Prophecy (1979, John Frankenheimer)

Unbearable.

Hey folks, and welcome to the second film in this new six-film series, Animal Apocalypses. I’ll be looking at a bunch of “nature run amok” movies that were prevalent in the ’70s, that sprung out of the decade’s environmental movement generally and, frankly, Jaws specifically. Inevitably, there are spoilers here. Read with care. Thanks!

What is it? Prophecy, directed by John Frankenheimer, written by David Seltzer, and starring Robert Foxworth, Talia Shire, Armand Assante, Victoria Racimo, Richard Dysart and George Clutesi as Hector M’Rai.

First viewing? No; three viewings in the Letterboxd era (9 June 2021, 27 March 2025 and 9 May 2025) and at least two, maybe three before that, and one of those was in the theater when I was 7 years old.

What’s it about? Physician Robert Verne (Foxworth) is hired by the E.P.A. to go to Maine and negotiate a peace between a paper mill and a tribe of Indigenous Americans. While there, he discovers that a series of murders, blamed on the tribe, are actually the attacks from a mutated bear.

What are your thoughts about it? Prophecy came from a time when both major studios and indie productions, flabbergasted by the incredible success of a lowly monster movie, threw their own lines into the water and see if they too could reel in a big fish. In fact, nearly all of the films I’ll be covering in this Animal Apocalypses series¹ owe their existence to Jaws.² There was such a feeding frenzy (puns), that the prospect of a big payday lured (puns) John Frankenheimer, the artist behind adult thrillers like Seconds (1964), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), and The French Connection II (1975), to make a movie about a giant mutant bear.

At this point in his career, Frankenheimer was struggling with alcoholism, and it was affecting his work. I wish I could say his craft and professionalism saw him through, but alas, it’s a sloppy mess. His work in the D.C. portion evinces directorial control, but once he gets to Maine (shot in British Columbia) and the monster, he’s clearly flailing. It’s difficult to tell whether the monster is shitty or if Frankenheimer doesn’t know how to shoot it; it’s probably both. Every bit of action is a jumble of close-ups; cinematic geography is nonexistent. IMDB doesn’t say as much, but to my eyes, there’s evidence that large portions of this were shot on a sound stage. If not, well, it takes a lot of talent to make a real forest look phony. On at least three separate moments, Frankenheimer’s idea of scary suspense is to drop the music out for a moment before revealing a loud jump scare, usually the bear’s big fake face. This is not his wheelhouse.

I mean: this isn’t a sound stage? They made this fog out in the wilderness and got it to stay perfectly still?

However, while a great deal of the film’s issues can be laid at the director’s feet (and based on what I’ve read, most people do just that), I’m going to suggest that Frankenheimer was set up to fail by David Seltzer’s script. Now, the usual caveats. Without a shooting script to read, it’s impossible to know for sure what exactly the screenwriter actually wrote.³ The process of shooting and editing can change a film drastically⁴, and blaming the end result on the screenwriter can be unfair. That said, uh, I’m going to do exactly that.

In my defense, I suspect the stuff I find most objectionable stems from the story’s very conception.⁵ On the surface, it seems admirable: a full-throated attack on corporations that pollute the environment and the racist whites that persecute the Indigenous Americans at the center of the story. Once Verne obtains proof that the mill is causing the mutations by putting mercury in the water, mill director Isley (Dysart) admits culpability and tribe leader John Hawks (Assante)⁶ is absolved of wrongdoing. Pretty cut and dried.

But two things,. First, what a piece of fiction is about is never on the surface. I’m sure the filmmakers and actors thought they were making a statement about corporate pollution. And there is one. But as this is a real problem that exists, why contrive a fictional mutant bear to represent it? Doesn’t that trivialize the issue? Unless of course, that isn’t what the story is really about. Second, and related: the paragraph above this is misleading. A closer look reveals cracks in that narrative that expose the liberal grandstanding as something more conservative, and, ironically, racist.

