Certainly while one praises The Manitou, one must also be aware that there is a good degree of schlocky ridiculousness that surrounds more than a few parts of the film. There’s one completely ridiculous scene where a hunched-over Lurene Tuttle starts making frog-like croaks while hovering six inches above the ground, while Tony Curtis runs about smiling rather bemusedly as if this were no more than one of his Doris Day soap opera comedies of the 1960s. Girdler’s shocks are often down around the level of crude circus showmanship – doctors plunging scalpels into their wrist, heads emerging from a table during a seance and several other scenes that inspire more laughter than anything else.

Yet on the other hand The Manitou contains a particularly strong building atmosphere of eldritch eeriness. The film could almost be an H.P. Lovecraft story – indeed Graham Masterson makes the indebtitude overt with reference to the climactic awakening of a Great Old One, which was the most powerful god in Lovecraft’s Cthulu Mythos. What adds considerable originality to The Manitou is the importing of Native American mysticism. The conceptual stew of ideas that Graham Masterson plays with here has a creativity way above any of the standard clones of The Exorcist (1973) that were being made around the same era. The middle scenes play the Indian mysticism with such an engrossing conviction that suspension of disbelief triumphs entirely over director Girdler’s rather crude shocks. The incredibly eerie scenes with medicine man Michael Ansara trying to build protective circles around the manitou’s bed, or moments where the manitou speaks through Susan Strasberg’s mouth, its emerging from the tumour, and bringing a dead orderly back to life, all work at a level of otherworldly spookiness that is very hard to shake when the film is over. Only the climax lets it down where Girdler takes a leaf from Star Wars (1977) with a bare-chested Susan Strasberg sitting up in bed, floating amid a very poorly matted starscape and meteor storm, blasting lightning bolts from her fingers at a poor sub-2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) psychedelic light show that supposedly represents the Great Old One.

Tony Curtis is badly miscast and doesn’t appear to be taking the show very seriously. His contribution to the film never rises above a slightly amused smile. Debatably even worse than Tony Curtis is Stella Stevens as a fellow medium. The one good performance in the film comes from the great and always reliable Burgess Meredith in a small part as an expert on Indian mythology.