General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Manitou

The Manitou is a 1978 American supernatural horror film produced and directed by William Girdler, based on the novel of the same name by the British writer Graham Masterton. It stars Tony Curtis as the fake psychic Harry Erskine, Susan Strasberg as his ex-girlfriend Karen Tandy, and Michael Ansara as the medicine man John Singing Rock, in a story about a tumor growing on Karen's neck that turns out to contain the reincarnating body of a 400-year-old Native American medicine man.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	New York opening April 28, 1978; Los Angeles opening May 17, 1978; distributed by Avco Embassy Pictures³
Director and producer	William Girdler, his final film; he died in a helicopter crash on January 21, 1978, three months before the release²
Cast	Tony Curtis (Harry Erskine), Susan Strasberg (Karen Tandy), Michael Ansara (John Singing Rock), with Stella Stevens, Burgess Meredith, Ann Sothern, and Jeanette Nolan⁴
Crew	Screenplay by William Girdler, Jon Cedar, and Thomas Pope; music by Lalo Schifrin; cinematography by Michel Hugo; 104 minutes, 2.35:1¹
Budget	$3 million, reported by The Hollywood Reporter on March 7, 1977³
Rating	Initially rated R; the Code and Ratings board voted ten to five to change it to PG after an appeal by Avco Embassy³
Reception	45% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 11 reviews; Roger Ebert gave it one star⁵^•⁶

Spoilers

Plot

Karen Tandy is admitted to a San Francisco hospital with an inexplicable, fast-growing swelling on her neck. The doctors schedule surgery but agree to keep the case quiet, since the tumor seems to have the characteristics of a growing human fetus.³ Karen calls her ex-boyfriend Harry Erskine, a phony psychic, for help.⁶

The growth is in fact the living body of Misquamacus, a 400-year-old Native American medicine man reincarnating himself through Karen to take revenge for the extermination of his people.¹ The film's title refers to a spirit from Indian folklore; as Roger Ebert summarized the premise, everything in the universe has its own spirit, or manitou, and medicine men have such strong manitous that they can grow on people.⁶ Harry enlists John Singing Rock, a contemporary medicine man, to fight the tumor, but the X-rays used to diagnose it deform the developing shaman, who is born as a monster and turns a hospital floor into a sub-zero environment with icicles hanging from the ceiling.⁶ The climax is a cross-dimensional showdown in space, with the Manitou facing laser beams and traditional Indian magic.²

The film closes with an epilogue presented as fact: "Fact: Tokyo, Japan, 1969; A fifteen-year old boy developed what doctors thought was a tumor in his chest. The larger it grew, the more uncharacteristic it appeared. Eventually, it proved to be a human fetus."³

The novel

Graham Masterton, a former editor of the U.K. edition of Penthouse, wrote his first horror novel in about a week, drawing partly on an old legend he had read in a Buffalo Bill Annual of 1955 and partly on the fact that his wife was pregnant with their first child; the idea was an Indian medicine man reborn in the modern day to take his revenge on the Paleface.⁷ TCM dates the novel to 1976,² while the Moria review dates it to 1975.⁸

The book had two endings. In the original hardback version, published in America by Lindel and Spearman, Misquamacus was killed by Vietnam Rose, a particularly nasty form of venereal disease passed on to him by his "mother"; the ending was changed when the American paperback was published by Pinnacle.⁷ Masterton described the original ending as a nod to The War of the Worlds, in which the Martians die of the common cold.⁹

The book's success inspired five more novel-length sequels, such as Revenge of the Manitou and Blind Panic, and its protagonist, the quirky spiritualist Harry Erskine, branched off into other adventures like The Djinn.² Masterton later brought Misquamacus back in Revenge of the Manitou, Burial, Manitou Blood, Blind Panic, and Plague of the Manitou, as well as the short story "Spirit Jump."⁵

Production

On March 7, 1977, Publishers Weekly announced that the production company Weist and Associates, Inc. had acquired the screen rights to the novel from Pinnacle Books.³ Girdler, a Kentucky-born filmmaker with eight films already behind him, was brought onto the Avco Embassy production mainly on the strength of Grizzly, his wilderness Jaws imitation that turned out to be one of 1976's most surprising hits.² According to Masterton, Girdler had picked the book up at an airport, telephoned to ask about buying the rights, and the film was made virtually within six months.⁷

Principal photography began in San Francisco on May 16, 1977, and the production moved to Los Angeles on May 23 to film for eight weeks, completing two days ahead of schedule.³ The initial R rating, based on the board's opinion that the subject matter would be too frightening for young children, was changed to PG on appeal.³ Girdler was killed at the age of 30 in a helicopter crash in the Philippines on January 21, 1978, while scouting locations for his next film, and The Manitou opened posthumously as his final film.²

Reception

Contemporary reviewers frequently described the film as an updated version of The Exorcist (1973), with opinions differing over how well the homage was executed. A positive review in Box called it an "engaging horror pic" that succeeded in having a sense of humor about the whole affair, while Cue called it "low-level horror mumbo-jumbo."³ Roger Ebert, reviewing in the Chicago Sun-Times on July 25, 1978, gave it one star and dismissed it as "El sleazo profoundo trasho zilch," mocking the film's closing claim to a factual basis.⁶ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds 45% on the Tomatometer from 11 reviews and 36% on the Popcornmeter from more than 500 ratings.⁵

Later standing. The film's reputation has grown among fans of 1970s genre cinema. The TCM essay by Nathaniel Thompson credits its "oddball combination of body horror and metaphysical sermonizing" with winning over fans, especially younger horror buffs who could see the PG-rated film without resorting to box office subterfuge.² Reviewers have noted that its camp value has increased over the years, and that the Star Wars-influenced finale, in which Karen sits up in bed amid a star field, remains the film's most discussed sequence.⁵^•⁸

Cultural context

The film belongs to a mid-1970s cycle of paranormal shockers in which middle-class lives are intruded on by the uncanny, following the success of Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and The Other, and it shares with some later films of the era the theme of white guilt over the treatment of Native Americans.² Scholarship on Indigenous representation in horror has treated the genre, including such narratives, as an example of a latent colonial rhetoric in which Indigenous characters and traditions serve as the embodiment of evil defeated by white protagonists.¹⁰ Writing on Ojibwe conceptions of the manitou notes that oral tradition treats manitous as natural elements of everyday life, in contrast to horror films and novels that misrepresent them as evil spirits or the ghosts of dead Indians.¹¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Horror films (individual works) › Body horror films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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