My sense is Robert Foxworth didn’t quite understand the role, which, to be fair, isn’t well-written. He plays nearly every moment of conflict as kind of pissy. It works thematically, but doesn’t make it any more fun to watch.

Throughout Prophecy are a number of moments that, for a lack of a better term, I’d call microaggressions, moments where an uglier intentions reveal themselves. We’re supposed to see Verne as a tireless crusader against injustice when we meet him in a D.C. ghetto, treating a Black baby for rat bites and threatening the absent landlord. However, when Verne and his wife Maggie (Shire) arrive in beautiful, forested Maine, he says, “I’d forgotten the world could look like this.” After an opening sequence that contrasts the serene concert hall with a noisy and inconvenient protest and the ghetto crowded with Black folks that the camera treats with suspicion, it’s not hard to read this as an anti-urban broadside. Implied questions hang in the air: does Verne think this is a place that Black people should escape to from the stifling ghetto? Or is it beautiful because there are no Black people there? Shortly after they land, the two witness a confrontation between the mill’s goons and the Indigenous tribe that turns violent. An absurd axe/chainsaw fight between Hawks⁷ and a goon ends with the goon threatening to decapitate Hawks. Does Verne, explicitly hired to mediate between these two groups, quite literally landing in the center of the conflict, does he even do the bare minimum and say, Hey maybe threatening to chainsaw a dude’s head off, in front of me and my wife and everyone else, isn’t the way to go? No, he lambastes Hawks for his resistance and the incident is never mentioned again. Immediately after this, immediately after this, what does Verne do? He goes fishing. This is his vacation.

I could talk about how poorly this is done that it barely gets across that this fish is supposed to be big enough to eat a duck, and I could talk about how the hell duck-eating fish isn’t a concern here along with the mutant bear, but I what I really want to talk about is an old issue of Dynamite magazine that had this series of fake humorous postcards you could pull out and how one of them was possibly kind of a ripoff of this shot? but I don’t know which came first so if you know what I’m maniacally blathering about please let me know and tell me which issue of Dynamite it was if you can. That’s what I want to talk about.

The commonality here is, of course, Verne. Verne is our protagonist. Verne is the one with a goal he proactively pursues, which is… negotiate between… well, he doesn’t really do that… then he gets sidetracked by a crazed raccoon which leads to… Let me start again. Verne is the one for whom the stakes matter most, because if the Indigenous tribe’s land is taken… except that he doesn’t have much to do with… but if the mill… except he doesn’t work for the mill…

Look, it’s not considered good form to “rewrite” a film as a mode of criticism — the film’s in the can, what’s done is done, so grapple with what’s actually there. That said, please do this thought experiment with me, one that illuminates the core issue with Prophecy: what if Hawks was the protagonist?

Armand Assante is of Italian and Irish descent. (I honestly thought he was of Spanish descent.) Anyway, not Indigenous American, but I feel he treats the role with gravity and respect.

Well, first, Hawks has an easily identifable goal with clear end terms. He wants to keep the land out of the hands of the mill, and he wants his people to be absolved of the killings committed by the mutant bear. His antagonists are clear, because they’re the ones blocking him from his goals: the mill and its goons, and the rampaging mutant bear. The movie makes feints towards the mutant bear as a spiritual entity called Katahdin, which I think is supposed to explain the title, but considering how indiscriminately the bear kills, I don’t think that interpretation holds up. But what if the bear really was Katahdin? Perhaps then Hawks would have an additional conflict, figuring out how to navigate between Katahdin, who represents all-out violence against the white invaders, and finding a solution that’s more modern, humanistic, and/or personal.⁸ He would have allies — Ramona,⁹ of course, and Hector, but Verne could still show up as a Matt Hooper-style figure. (Maybe Hawks comes across him while he’s fishing?) Most importantly, the stakes of the situation mean more to him than any other character — he is the de facto leader of the tribe, and their continued survival, particularly Ramona and Hector, is up to him. Finally, maybe, just maybe, if there was a larger focus on Indigenous spiritual practice, there could be an actual prophecy in Prophecy. You know, as a treat.

