Mother of Fears: The Premonition
Pop culture pundits can debate endlessly about the role of the Final Girl, but there are a multitude of other roles for women in horror movies that are just as significant.
In The Premonition (1976), a housewife named Sheri Bennett becomes troubled when her young daughter Janie is approached by a strange woman in the schoolyard. She tries to convey her worries to her husband Professor Miles Bennett, but he’s preoccupied with work and brushes her off. We know that her fears are real, because before this happens, the woman in question is introduced to us. Her name is Andrea Fletcher. She believes that young Janie is her own child and seems desperate to reunite with the child. By establishing a situation that is firmly grounded in reality, i.e., parental rights and kidnapping, The Premonition allows us to sympathize with both women before it introduces the supernatural element.
Or is it supernatural? Sheri tells her friend Lenore that she had a disturbing nightmare, but doesn’t indicate what it entailed. However, Sheri’s premonition that something wasn’t quite right about the woman who approached Janie – a premonition that is actually a combination of intuition, deduction, and common sense – is proven to be true. Andrea and her friend Jude approach the Bennett home late one night with the intention to kidnap Janie, but their plans are foiled when Sheri hears a strange noise coming from her daughter’s bedroom and interrupts the abduction.
Sheri begins to have strange visions which increase in intensity. Eventually, they are revealed (first to the viewer and then to the characters within the movie itself) to be clues to things that have taken place. At first, Miles, a physics professor who dismisses the new field of parapsychology as rubbish, treats Sheri as if she’s having a nervous breakdown instead of experiencing a series of psychic events.
When Miles arrives home after the attempted kidnapping, he literally tries to shake an answer out of Sheri and is frustrated by her inability to form a coherent sentence. The camera then cuts to the faces of the exasperated cops who are rolling their eyes. This short scene says little but conveys much: women are fragile creatures at the mercy of their emotions and cannot be relied upon in a crisis. The irony is that it was Sheri herself who foiled Andrea’s plans: Miles was at the local carnival with his new colleague, Dr. Jeena Kingsly.
Dr. Kingsly plays an important role in The Premonition. Not only is she a parapsychologist who forces Miles to see things from a less rigidly scientific angle, she is also an advocate for helping Sheri come to terms with the psychic events that are happening to her.
Yet it’s not just Sheri who is enduring psychic strain. Andrea has a history of mental health issues, having been institutionalized for five years after leaving then-infant Janie alone for hours. This is how the Bennetts came to adopt Janie; Sheri and Miles had tried for years to have a child of their own but were unable to do so. Despite Andrea’s actions and obviously unstable personality, we sympathize with her because like Sheri, she just wants her child to be with her. She can’t control her mental illness nor did she ask for it, and her pain at being separated from her child is real. The Premonition doesn’t paint her as a villain, but a victim, something that is made clear when Jude, frustrated by her inability to succeed in kidnapping Janie, flies into a rage and stabs her to death with a kitchen knife.
It’s also intriguing that it’s Sheri, and not Janie’s “natural” mother Andrea, who has the psychic connection with Janie. This is another way that The Premonition upends some of the tropes about women and children. In the film’s climax, Sheri performs some of Andrea’s original piano compositions in an attempt to draw Janie to her by channeling Andrea’s emotions. It works, but not in the way you might expect.
While on her way to meet with Dr. Kingsly to explore the meaning behind her visions, Sheri experiences another psychic event, loses control of the car, and crashes into a tree at the side of the road. Neither the EMT workers or the police can find Janie, but we soon witness her stumbling towards the local carnival, where Jude works as a circus clown. This bolsters Jude’s feeling that the child was somehow meant to be with him, even after he’s murdered Andrea.
Meanwhile, the traffic that piles up from bystanders stopping to listen to Sheri’s performance in the park waylays Jude, who is his way out of town with Janie in tow in his trailer. Miles notices the horses painted on a piece of set decoration from Jude’s clown performances and, remembering that Dr. Kingsly predicted that Janie would be found near horses, runs towards the trailer and into Jude, who tries to strangle him. Yet in the midst of this, Janie has escaped from the trailer and heads towards Sheri, who’s still playing piano in the park.
Like Dr. Kingsly says in the film, “Science cannot explain everything.”
The Premonition was reissued on February 23 as part of the Arrow Video collection, American Horror Project Vol. 1.