Drafthouse Films Buys The Rights To The Sci-Fi Epic The Visitor

By Rudie Obias | Updated

This article is more than 2 years old

The VisitorDrafthouse Films is a new-ish movie distributor for emerging foreign films and strange forgotten genre offerings such as Klown, Miami Connection (which is now streaming on Netflix!), and Wake In Fright. It’s a boutique label for anyone who is looking for eccentric movies that can’t be found at your local Cineplex. The newest addition to Drafthouse Film’s oddities is the cult classic science fiction from 1979 called The Visitor.

The Visitor is an Italian sci-fi genre film about a young girl with telekinetic powers who is in the middle of an on-going battle between good and evil. Katy Collins is an 8-year-old Christ-like alien little girl who has a special power that has to be carried on for future generations. Her mother Barbara has to give birth to a male with the same powers as Katy so she can one day mate with him to keep the telekinetic power bloodline going.

It sounds weird, I know, but it gets much stranger when other forces try to get Barbara to give birth to another evil child. But when The Visitor and his legion of telekinetic children arrive to Earth, they must try to keep these powers on the side of good for all humanity.

The strange sci-fi film was part of a large crop of knockoff blockbuster movies from the late 70s to the early 80s. It is compared to movies like The Omen, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, and Star Wars. The Visitor features actors John Huston, Shelley Winters, Glenn Ford, Lance Henriksen, Mel Ferrer, Joanne Nail, Franco Nero, and Paige Conner as Katy, with legendary film directors John Huston and Sam Peckinpah making appearances. Italian filmmaker Giulio Paradisi (aka Michael J. Paradise) directed the film, while Ovidio G. Assonitis produced The Visitor.

Drafthouse Films has a pension for the schlocky genre films that are notorious for once thought of as lost or forgotten. Watch the jaw-dropping trailer for The Visitor below:

The Visitor one sheet