There is no good way to prepare someone for The Visitor. You can say it’s an Italian-American co-production from 1979 starring John Huston as a cosmic guardian, Glenn Ford as a detective, Shelley Winters as a housekeeper, Sam Peckinpah as a doctor (fully intoxicated during filming, per producer Ovidio G. Assonitis), and Franco Nero — uncredited — as a sort of space Jesus. You can say it involves telekinesis, an eight-year-old girl who acts as a vessel for an ancient evil, a killer hawk, exploding basketball backboards, and a light show borrowed from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. None of that actually conveys what it’s like. Arrow Video’s 4K UHD gives this demented marvel a home that is, against all logic, entirely appropriate.

The plot, such as it is, concerns little Katy Collins (Paige Conner), a child with terrifying psychokinetic abilities who is being monitored by a Satanic consortium that wants her to produce a male heir and restart an ancient evil bloodline. Standing against them is Jerzy Colsowicz (Huston), an otherworldly guardian dispatched from a realm that feels designed by someone who’d watched 2001: A Space Odyssey and decided it needed more doves. Meanwhile, Katy’s mother Barbara (Joanne Nail) is being maneuvered by her boyfriend Raymond (Lance Henriksen, Jennifer 8), who is more committed to the Satanist agenda than she realizes.

Calling The Visitor a Carrie knockoff or an Omen ripoff or an Exorcist derivative is both technically accurate and completely inadequate. It borrows from all three and from Suspiria, from Sergio Leone, from the Book of Revelation — and somehow the collision of all these influences produces something that operates on its own fevered frequency entirely. To be clear: the film isn’t incompetent or without merit. Director Giulio Paradisi has gathered the right technical team to support the heft of talent in front of the camera. Cinematographer Ennio Guarnieri knows exactly what he’s doing with a frame. Huston, who clearly decided to give this everything he had, is genuinely magnetic.

Arrow’s 4K restoration from the original 35mm negative is excellent. The psychedelic opening sequences explode in HDR — cobalt blues bleeding into deep orange-reds — and the film’s practical sets and location work in Atlanta show far more fine detail than any previous release. The 109-minute European version is presented, running longer than the American cut which was truncated prior to its release.  There are some sound issues on this cut but it’s nothing to cry over when the visual presentation is so strong. Franco Micalizzi‘s score is one of those soundtracks that feels like it was composed by three different people who weren’t speaking to each other, which turns out to be exactly right for this patchwork quilt of a film.

The extras are serious and smart — which is exactly the right approach for a film that rewards serious, smart attention. Meagan Navarro’s visual essay “A Biblical Battle for the Cosmos” and Willow Catelyn Maclay’s “A Cosmic Right to Choose” provide two distinct critical lenses on the film’s cosmic theology and its treatment of bodily autonomy. The BJ and Harmony Colangelo commentary is an enthusiast track that keeps the energy high. Archive interviews with Henriksen and cinematographer Guarnieri round things out, and the collectors’ booklet — with writing from Marc Edward Heuck, Richard Kadrey, Craig Martin and Mike White — looks to be one of the better Arrow essay packages in recent memory. The reversible sleeve with new Erik Buckham artwork is striking.

If you’ve ever wondered what happens when a 1970s Italian producer is handed a massive budget and a remarkable cast and opts to tackle a story that literally cannot be summarized — this is your answer. Lance Henriksen’s well-known tale of watching the film’s New York premiere in stunned embarrassment while a man in the balcony stood up and demanded his money back is almost certainly the most honest review The Visitor ever received. And yet here we are, nearly fifty years later, with Arrow treating it like the essential cult artifact it is.