Director – Rich Ragsdale, Screenplay – Mark Young & Robert Sheppe, Producers – Vasily Bernhardt, Daemon Hillin, Ryan D. Johnson & Martin Sprock, Photography – Pierluigi Malavasi, Music – Sherri Chung, Visual Effects Supervisor – Alex Gabrielli, Special Effects Supervisor – Jerry Constantine, Makeup Effects – Kristy Holt Berry, Production Design – Burns Burns. Production Company – Sprockfeller Pictures/Warm Winter Productions/Adirondack Media Group/El Ride Productions/Hillin Entertainment/TB Films.
Cast
Scout Taylor-Compton (Grace Covington), Nolan Gerard Funk (Jack Cabot), Jeff Fahey (Wayne Caldwell), Deborah Kara Unger (The Master), Kevin Ragsdale (Wade)
Plot
In New York City, Grace Convington receives news from Frank Caldwell, an investigator she has hired, that he has a lead on tracing the parents she never knew. She and her boyfriend Jack Cabot travel to the South where Frank has left the keys to his house for them to stay. That evening, sinister figures in black robes and animal skull masks surround the house. As Grace and Jack discover, these are locals descendants from a Pilgrim cult that follow the snake demon Uktema. They have come preparing the way for Uktema’a manifestation at the equinox.
The Long Night, also known as The Coven, was the third film from Rich Ragsdale, an American filmmaker who had previously made the feature-length The Ghost of El Charro (2005) and Ghost House (2017), the latter also starring Scout Taylor-Compton. In his day job, Ragsdale pays the bills as an editor, musician and music video director. The film has a script from Mark Young, a director in his own right who has made the modest likes of Tooth and Nail (2007), the backwoods monster film Feral (2017), which also starred Scout Taylor-Compton, and the afterlife film Limbo (2019).
Rich Ragsdale sets up a promising opening on an idyllic domestic scenario between Scout Taylor-Compton and boyfriend Nolan Gerard Funk as she receives the call that gives her potential information about her parentage. The end of the scene comes with an abrupt cut between this domestic scenario and the image of a blood-covered Taylor-Compton screaming at the camera, all of which promises good things.
Cultists gathered outside the house
With The Long Night, Ragsdale sets up a standard backwoods dynamic with Scout Taylor-Compton seemingly caught between boyfriend Nolan Gerard Funk who represents a certain New York privileged elite – he’s a property developer, he went to Princeton and has a family who vacation in The Hamptons, while holding attitudes that are dismissive of the locals. The locals (those whose faces we see at least) are represented solely by Kevin Ragsdale, Rich’s brother, as a stereotypical hick operator of a roadside rest stop store, while all the rest appear to be cultists. The surprise is that for all the setting up a contrast between two cultural poles, this dynamic fails to play out elsewhere throughout the film.
Thereafter, Ragsdale gets quite a reasonable degree of sinister effect out of sinister black-robed figures with animal skull masks carrying burning torches lined up surrounding the house and upon occasion breaking in as Scout and Nolan fight them off. You cannot help but feel that the sinister effect would be have been far more if the figures in animal masks had not been used by the recent incredibly eerie Folk Horror Sator (2019). Even aside from that, the whole image of sinister hooded occultists lined up with burning torches goes back to 1970s Devil Worship films like Brotherhood of Satan (1971), The Devil’s Rain (1975) and Race with the Devil (1975) and a host of others that drew influence from them all the way to the recent A Classic Horror Story (2021).
What The Long Night feels like is a scene that would usually come near the climax of one of these 1970s films – the one where the hooded cultists surround the house or the heroine is brought out to find them waiting for her, which would lead into a ceremony or ritual sacrifice. It feels as though such a scene has been extended to become the whole film. What seems missing is usually the preamble to such scenes where the heroine finds her family and/or the locals are part of the conspiracy. Almost the whole film here consists of what in most other occult films would be just one of these scenes with the occultists surrounding the house, before a fairly predictable ending about the purpose of it all.
