My name isn’t Glenn—it’s Glaeken. I’m as old as Rasalom. I built the keep.

I almost started this review with the Fangoria, but at the last minute a memory popped into my head that said that was not the first time I learned of The Keep. I stumbled upon F. Paul Wilson’s novel in a department store around, I figure, when it first came out in 1981. I was twelve then, and me, my brother, and my mother were in this department store called, Zayer. She was in line at the registers, and I noticed the area beyond where the books were kept. I can’t remember if my brother joined me or not, but I went over and checked them out. Back then some stores used to put their paperbacks on these circular metal racks that could be spun. The ones at Zayer squeaked like a mother and were rickety, so I simply walked around it to see the books, and I vividly remember the cover art for The Keep. I direct you to the three book covers above, the one on the far left with the embossed letters is the one I spotted. That image stayed with me, the title felt ominous, and more so because of the imagery of that weird glow coming out of the window. Also the way the title wrapped around the tower, and the angle of the “shot,” like someone was standing at the bottom and aiming a camera up to try and snag a photo of that glow . . . yeah, that damn glow, the more I gazed at it the more I wondered what kind of “evil force” could be making it?

At some point I came across the middle cover, the one without the embossed title. I can’t recall, though, if it was at Zayer or another store. There was a local grocery store that used to have their paperback novels near the registers and I used to peruse those too.  I do remember thinking the other cover with the raised title was more appealing. The last cover up there I never came across, or if I did it didn’t make much of an impression. I’m guessing that was a re-issue of the novel in 1983 when the movie was about to hit theaters, for the cover is very similar to the movie poster. I love that poster and that third cover ain’t bad, but it’s that first cover in 1981 that really shines the brightest for me.

Issue #31 of Fangoria where the coverage of The Keep kicks off!! Click photos to enlarge and read. 

Now I can talk about my first impressions of when the movie came out, but you know it wasn’t until many, many years later before I made the connection to that book. It was Fangoria #31 that first covered it with an interview with actor, Scott Glenn, but back in those days my collecting of the magazine was scattershot. The bookstore that sold them didn’t always get every issue, so I never saw #31, but they did get issue #33, and as you can see below, Molasar (the movie’s supernatural villain), made the cover, and it was with that issue where I first learned of the film. I was just entering freshman year of high school aka the single worst year of school I’ve ever experienced, which, I suspect, just added to the cementing of all my memories surrounding this film.

Second article Fangoria did of the movie (issue #33), this one focused on FX artist Nick Maley’s effects. Click photos to enlarge and read. 

When I first saw a TV spot for it I thought it was set in some kind of post apocalyptic world. I’m wondering now if I may have seen this commercial before I bought that Fango issue, because if it was the other way around why would I think that? The scene that made me wonder was a quick shot of Gabriel Byrne riding atop that military vehicle/armored car as it rode into the keep. For some reason I thought that vehicle looked “high tech,” and I had never seen a keep put on screen before, or I should say in the way Micheal Mann envisioned it. Say what you will about the lack of faithfulness to the source material (more on that later), but director Mann sure knows how to entice you visually with interesting and spectacular shots, and for a fourteen year old this was all so gloriously new.

It’s too bad I have zero recall when I saw it for the first time on cable, but I can tell you I loved it! And I wouldn’t end up reading the novel for more than a decade later; I think, maybe, in the late 90s, and, man, it’s like comparing apples and oranges, but I love both versions. Same thing happened with Wolfen and Salem’s Lot, they also deviate heavily from their source material, and I read them decades after seeing their movie/min-series adaptations, and love the novels just as much.

The Keep was director Michael Mann’s second directorial gig and he didn’t care for Wilson’s novel, I direct you to the quotes below from a couple of magazine interviews where he talks about his dislike of the book and the kernel of attraction it did have for him which pushed the film into a totally different direction than the source material.