The group hides from the bear in a small underground dugout. Frankenheimer conveys the entire suspense sequence with a series of split diopter shots like this one. It looks good, or at least interesting, at first, but there’s so many of them it becomes funny.

But Hawks isn’t the protagonist; Verne is. What does Verne care about? He can’t really care about the tribe or the loggers, except in a vague, intellectual way.¹⁰ If the mill takes the land, if the tribe takes it, if the tribe is slaughtered, if Katahdin just rolls over everyone… none of it has anything to do with him, so it can’t mean much to him emotionally. He can’t even truly care about the pollution — he can try to right an obvious wrong, but he doesn’t live there. None of this is going to strike at the core of his being. So what does he care about?

He cares about his wife. And now we’re awfully closer to what Prophecy is really about.

I didn’t have a place for this, but I need to note how they fly in this doctor and his wife from D.C. in order to help, and then drive them away from the town, then ten miles through a forest on dirt roads AND THEN they use a boat to cross a lake to an isolated cabin on the other side that doesn’t have a phone. There’s a lot of stupid, incomprehensible stuff in this movie, but this might be the tip-top.

There’s no real, let’s call it “diagetic,” reason for Maggie to be there. There are structural reasons — it’s always helpful to have a character that can be a sounding board for the protagonist. But still, why is she there? “Hey hon, I need to fly a thousand miles away to a forest in the middle of Maine to negotiate a truce between a mill and some Indians. Wanna come? We could fish.” No, Maggie is there because the screenwriter chose to center the story around a white outsider, and that white outsider needed someone the audience would believe he cared about. There’s nothing inherently wrong with these structural choices, but structural choices help determine meaning. If you center the white character, then the white character’s needs will be centered over everything else, which is a problem if your story is about racism.¹¹ If Maggie is what Verne cares about, then by definition Maggie’s problems have little to do with the stated premise.

And what’s Maggie’s problem? It’s that she’s pregnant. This is what Prophecy is about.

The giant tadpole. It really seems like between the giant fish that eat ducks and a tadpole that logically will grow into a monstrous frog, there’s more to worry about in this forest than just the bear.

The whole film has this weird preoccupation with fecundity, both fascinated and repelled by it. That’s most obvious when Hector takes the group to his secret grove where they find the giant tadpole. (“I told you, things grow big here!”) But it’s woven all through. It’s the bear having cubs, it’s Ramona telling Verne about the birth defects afflicting the tribe, it’s the dad and his kids going camping, it’s the forest itself. It even goes backwards: it’s the protest, and only now I realize, queasily, it’s the mass of Black bodies on the stoops and streets. (I’m going to be magnanimous and say this accurately reflects the protagonist’s mindset and isn’t just unthinking thematic detritus on part of the filmmakers.)

There’s a whole, I wouldn’t call it a subplot, but a bit where Maggie takes care of the mutant cub, reflecting her desire to be a mother and the possibilty that her unborn child is a monster. It doesn’t go anywhere. The cub ends up biting her while crossing the lake, threatening to drown her. Verne ends up pulling it off her and submerging the creature. Written out, that sounds like the film taking a stance, but it never feels like that in the movie, just another incident.

This theme is potentially interesting, and if you wanted to do a page one rewrite with this as your lodestar, there might be some juice there. But again, because of who the protagonist is, it all gets filtered though a white outsider’s concerns. Those Indigenous babies with the birth defects? We don’t see them. They are a data point. But when Maggie discovers she’s eaten a single, possibly contaminated, piece of fish that maybe conceivably could affect her unborn child, that’s a crisis. Halfway through, Maggie, telling Verne she’s pregnant, says “You’re too busy playing God to be a human being!” It’s kind of jaw-dropping in its selfishness — “stop focusing on these Indians and pay attention to me!” — but here’s the thing: the film is on her side. Eveything else — the mill, the tribe, the monster — if it doesn’t touch on this conflict, it’s a distraction. As those things are about 80% of the movie, that’s a problem.

