The thing about this movie we saw last night on the Svengoolie show, “The Thing That Couldn’t Die,” is that it heads in the wrong direction from the start—with a woman who douses for treasure. Dousing or witching for water or other things employs a special stick or rods to find objects buried underground. I actually saw this many years ago when I worked as a land survey crew member and watched an old guy use dousing rods to find buried water tile lines in a field. I remember one guy in my crew mentioned under his breath that the guy was probably old enough to remember where the tile line was originally buried.
Anyway, this film was released in 1958 and the general idea is that a sorcerer named Gideon Drew was beheaded by Sir Francis Drake 400 years ago. The head was buried in a box and the rest of the body was buried somewhere else. This would ensure that Gideon would suffer for all eternity—as long as nobody used his head to figure out that if you reconnected Drew’s body and his head, he could again commit mayhem.
Jessica is a seemingly empty-headed woman who is really able to find important objects by dousing. She finds the box containing Gideon’s head and a special charm necklace that protects her (at first) from Gideon’s ability to get inside your head.
Gideon possesses the deadhead character Mike because he’s the one who first opens the box. He then kills his controlling buddy, Boyd, who yells his head off, waking up Peggy’s Aunt Flavia, the owner of the land on which the box was found. Aunt Flavia has a head for figures because she runs the dude ranch where all the characters are and realizes that the box contained something valuable, learning later that she could get $5,000 for it from an archaeologist.
Mike drags Boyd’s body around in the woods by the head for a while, eventually dropping it into the hole where the box was originally found, but then gets killed off early in the movie. The actor, Charles Horvath, was ticked off about it and later went on to form the well-known rock band, the Ungrateful Head.
Meanwhile, Linda, who earlier invited Jessica to a square dance who declined because she preferred head banger music, gets hypnotized by Gideon. Linda then puts Gideon in a hatbox, which she gifts to Jessica after Jessica’s wannabe boyfriend, Gordon, takes the charm away from her to get it cleaned up. When Jessica opens the hatbox, Gideon zaps her, causing her to become a bad girl. Linda slaps her boyfriend Hank in the head a couple of times, which leads him to head back to their cabin to tear up his painting of her portrait and get his head bad by drinking whiskey.
Linda, Jessica, and Hank all get pretty drunk, and eventually Jessica decides to witch for the body of Gideon Drew, which she finds and the action starts coming to a head—Gideon’s head that is.
Jessica replaces Gideon’s head on his body. He integrates into the consistency of grayish head cheese and his vocal cords start working. The gang’s all there and Gideon threatens everybody and starts to bully them. Gordon tries to shoot him but bullets don’t work, and he then gets his head on straight, remembering he has the charm necklace. Gordon points it at Gideon, who reacts like Dracula does to a crucifix and almost immediately jumps back into the coffin his body was buried in, where he disintegrates.
Gideon’s spell is broken and a good time was had by all with nothing left to suffer but a mild headache from the whiskey hangover.
The moral of the film’s story is lost in all the interpersonal drama, but it might be that if you’re having trouble with water witching for drain tile lines, you should not lose your head because you can probably find a map of tile line locations in the city engineer’s office.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 