A Howling in the Woods (1971)

Having had enough of what must have been the endless bullshit of her fashion photographer husband Eddie (Larry Hagman), young and beautiful (as the film will never stop saying, so I’ll just do as I’m told here) Liza Crocker (Barbara Eden) returns to the home of her father in the very rural small town she hasn’t visited for half a decade, to lick her wounds, planning to stay there long enough to establish residence and be able to put in for a divorce.

But Liza’s father isn’t there at all. Apparently, he has already embarked on his yearly archaeological – or is is anthropological - expedition into parts remote where no telephone can reach. At least her stepmother Rose (Vera Miles) provides our heroine a warm welcome, as does the Rose’s son Justin (John Rubinstein) whom Liza meets for the first time. One might even suggest that Justin’s a little too warm, though Liza seems charmed.

These two are pretty much the only ones greeting out heroine with open arms, however. The rest of the town’s population treats her with disregard to outright rudeness Liza can’t explain to herself, as if she were some kind of pariah everyone she once knew was just all too happy to see go. Or is it jealousy for her big city success?

There is, indeed the kind of dark secret hanging over the town you’d expect to encounter in a modern Nordic noir rather than an innocent little NBC TV movie like this. It all has to do with the drowning murder of a little girl some months ago, and with what the town’s people, once properly riled, proceeded to do afterwards.

I know very little about the career of A Howling in the Woods’ director Daniel Petrie beyond his humungous filmography (much of it in TV and family movies), but this thriller is certainly not an achievement to sneeze at, whatever I think about the rest of the guy’s work whenever I may encounter it. Petrie has a firm grip on his film’s not uncomplicated plot, timing his reveals well and turning the town this takes place in into the sort of community that’d only need one good werewolf or vampire to turn into a complete American rural gothic nightmarescape. Though, as it turns out, humans do pretty well in the monster business too.

The film creates an effective sense of Liza’s increasing paranoia, very efficiently suggesting how much her new experience in her old home diverges from what she remembers, using the inexplicability of this change to ratchet up the tension. If you’re not Liza, the film is also suggesting that there always has been something darker under the surfaces she knew, the kind of violence and darkness that needs another act of violence as a catalyst to come to the surface, but which only ever seems to be just waiting for that kind of excuse.

There’s some great acting on display, too, Eden (while about ten years older than her character is probably meant to be) making a likeable and often rather tough heroine, Hagman – who of course pops in during the course of the movie to convince his wife of taking him back via the power of being obnoxious - making pretty clear the difference between meaning well and knowing how to express it, and Rubinstein showing himself as really rather good at being a creep.

It’s a satisfying little movie that uses a complicated and not completely probable plot as an excellent excuse for a thriller that’s also interested in the dark heart of communal life.