Alice, Sweet Alice

• Shot for roughly $350,000 entirely in New Jersey, mostly in Paterson where director Alfred Sole came up restoring historic buildings before filmmaking and used those connections to lock down period locations.
• It marked Brooke Shields's film debut; she plays Karen, the favored younger sister murdered in the first act, and was around 11 at the time of the 1977 U.S. release.
• Paula Sheppard turned 19 during the 1976 shoot while playing 12-year-old Alice, a casting gap that gives the character her uncanny, too-knowing presence.
• The film carried three release identities: it premiered as Communion at the 1976 Chicago International Film Festival (where it won an award and a rave from Roger Ebert), got re-titled Alice, Sweet Alice for its 1977 U.S. release by Allied Artists, then was reissued in 1981 as Holy Terror through Dynamite Entertainment to cash in on Shields's fame after Pretty Baby.
• Director Alfred Sole had been excommunicated from the Catholic Church after obscenity charges tied to his earlier softcore film Deep Sleep (1972), and channeled that into making a horror movie about murder inside a devout Catholic parish.
• Alphonso DeNoble, who plays the grotesque cat-hoarding landlord Mr. Alphonso, was not a trained actor but a Paterson bar bouncer Sole persuaded into the role.

The movie engineers a misdirect rooted entirely in how the household treats Alice. Because the parents and the camera both frame her as the obvious culprit, the audience is led to convict a neglected kid for the sins of the adults around her, making the eventual reveal an indictment of who gets believed and who gets blamed.

Read as Sole's revenge on the Church that cast him out: the institution offers communion, confession, and sanctuary, yet every one of those spaces becomes a crime scene. The faith that's supposed to protect these people is the exact machinery that hides the killer.

The translucent mask works because it shows a blurred human face underneath rather than a blank one. The killer isn't a monster, it's a recognizable person we're not allowed to see clearly, turning the whole film into an argument that evil here is domestic and ordinary, not supernatural.

Paterson, New Jersey, 1961. On the morning of her first communion, golden-child Karen is strangled and burned in a church alcove by a figure in a yellow rain slicker and a translucent mask. Suspicion lands on Alice, the sullen older sister who resents being overlooked, and the killings keep coming as the family fractures around her. Sole builds the whole thing on Catholic ritual turned poisonous, withholding the mask's face long enough to make every adult a suspect and every blessed candle look like a weapon.