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.

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.