Initially I didn’t care much for the book, but then I realized it contained something fantastic. I rewrote, and then took the screenplay in a direction the book doesn’t go, with the idea of doing a fable. It’s a fascinating form – you don’t have to deal with the origins of things in terms of natural phenomena or natural causes…you don’t have to explain how or why; it’s all accepted. You can just channel the characters into metaphor.” – Director Michael Mann from Sight and Sound, September 1982

Let’s face it, the book was very messy. I saw more potential than the existing application. The novel was the usual sort of solid gothic horror, and I wanted to do something more expressionistic and basically make the whole thing as a dream…I mean the vampires were out immediately. It’s nonsense and it has all been seen before and I’m just not interested in doing something that has been seen before or a variation on that theme. This is a very ambitious film to make as I want to make you feel in ways you only feel once every two months or so when you have had an erotic dream or terrifying fantasy. The mechanism of events, as I see the story now, are repressed urges and desires in the unconscious mind that has to motivate the characters themselves in the story events themselves. And that is quite a departure from the book…this setting, that Paul Wilson chose for his story, works very well in the context of a fairy story for adults. I don’t know what Wilson thinks about my changes to his story. We talked briefly and he did send a telex with some suggestions but when we are making a movie, we are doing just that. The book is the raw material to change into what the movie has to be” – Director Michael Mann in 1983, from Starburst magazine

When all was said and done rumor has it Mann had created a three and a half hour movie, but Paramount forced him to cut it to down to two hours, and then eventually to the running time it is now, which is ninety-six minutes. I was never aware of the “problems” this film had when I first saw it, and between the time I last saw it on cable and seeing it last night I had gotten educated in the intervening years, and I can now see the flaws. It doesn’t change how I feel about the film, I still love it, but I can now see how truncated it feels, and where cuts were probably made in various scenes.

The Keep is a period piece, taking place in 1941 during World War II, and in a very unique location; as if God sliced open the Earth and put a village at the bottom of a ravine. This village is in Romania in the Carpathian Mountains; across this “causeway,” linking the village, is the keep.

Point of view from the keep looking into the village.

The movie begins with a battalion of German soldiers entering the village and occupying it. If there’s such a thing as a morally good German soldier working for Hitler in 1941, Capt. Klaus Woermann (Jürgen Prochnow), would be it. You can consider him a good guy, for even though he’s occupying this village against the wishes of its people he doesn’t want to set a bad example by killing, or torturing them, and he does treat the caretaker of the keep, Alexandru (W. Morgan Sheppard), Father Fonescu (Robert Prosky), and the other villagers with some modicum of respect.

The keep is an impressive structure, the walls are adorned throughout with 108 crosses made of nickel. There are rooms to be inhabited, if one desires, but no one does. Alexandru says he and his sons maintain it, but they do not live in it, and no one stays in it during the night. It has a reputation, but Alexandru does not go into details. During a tour Woermann’s points out how the outside of the keep has the small stones and the inside has the much larger ones, if it were designed to keep enemies out it’s designed backwards, this isn’t constructed to keep anyone out, but something in.

During the night two soldiers are lured to one of the crosses because it appears to be glowing, and for reasons only known to them they get it into their heads the rest may be made of nickel but not this one, this one is fucking silver! So they proceed to try and wrench it from the wall, only succeeding in dislodging the stone block it’s embedded in, revealing a passageway. Thinking it leads to more silver, one of them decides to crawl through and see where it goes, and where it goes is an immense cavern. I wondered if this area was within the keep or within the mountain the keep is built up against. To give you some idea how immense, as the camera pulls slowly back from the soldier with his flashlight, the flashlight starts to look more and more like a star in a night sky.

Within this cavern is a Stonehenge-type configuration this mysterious power zooms through and slowly tracks up the wall towards that “star.” Once both meet, the outside soldier, keeping his buddy steady, is violently swung around. The body he pulls out appears to have been disintegrated, or burnt, from the waist up, there’s barely anything left of him. There’s no gore in this film, aside from occasional bloody bullet wounds, the rest of the carnage are bodies appearing to be disintegrated and heads that explode as if they were made of stone, or porcelain. Very weird.

Now we head to Greece where the releasing of this evil “activates” the keep’s watchdog, Glaeken Trismegestus (Scott Glenn). He bolts upright from a sound sleep, eyes glowing, giving us the first impressions he may not be human. He now begins his fated journey to the keep with a long box, part of the weapon he will use to either kill off the evil or send it back into the keep. It sends it back through that passageway the soldiers discovered, but has it been killed or just imprisoned anew?

