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The Giant Snake That Was Never in the Film

Poster art can become the first trailer a cult film ever receives. For The Manitou, the 1976 supernatural horror directed by Herbert L. Strock, that promise arrives in full: a colossal serpent coils above a lone figure while the title makes the monster sound like the main event. The image sells fear, exotic mystery and cheap spectacle in one glance. It also creates a tidy problem for anyone who later watches the film: the snake never appears.

What plays instead is a strange, talk-heavy story about John Morlar, a terminally ill advertising executive played by Tony Lo Bianco, and an occult object connected to a Native American medicine man called Two Jacks. Susan Strasberg, Michael Ansara, Stella Stevens and Burgess Meredith appear in a web of psychics, heirs and attempts to cheat death. The premise is expansive, the tone keeps changing, and the supposed supernatural threat is discussed rather than embodied.

That absence has helped rather than harmed the film’s afterlife. The Manitou developed a following for its flamboyant dialogue, strange leaps of logic, horror atmosphere and capacity to be enjoyed as a knowingly awkward curiosity. It is the sort of title that survives on late-night television, imported home-video shelves and repertory bookings long after larger monsters have been restored in high definition. The American one-sheet became part of the appeal, announcing a definite creature even when the movie supplies an enigma.

The gap also reveals the machinery behind cult cinema. A sensational image can be produced, printed and distributed before anyone has decided how the central effect will work on screen. In exploitation cinema, an illustrated promise often travels farther and earns more than a costly set, puppet or optical effect. Its serpent converts a spiritual idea into a straightforward monster and packages Indigenous identity through the period’s familiar stereotypes. Australian audiences have often met American exploitation titles through specialist retailers and later genre festivals, so the poster may be the version many remember before the less literal story unfolds.

A Monster Sold Before the Credits

The 1970s were a sweet spot for lurid one-sheet art. A painted shark, zombie, demon or snake gave exhibitors an instant sign that could be hung beside a drive-in fence or stacked in a video-shop window. Unlike a small print review, the image had room to exaggerate. The Manitou’s artwork follows that logic almost perfectly: the serpent occupies most of the composition, dwarfing the human figures and turning an invisible spiritual danger into a creature with scales, fangs and physical weight.

At the same time, the design had to win attention in a crowded market. Jaws had made large animals newly bankable, The Exorcist had made demonic imagery urgent, and “A movie from the master of the macabre” remained a useful sales pitch. A serpent offered several promises at once: ancient evil, forbidden knowledge, a haunted object and an unstoppable force. It also provided a clean visual hook for posters and drive-in calendars. Viewers did not need the plot explained; a painted mountain serpent and ominous lettering could do the selling in seconds.

Genre publicity often worked through expectation rather than literal accuracy. Horror art regularly suggested confrontations, monsters or deaths that the finished screenplay handled indirectly. The Manitou makes the gap unusually easy to spot because no giant snake crosses a single frame. The artwork therefore becomes more than decoration. It is the film’s boldest performance, supplying the physical certainty the narrative repeatedly withholds and turning viewers into detectives comparing what they were promised with what they actually see.

The Story Hidden Beneath the Artwork

The movie is built around belief, inheritance and unstable identity rather than a creature hunt. Morlar’s illness gives urgency to the search for the Manitou, while Two Jacks and the people around him offer competing claims about what the thing is and what it wants. Drawing on Graham Masterton’s novel of the same name, the narrative circles those claims with dream imagery, spiritualist ritual, eerie music and sudden changes of tone. It is less a drive-in chase than a chamber piece in which the object itself remains difficult to define.

Sound and suggestion do more work than effects. Whispers, hissing, chanting and pauses imply a presence without assigning it a body. Faces and objects carry the idea from scene to scene, so viewers who accept the story’s rules can find the Manitou everywhere. The absence of a physical snake also leaves the title freer: it can mean a spirit, a fragment of a person, a supernatural mechanism or some combination of them. What the poster turns into one monster, the film keeps deliberately unstable.

