Abstract

This chapter examines Michael Winner’s The Sentinel (1977) as a case study in “failed controversy”. Released after Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist the film assembles familiar shock tactics—blasphemy, grotesque bodies, and sexual deviance—yet never ignites the scandal its director appeared to court. In contrast to Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), which humanised its disfigured performers and provoked decades of censorship, The Sentinel reduces disfigurement to a climactic spectacle, reinscribing “otherness” as demonic rather than destabilising it. Likewise, where The Exorcist aligned abjection with pressing cultural anxieties and triggered protests and moral panic, Winner’s gestures feel belated and derivative. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s abjection, Barbara Creed’s monstrous-feminine, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s grotesque/carnivalesque, the chapter analyses the film’s deployment of queer sexuality, aging and excessive bodies, and the patriarchal containment of its heroine, Alison. Reception and industrial context (including Winner’s own notoriety post-Death Wish) explain why the film landed as pastiche rather than provocation: too slick for the counterculture, too clichéd to scandalise the mainstream. Ultimately, the chapter argues that The Sentinel’s lasting contribution and controversy resides not in the film but in Winner’s public persona, clarifying the limits of manufactured scandal within a shifting 1970s horror landscape.