Abstract

This paper examines Michael Winner’s The Sentinel (1977) in the context of controversial cinema and positions the film as an example of failed or unfulfilled controversy. Released after Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, the film employs familiar shock tactics— visceral violence, grotesque bodies, and sexual deviance—yet never ignites the scandal its director appeared to court. It infamously features physically siabled performers to represent demons but 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.
The film’s reception and industrial context (including Winner’s own notoriety post-Death Wish) explain why it landed as pastiche rather than provocation: too slick for the counterculture, too clichéd to scandalise the mainstream. Ultimately, the paper 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.