That instability sits beside the movie’s less flattering use of Indigenous culture. The unnamed medicine-man mythology, generic ceremonial imagery and mystical shorthand flatten distinct traditions into a Gothic device. Australian audiences, who live alongside hundreds of Aboriginal cultural and linguistic traditions, are especially likely to recognise how misleading such a lumped-together representation feels. The serpent is not simply disconnected from the plot; its use as a marketable horror icon adds another layer of simplification. Appreciation of the cult film can include genuine pleasure in its atmosphere while treating its cultural representation as dated and damaging.

The Exploitation System Behind the Promise

Independent genre production made this kind of poster-first approach practical. Locations could be brief, schedules tight and effects improvised, while publicity still needed an image capable of competing with studio releases. If a realistic snake required a crew, a soundstage and money the budget did not contain, then a painted snake solved the problem. The audience received a bold premise, while the filmmakers retained the option of delivering menace through dialogue, atmosphere and implication.

This history is not unique to The Manitou, and it would be misleading to imply that this particular production had a specific kind of financing. The risks and shortcuts associated with mafia-backed genre cinema, for instance, illustrate how fast, inexpensive genre pictures could be financed and pushed into circulation. The wider lesson concerns the ecology of exploitation: money, production limits, distribution and poster art often point towards different products. A striking image may be the most controllable part of the campaign.

That mismatch can be fatal in a conventional release. A film advertised as a monster feature that never delivers its monster invites disappointment. Cult status changes the reception. Once irony enters the conversation, the impossible artwork becomes evidence that the film is bolder on the page than on screen. Later viewers may even value the poster’s excess precisely because the screenplay refuses or lacks the means to reproduce it. The snake survives through expectation, repetition and circulation; in the auditorium, there is only the voice, the shadow and the argument over what it all means.

An Australian Cult Movie Education

Australia has its own rich route into this kind of discovery. Regional drive-ins and late suburban cinemas once made lurky double bills part of a summer night out, even though the country was more geographically spread than the United States. Roadshow prints and battered trailers travelled between towns, where a painted monster could promise a payoff that a small audience had no other chance to see. The Manitou’s artwork fits that tradition, even if Australian viewers often encountered it through an imported print, television slot or VHS rather than a major suburban cinema.

The home-video era gave Australian collectors a different kind of hunt. In Sydney and Melbourne, specialist video shops became small cultural archives, their shelves mixing Australian releases with American genre imports, bootleg transfers and subtitles that varied as much as the covers. That appetite survives through specialist dealers, convention stalls, streaming catalogues and festivals such as Monster Fest in Melbourne. A cult film can gain a second life there, but viewers still need to distinguish a famous poster from the edition they are actually watching.

The broader willingness to value strange, talky genre films is also part of the local cult vocabulary. Australians have long enjoyed the “so bad it’s good” pleasure of overheated dialogue and plot mechanisms that become clearer only after the credits. The tradition extends beyond individual oddities: talking-car cinema, for example, examines how a vehicle becomes a character through personality, sound and the expectations attached to familiar models. The Manitou works similarly with a supposed creature that exists mostly through talk. Its poster supplies the body, while the movie and its audience supply the voice.

Watching the Promise and the Film

A first-time viewer can get more from the contrast by treating the artwork as evidence rather than a shopping list. Notice what the painting makes certain, then test which of those certainties the film earns, postpones or abandons. Listening for sound cues also matters because they reveal a different approach to the unseen. The exercise preserves the poster’s energy without allowing it to dictate the entire experience.

None of this requires rejecting the film. Plenty of genre favourites are imperfect in ways that become part of their character, especially once the audience can laugh at the distance between intention and result. The poster remains the cleanest version of a promise the production could never quite literalise, which is precisely why it has outlived the imagined reptile.

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