In the movie’s 96-minute form origins of what Glaeken and the evil are never get explored beyond a vague explanation Glaeken gives of the keep being designed to hold it and he’s been around for ages keeping tabs on it, giving us more clues that he may be some kind of immortal. During a crucial scene later on when he’s being forcibly taken to the keep, he’ll display more of his “odd nature,” in the form of super strength as he hurls one of the soldiers over the “causeway” into the chasm below with one toss, and is then riddled with bullets showing us his blood isn’t red but green! More cryptic exposition from him will reveal he and this evil are intertwined, the moment he puts it down his time will come to an end too.

This unnamed evil isn’t the only thing morally compromised in the movie, once Woermann’s men start to get killed on a nightly basis, he radios back to base for relocation, a Sturmbannführer (Major) Erich Kaempffer (Gabriel Byrne) then arrives with his men and these guys are full blown in-your-face Nazis who have been dispatched to clean up his mess. Kaempffer is not beyond making an example of others, like randomly lining up villagers and gunning them down, thinking he’s showing the other villagers who he thinks are killing Woemann’s men his ruthlessness, and in turn intimidating them. After a recent killing the evil leaves a message scrawled on the wall written in an ancient language; Kaempffer wants it deciphered, so now we’re introduced to two more intrinsic characters, Dr. Theodore Cuza (Ian McKellen) and his daughter, Eva (the late Alberta Watson). Cuza grew up in this village and has made an in-depth study of the keep, but he’s also diseased; he’s forty-eight, but looks sixty-eight due to his scleroderma.

The evil is extremely different to how Wilson has it portrayed in his novel. In the movie it goes through three impressively executed FX stages, the first looking like a glowing brain enveloped by roiling mist, the second a towering skeletal form without skin, and it’s final shape, an equally towering flesh and blood being. I direct you to the magazine articles I have embedded above to see what I’m talking about. In the articles this evil is named, Molasar, but he is not named at all in the movie, and this always confused me when I first saw the film. I kept looking for a moment when this thing introduced itself as Molasar, but it never does. The end credits have it credited as Radu Molasar.

The novel gives us a proper, and interesting, origin into who Molasar and Glaeken are. They are remnants from the First Age of Man, and an age that I felt was similar to Lord Of The Rings. There were two opposing forces, Light and Chaos, and Molasar was a necromancer named, Rasalom (Molasar is Rasalom spelled backwards), who gave himself totally to Chaos. Glaeken was chosen by Light to do battle with Rasalom, and during a massive battle the First Age of Man was wiped out, only Glaeken and Rasalom survived. As the Second Age Of Man came into being Rasalom walked the earth creating all sorts of mayhem, like the Black Death, and Glaeken tracked him throughout the centuries, until he realized something more had to be done, so five hundred years ago he built the keep and tricked Rasalom into it and he’s been trapped there ever since. In the movie it’s a “talisman” belonging to Glaeken buried deep in the keep that keeps Molasar imprisoned. Molasar is the name he conveys to Cuza when he realizes he needs to corrupt someone into taking the talisman out. He cannot touch it himself for it negates his power, so he appears to Cuza (in the book he’s a normal looking human adorned in a robe) and makes him think he’s a good guy and if he can get out he’ll put an end to the evil that is Hitler; this aspect was actually carried over to the film. In the novel there is a vampire undercurrent in that Rasalom is the source of all our vampire myths, but what he feeds on his hate and corruption, of turning good souls evil, but such an insubstantial concept was more easily grasped by making the vampire a creature that feeds on blood.

Glenn’s character is barely named in this short cut too, I detected one moment where Eva (Magda in the book) may have mumbled his “Glenn” moniker, and then finally mentions his full name at the very end during the final confrontation with Molasar, except his last name of Trismegestus is a creation of Mann’s. Glenn plays Glaeken as a very detached and emotionless being, if he were revealed to be a machine in Mann’s version it would easily explain this, but I didn’t mind the way he played him, it gave him this otherworldly air. That quote I opened up the review with is directly from the novel.

