Encounter with the Unknown

Did You Know?

• The studio's second feature, So Sad About Gloria (1973), was filmed simultaneously with Encounter with the Unknown.
• Some filming took place at the Capital Hotel and Mount Holly Cemetery in Little Rock, Arkansas.
• The film opened in Hope, Arkansas on October 29, 1972.

Plot

The movie claims to recount three real supernatural incidents. In the first, "The Heptagon," a funeral opens the story for Johnny Davis, a college student. His friends Dave, Frank, and Randy are present at the burial. These three had tricked Johnny with a phone prank, sending him to an address where he was supposed to meet a date.

Instead, the elderly homeowner there shot and killed him by accident. When the service ends, Johnny's mother—the seventh daughter of a seventh son—speaks a puzzling curse to the three men she holds responsible: "One by land, two by sky...seven times around go the three of you, and may your reward be just and true." Later, on an airplane, Frank tells this tale to a priest named Father Duane. Frank reports that Dave was struck by a vehicle and died exactly one week after the funeral.

The priest dismisses it as chance. But after Father Duane leaves the plane, it crashes during takeoff. On the runway, the priest comforts a dying Frank, who notes that two weeks have passed since Johnny was buried. Troubled, Father Duane consults his superior, who advises him to phone the last friend at the state university.

The priest reaches Randy's roommate instead, who says Randy is skydiving. The narrator reminds us that twenty-one days have elapsed since the burial, and Mrs. Davis's prophecy foretold that two of the men would die by sky.

The second segment, "The Darkness," takes place in early 1900s rural Missouri. A boy's dog vanishes near a strange hole in the ground. Worried by eerie moans rising from it, the boy's father agrees to be lowered down on a rope to find the dog and the noise's source. A horrible scream erupts from the pit, and when the father is pulled back up, he is a raving madman. The hole's secret is never uncovered, and the narrator tells us the father lived out his days in an insane asylum.