None of it makes sense, least of all in the version Americans got, and that is the wonder of it. Every legend on screen commits completely while plainly having no idea what is happening.

John Huston. Shelley Winters. Glenn Ford. Sam Peckinpah. Somehow, all of them ended up in a baffling Italian knockoff of The Omen about a telekinetic eight-year-old and a cosmic war between aliens for her soul.

THE VISITOR (1979), released in Italy as Stridulum, was directed by Giulio Paradisi under the alias Michael J. Paradise.

John Huston plays a benevolent space traveler and delivers pure nonsense with the authority of a man reading scripture. Shelley Winters is a sinister nanny. Lance Henriksen runs an Atlanta basketball team and a satanic conspiracy at the same time. Sam Peckinpah, the director of The Wild Bunch, turns up as an ex-husband. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is in there somewhere too.

The film is also, against all odds, beautiful, all soft focus and dream logic and sudden bursts of real dread.

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The Visitor (1979) was produced by Ovidio G. Assonitis as a chaotic, $800,000 Italian-American co-production shot in Atlanta, Georgia, and Rome's Cinecittà studios. Initially released in Italy as Stridulum in 1979, it was picked up for U.S. theatrical distribution by the International Picture Show Company, which released a heavily truncated version in late 1980 that flopped commercially and faded into drive-in obscurity. Its distribution legacy was completely revitalized decades later when Drafthouse Films digitally remastered the movie for a 2013 theatrical and home media re-release, cementing its modern reputation as a celebrated cult classic.