I love 70s made for TV horror movies.

I love 70s made for TV horror movies. Because they needed to really unnerve a wide audience quickly but weren’t allowed things like sex, gore, or a budget, they figured out other ways — sometimes music or cinematography but usually just very clever & subtle writing.

Richard Matheson was the king of this — take a look at the short film Bobby (the last segment of the anthology movie Dead of Night), which (while the direction, by Dan Curtis, is gorgeous) gets chills from… two actors, one of them a child, and no fx beyond flashing lights. And it’s because Richard Matheson knows how to write a line of dialogue whose subtext is so twisty that it makes you want to rip your skin off to get at the bugs squirming beneath.

As soon as the protagonist of Bobby says “my son, who drowned by accident”, you know it was no accident — at least, not completely. As soon as we meet the ressurrected Bobby, we know his story is bogus. Did the actress flub “tetragrammaton” as “terragrammaton”, or is this in fact the reason the son came back in a demonic manner — i.e., that she failed to gain the protection of YHVH? If it’s an accident, it’s a brilliant one. Who in the general audience would catch that?

The power of writing in these things is maybe better illustrated by a worse-made movie — The Babysitter (1980), starring William Shatner. The premise: the too-perfect young live-in housekeeper is in fact a destructive sociopath with a string of broken homes behind her.

You’ve seen movies with this premise before, but generally they lean on style. This one is made in a stagey workmanlike manner (with the exception of a couple shots near the end that did some interesting stuff with plastic drapes). But it has some brilliant writing sometimes.

In one scene, the titular babysitter is talking to the mother of the family when the phone rings. She goes to the other room, answers the phone, and says that the woman she was just talking to “isn’t home”. The person on the other line says “tell her that we’re on for tennis tomorrow”. She hangs up, returns, and says “Barb says she can’t make tennis tomorrow; do you want to talk to her?” I thought maybe I had misheard this character, & that she said “we’re off for tennis”… The mother of the family says “that’s the third time this week!”

At that point, I realized: jesus christ, she’s isolating these people systematically, making them depend on her, in order to more easily manipulate them! And, in fact, the story shows that this is her M. O. without ever stating it, mostly through sequences like these. We get basically no exposition, and this pays off because we draw on those things we do know & imagine even more horrifying things (that, if made explicit, the network would no doubt have censored).