A half-hour short, Jack
Hill’s first film, written and directed while a student at UCLA, made a bit of
a splash, well enough to gain him some attention in Hollywood, where he went on
to make many cult classics starting with Spider
Baby (1964) and Pit Stop (1967). Most of them would feature actor Sid Haig,
who makes his debut in The Host. The film is a Twilight Zone-tinged existential western, a forerunner of Monte
Hellman’s Ride in the Whirwind (1965). Haig is a fugitive who rides into a desolate Mexican
village comprised only of scattered crumbling adobe buildings. He immediately finds himself being shot at by
another nameless man barricaded amid some broken walls. The fugitive takes cover and is approached by a
strange girl who explains that the other man has been trying to kill anyone who
approaches him because he wants no part in the community’s traditional propitiatory
rituals. These rituals, the girl
explains nonchalantly, involve a symbolic king being devoured by the
townspeople and replaced as king by whoever kills him, in return for which the
crops prosper through the next season.
Of course it’s a modern retelling of the Diana cult of Nemi, whose
priest-king was always killed by his own successor, as told in J.G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Hill has always claimed that his UCLA
schoolmate Francis Ford Coppola “borrowed” this premise from The Host for the final act of Apocalypse Now (1979), but I’m
not so sure this is the case. Coppola
has often referenced The Golden Bough as
a source – (even including a copy of the book among Col. Kurtz’ belongings in the film itself) – and
it seems reasonable that both Coppola and Hill merely found similar inspiration in Frazer’s book.
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