Ramona has been tossed by the bear into the water and she looks on helplessly as John is killed by the bear. This shot is the last time we see her. There’s no aftermath, no reckoning. The movie just does not care about her or anyone other than Verne and Maggie.

And this is why Prophecy ultimately fails. There’s the thing it says it’s about (pollution and racism), the thing it’s actually about (natalism, basically, both pro- and anti-), and it fails to find a way to tie those together. When you structure a story with a protagonist and a goal and stakes across a journey, where that journey ends, how that protagonist does or doesn’t change, is the meaning of the story. Prophecy’s climax is the final confrontation between Verne and the bear, which Verne wins in the most unlikely way (jumping on the bear and stabbing it with an arrow, despite the evidence that guns and bows don’t harm it).¹² How does killing the bear answer the dramatic question? It doesn’t. Or at least, it could, but the movie refuses to say how. The last we see of Verne and Maggie, they’re on a plane. Maggie wakes up from unconsciousness,¹³ she looks at him nervously, he touches her face and smiles back reassuringly, and that’s it. Has he acquiesced to her insistence on a child? Maybe! Or maybe he’s just happy she’s alive and they’re getting out of the mutant animal zone. We don’t even find out if there really is going to be a problem with the baby. The ending could mean anything. And if the ending means anything, the ending means… well, you know.

How many stars out of five? I had given this three stars in previous viewings — it has spectacle, I’ll give it that — but in this last viewing, after diving deeper into the structure of it and the screenwriting choices, and really witnessing Frankenheimer’s poor direction, I’ve lowered it to two stars. Some of this stuff is borderline unforgivable.

Where can I stream it? As of this writing, you can rent or buy it from Amazon, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home.

What can we take from it? Above, talking about an imaginary version of Prophecy with John Hawks as the protagonist, I suggested a more expansive idea for the mutant bear: what if it really was the spirit Katahdin?¹⁴ So let’s use that as a basis for a Cypher System creature. For an alternate version of Katahdin, check out the “Ravage Bear” on page 350 of the Cypher System Rules 2nd Edition.

KATAHDIN

Level: 6

Description: Katahdin normally takes the form of a large black bear. However, a local paper mill has been dumping toxic chemicals into the water, and this has caused a physical change in Katahdin. Half of Katahdin’s body is now hairless, orange, and appears to be melting — dollops of flesh droop down over its face. It has also taken to walking on its hind legs like a biped.

Motive: As the protector of the forest, Katahdin moves swiftly to eliminate any threat to it. Unfortunately, due to the warping effects of the nearby pollution, Katahdin currently sees everyone and everything as a threat to the forest.

Environment: The forests and mountains of Maine.

Health: 30; however, as a spirit being, Katahdin cannot be harmed by non-magical weapons.

Damage Inflicted: 10; Katahdin tends to take out adversaries in only a few blows.

Armor: 1

Movement: Short

Modifications: Stealth at Level 8; despite being over ten feet tall when on its hind legs, Katahdin is surprisingly good at being quiet and launching sudden sneak attacks.

Combat: Katahdin uses its massive claws to rend foes to shreds. Additionally, anyone struck by Katahdin must make a Might roll against difficulty 3 or be infected with the same pollution-generated malady as Katahdin.

Interaction: Katahdin is most likely to attack as anything else, but as it is under the malign influence of the pollution, there is the possibilty of communicating non-violently with it. The chances of success are left to the GM’s discretion.

Use: The PCs need to enter Katahdin’s forest. They could have any or all of the following goals: rescuing someone trapped there before Katahdin gets them; destroying the paper mill or otherwise neutralizing the pollution that is affecting Katahdin; finding and healing Katahdin without being mauled to death by it.

Loot: None.

GM Intrusion: Katahdin suddenly leaps out from behind the trees. The PCs come across Katahdin’s cubs, who cry out for help. Katahdin forces a vehicle to stop completely with no harm to itself.

NEXT TIME, ON AGAINST THE ’70S: Piranha (1978, Joe Dante)