The Manitou

Karen Tandy goes to a San Francisco hospital with a growth on her neck and back that keeps getting larger. Medical tests lead her doctors to suspect the mass is not a tumour at all but a living foetus. Karen's old friend Harry Erskine, a fortune teller who makes his living reading cards for elderly clients, is drawn into her case, and through his girlfriend Amelia, a medium, he comes to understand that an ancient and powerful Native American sorcerer, a Manitou, intends to be reborn through Karen's body.

William Girdler directed and produced the film from a screenplay he wrote with Jon Cedar and Thomas Pope. It was his fifth feature as director, following Sheba, Baby, Grizzly, Project: Kill and Day of the Animals. Tony Curtis plays Harry Erskine, with Michael Ansara as John Singing Rock, Susan Strasberg as Karen Tandy, Stella Stevens as Amelia Crusoe, Jon Cedar as Dr. Jack Hughes and Ann Sothern as Mrs. Karmann.

The film was released in April 1978 and runs 104 minutes. Made on a budget of about 3 million US dollars and shot as a Canadian-American co-production, it is rated 5.4 out of 10 on IMDb from around 3,700 votes, and 5.4 out of 10 on TMDB from a much smaller number of votes, so viewers on both services judge it similarly.