In the film the weapon Glaeken uses to vanquish Molasar is a staff, and the “talisman” the crosses adorning the walls of the keep are representations of affixes itself upon the head of this staff, with the “wings” disappearing into it so it looks like a small cylinder, that scene makes the “talisman” appear to be alien technology, and making me wonder if Glaeken and Molasar were alien beings. In the novel it’s a sword blade he carries with him and the “talisman” is the blade’s hilt, combined it gives Glaeken the power to kill Rasalom. After he kills him in the book Glaeken is given his mortality back, and has a happy ending with Magda, in the movie there isn’t a happy ending, but there was one filmed that was tacked on to TV airings in the late 80s. Glaeken’s restored mortality reminded me of the ending of Highlander (1986), where Connor Macleod is given his mortality back after defeating the Kurgen and it too is about immortals battling down through ages.

The movie has top notch actors, I had forgotten Bryne was in it, before he was famous, and this was before I truly knew who Ian McKellen was too, known by everyone nowadays as Gandalf in the Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit trilogies, as well as Magneto in three of the X-Men films! The presence of Robert Prosky is the most surprising, because he’s in another horror flick I’m a fan of, Christine (1983), and for the longest time I didn’t make the connection that that long-haired bearded priest in The Keep is that old, crotchety douchebaggy old man, Will Darnell, in Christine who owns the garage Arnie is allowed to fix up his car in. Based on these two diametrically opposed roles I consider Prosky a chameleon of an actor.

I will agree with Mann regarding that first quote from the Sight and Sound interview about the film and it’s fable quality and not getting into origins and explanations, and that’s kind of the vibe I got from it. Not to mention the dream quality he wanted for it mentioned in the second interview. To me the movie felt like it was dipping in and out of scenes already in progress, giving me the impression there was more going on I wasn’t seeing. If that’s what he intended we get from it, even in this “short version,” then he succeeded.

Tangerine Dream created the music, and if you’re child of the 80s, or just into 80s films, you’ll recognize their instrumental scores from movies like Legend (1985), Near Dark (1987), Firestarter (1984) and Strange Behavior (1981). Their scores are very distinctive and I tend to mix them up with Vangelis (Blade Runner) sometimes. I bring them up for two reasons, one, their music is simply just great, and two it’s been widely rumored their score is the main reason The Keep has never gotten a DVD or blu-ray release here in America. I’ve never been entirely convinced it’s solely those copyrights keeping this film from a physical release. Kino Lorber Studio Classics let it out of the bag a couple of years ago on Home Theater Forum they were planning to do a 4k restoration of the movie, when it was suddenly shut down, and they gave no reason why. Previously when music rights have blocked them from releasing a movie they’ve stated so, but in this particular case they never explained why the restoration was cancelled leading me to believe Mann stepped in and killed it himself. The rumors I’ve heard in the last several years is that Mann would like to do a director’s cut and Paramount doesn’t want to pay for it, so it lingers in purgatory. If anyone from Paramount who’s in the know happens to read this, or even Mann himself, please, feel free to chime in and separate fact from fiction. We’d all love to know what’s going on.

For decades I’ve always hoped a remake would get made, something more along the lines of the novel this time, or even a cable mini-series, a 10-part limited series would be something I’d love to see. And if there was ever a director who could do this material justice it would be Guillermo del Toro.

I was straight up shocked when I saw Australia’s Via Vision Entertainment was going to be the first country to put out a legit DVD. Sure, we all wish it were a blu-ray, but they told me Paramount didn’t supply them with any HD elements, which isn’t all that surprising considering its purgatory status, but to get the DVD in it’s proper widescreen ratio was the main selling point for me! If you’re in America the best places to acquire Australian discs would be ImportCDs.com, DiabolikDVD, and DeepDiscount.com. Concerning Diabolik, if they don’t have what you’re looking for on their site, you can contact them and they’ll most likely be able to get it for you. You can also order directly from Australia via JB Hi-Fi (they sell worldwide) and Via Vision Entertainment.

Video/Audio/Subtitles: 2.25:1 (anamorphic) widescreen—2.0 English Dolby Digital—No subs

There are some saying the transfer used might be the 1993 laserdisc version, I can’t say since I never collected laserdisc, but I was very satisfied with what Via Vision was able to get from Paramount. Clarity and detail are quite good for this standard DVD release. And, as I said, it’s in its native 2.35:1 aspect ratio. So a winner for me all the way around.

Extras included . . .

  • Original Theatrical Trailer
  • Reverse Art Without Ratings Certificate