The Stranger Within (1974)

Ann (Barbara Eden) and David Collins (George Grizzard) have a rather long, loving and happy marriage, atypical not only in the white upper class that likes to call itself middle-class circles they are moving in.

Because it would otherwise result in a pretty boring movie, for a private utopia does not for great storytelling make as you probably know, marital troubles rear their ugly head. Ann becomes pregnant; which, given the couple’s closeness, would usually be a reason for happiness. However, David had undergone a vasectomy some years ago after Ann nearly died during a miscarriage, and can’t be the father.

Despite the medical impossibility, Ann is adamant nobody else can have fathered the kid; David clearly doesn’t know what to believe. He would prefer her to have an abortion. Not necessarily because he doesn’t believe her (though there’s certainly something of this floating around in his subconscious), but because she’s at a very high risk of simply not surviving giving birth. Ann’s rather less sure about this, but then, further developments suggest she might not be quite in control of her faculties anymore even at this point. Attempts to drive her to an abortion clinic only end in her suffering from horrible pains that make it impossible to go through with it.

But there’s something much stranger going on than possible psychosomatics: what looks at first like typical if extreme pregnancy cravings is probably better described as a dependency on coffee; Ann begins needing ridiculously low temperatures; she, apparently never much of a reader before, begins reading everything she can get her hands on about every theme imaginable with an impossible speed. Further into the pregnancy, Ann does indeed appear to be reading by stroking the outside of books suggestively. Not surprisingly under these circumstances, her character and temperament begin to change as well, as if she weren’t quite herself anymore, and the baby would increasingly take her over.

For my tastes, this piece of SF horror directed by Lee Philips for the ABC Movie of the Week, based on a script by the great Richard Matheson in a particularly good mood, is one of the crown jewels of US made-for-TV horror.

It’s a film that’s practically flawless, full of telling incidental detail about the relationship between Ann and David (as well as with their friends) that would have added twenty minutes of exposition in lesser hands, creating a believable world for Matheson’s increasingly bizarre version of alien abduction tropes to take place in.

Matheson being Matheson, he also uses the plot to explore the breaking points of a solid and loving relationship when confronted with the Weird entering their lives, which can metaphorically obviously stand in for all kinds of existential problems a couple might encounter in life. Whereas other parts of the film are quite obviously also expressing fears about the physical dangers of pregnancy, and the very real changes it brings to a relationship and a couple’s personal lives.

Philips’ direction is quite sensitive to his script’s demands here, as well, and creates something closer to kitchen-sink (if your sink is in a really big house) realism than soap operatics when it comes to showing the strains on our couple’s relationships. Which seems to have been something Philips was genuinely good at, going by some of the other TV movies he directed I’ve seen. Having worked as an actor himself, he’s also willing and able to open up more space for Eden’s and Grizzard’s work than other TV directors might have been able to.

Particularly Eden thanks him with a performance that’s much more human than her more typical routine TV star turns (which is not a mode to be sneezed at when done well, either), making the increasing strangeness and intensity of Ann’s behaviour much more believable as well as creepy. She also does some great scenery-chewing when the time comes for it.

Rooting the increasing weirdness as well in a somewhat relatable (even though these guys are stinking rich) personal reality as the film does is one of its major strengths, making the more absurd turns of Matheson’s script all the more believable by the simple virtue of taking place in the world Philips has created.

And things really get weird in the final act, even as apocalyptical as they can get on a TV budget. All of which works because everyone involved has prepared the way towards the strange and the extremes so very well. When given the right material, as he is here, Philips turns out to be a genuinely great director of TV horror, using every cheap and not so cheap trick in the book to create a mood of dread and of the uncanny creeping into very normal lives.