The Sentinel

• Director Michael Winner cast real people with physical deformities — recruited from hospitals and sideshows — as the demons in the climax, saying budget constraints made elaborate prosthetic makeup impractical for those roles. The decision drew lasting accusations of exploitation from critics and disability advocates.
• The demonic transformation effects were created by makeup artist Dick Smith, fresh off The Exorcist and The Godfather — not Tom Savini, who had no involvement with the production.
• The supporting cast is stacked with Golden Age names — Burgess Meredith, Ava Gardner, Sylvia Miles, Arthur Kennedy, Eli Wallach, Jose Ferrer, John Carradine, and Martin Balsam — surrounding then-unknowns Christopher Walken (as Detective Rizzo) and Jeff Goldblum (in an early role as photographer Jack).
• Richard Dreyfuss, the same year he made Close Encounters of the Third Kind, has an uncredited cameo early in the film, briefly glimpsed on a Brooklyn sidewalk.
• Critic Robin Wood called The Sentinel 'the worst — most offensive and repressive — horror film of the 70s,' a judgment aimed squarely at the film's use of real disabled performers purely for shock value.

Alison's neighbors are never shown outside the building, never interact with anyone else, and seem frozen in specific time periods — the film hints they're not damned souls but echoes of previous Sentinels who failed, trapped as warnings. Their aggression toward Alison is jealousy: she's still alive, and they're not.

Alison's suicide attempt as a teenager is revealed as backstory partway through the film, but the entire narrative could be read as a dying fantasy — the building, the demons, the priest, are all her brain processing guilt over her father's abuse and her own self-destruction. Hell isn't a place she's sent; it's where she already is.

The priest's silence isn't vigilance — it's exhaustion. The film's final reveal that Sentinels are replaced suggests a cycle, and the old priest's blank stare reads less like concentration than a man who stopped caring centuries ago. Alison isn't being chosen; she's being conscripted into a cosmic scam.

Fashion model Alison Parker moves into a Brooklyn Heights brownstone renting for suspiciously cheap. Her neighbors are odd — one is an elderly priest who sits motionless at the top-floor window, silently observing. The building's other residents behave strangely, and Alison's migraines and blackouts worsen as the tenants grow more aggressively bizarre. Her boyfriend presses for marriage, but Alison is still haunted by a suicide attempt from her teenage years, rooted in trauma over her father's sexual exploits. A Catholic investigator digs into the building's history and uncovers something older and worse than bad real estate. The priest at the window is the Sentinel — and he's guarding the gateway to Hell. Alison, marked by her own history of suicide, is chosen as his replacement, whether she wants the job or not.