The Scare Salon

Note, however, that Fright does not feature the “call is coming from inside the house” trope that appears in the likes of Black Christmas (1974) and the aforementioned When a Stranger Calls.

Fright is a solid 1970s British thriller with some great shot compositions and masterful tension, especially in the first half. In my opinion, the latter half gets a bit overwrought, and the final confrontation goes on a tad too long, but all in all, this is a must-see for anyone interested in examining the seeds of later movies in the subgenre, and just in British horror cinema in general.

As is usual in my reviews of older movies, I will likely spoil aspects of the plot, so if you haven’t seen Fright and don’t want to know what happens, go watch it first and then come back. This is your only warning.

Susan George (who was also having a hell of a time in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, which came out the same year) plays a college student named Amanda, who takes a babysitting job at a remote gothic pile occupied by Helen and Jim Lloyd (Honor Blackman and George Cole, respectively) and their three-year-old son Tara (played by the director’s real-life son, Tara Collinson).

Right from the jump, Amanda senses that something is ever-so-slightly off with her hosts; Helen in particular seems very nervous and reluctant to leave, and Amanda notices that all the doors have alarmingly big-ass bolts on them. Amanda asks the couple where they’re going, just making conversation, and they tell her they’re going for dinner and drinks at a higher-end inn down in the village. Amanda asks if it’s a special occasion, like their anniversary, and Jim tells her it’s…something like that. Hmmm.

Jim also tells her that they’ve only just moved into the house a couple of months prior, and Amanda tells him she already knows this; it’s a small village, she says, and everyone knows everything, which seems to unnerve him a bit.

The Lloyds take her upstairs to meet the adorable tow-headed moppet she’ll be babysitting, and after some initial crankiness, he warms to his new minder. Helen says he’s tired and will probably sleep the entire time, which is fine with Amanda because it appears she brought some books with her to get some studying done; she’s working on a child welfare and psychology course.

After much hemming and hawing, especially from Helen, who chides herself for being so paranoid and unused to leaving her kid, the Lloyds finally skedaddle, and Amanda is left in the creepy old manse with only a snoozing toddler to keep her company.

Despite her apparent level-headedness, she starts to get anxious almost immediately, spooked by the dripping tap and the rattle of the plumbing as she makes a cup of tea. She also thinks she hears light knocking at the window and goes outside to see what it is, giving herself a jump scare by running into the laundry drying on the line.

Even more startlingly, she’s sure she sees a distorted face peering at her from one of the windows after she goes back into the house. Now completely on edge, she almost loses her shit when the doorbell suddenly rings, but it’s only her douchebag of a sorta-boyfriend Chris (Dennis Waterman), sporting a tragically shaggy haircut which is horrific enough on its own without the potential threat of wandering murderers.

Amanda seems conflicted about Chris’s arrival; on the one hand, she’s glad to have someone to keep her company, but on the other hand, Chris is an annoying boor who only wants to get laid and starts getting petulant when she tells him no. She insists that they should just talk, and the first thing out of his mouth is to say what great “bristols” she has. Stay classy, Chris.

I would also add that it’s a mite stalkery that he followed her here after going to her place and finding out where she was from her roommate, I presume. YOU IN DANGER, GIRL.

Not really, though, as Chris mostly just pouts. Amanda is actually angry at him because she thought it was his face leering in at her from the window and that he was deliberately trying to scare her, but he denies this, telling her he came straight up to the door. This freaks her out even more, because now she’s convinced there’s some other sketchy motherfucker creeping around out there, but of course he does the standard man thing they all do in these movies by assuring her that she must have just imagined it. Yep, I imagined a whole-ass face looking at me through a window. Silly me and my vivid hallucinations.

Not reading the room at all, Chris compounds her unease by telling her that Jim Lloyd is actually not Helen’s husband. Helen’s “real” husband, and the father of her child, was confined to a mental hospital after he tried to kill her some time before. Amanda simply cannot handle this information and begs him to tell her that he made it all up, and while he’s at it, to also assure her that it was indeed his face she saw at the window. Since her terror has finally coaxed her into his arms, he lies and tells her exactly what she wants to hear, all while unbuttoning her dress and feeling up her pert boobies (while they’re still in her bra; sorry, nudity fans). She tearfully calls him a “rotten sod,” but lets him do it. UGH, please kill this guy already, lurking psychopath.

Anyway, they start getting hot and heavy, but the cockblocking phone rings before Chris can even get his pants off. He tells her to ignore it, but damn, she’s DOING A JOB, Chris. She needs to answer the damn phone whether your poor neglected little pecker likes it or not. I really hated this guy, could you tell?

The phone call is obviously from Helen, who has had a bad feeling all night and wanted to call from the restaurant to make sure everything’s all right. Amanda tries to reassure her, but Chris is acting like a complete tool in the background, making monkey noises and trying to distract Amanda, and she’s getting righteously pissed off. Helen is getting more and more worried on the other end of the line because Amanda sounds harried and she can hear someone else there, but finally Amanda is able to get Chris to shut his stupid piehole for five seconds so she can tell Helen that everything is fine.

After she hangs up, she tells Chris to get the fuck out because she’s sick of his shenanigans, and I was so on Team Amanda at this point. Hell, I wouldn’t even have blamed her if she’d winged a glass ashtray at his head on his way out. Chris huffs and puffs and gives her the old “okay I’m going but you’ll be sorry” crap, but she’s not having it, telling him to just go home and that if he comes back ringing the doorbell she won’t answer it. At long last, he fucks off, and good bloody riddance.

When he’s out in the yard, there’s a POV shot from behind some bushes watching him, and I was so stoked at this stage, yelling, “YES, PLEASE KILL HIM!” Happily, the so-far unseen psycho punches Chris repeatedly in his ever-so-punchable face until he falls to the ground, unconscious. YAY!

Meanwhile, down at the Plover Inn, Helen is dealing with her own man problems. She and Jim, it turns out, are celebrating an anniversary of sorts; her divorce from her lunatic husband Brian (Ian Bannen) is now final. His psychiatrist, Dr. Cordell (John Gregson), has also joined the couple for dinner, and both the doctor and Jim have been trying to convince Helen all night that she’s safe, that there’s nothing to worry about, and that she should just relax and have a good time.

Helen can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong, though, especially after that strange phone call with Amanda. The men come up with all kinds of excuses as to why she shouldn’t be feeling the way she’s feeling, and it was really infuriating because you as the viewer have already deduced that her nutbag husband has busted out of the asylum, a possibility that these two patronizing twerps don’t seem to have considered.

Back at the mansion, Amanda tries to distract herself by watching Plague of the Zombies on TV, but someone keeps ringing the doorbell. She thinks it’s Chris and tries to ignore it, but soon after, she looks out a window and sees that leering face again, at which point she panics and calls the restaurant.

Helen comes to the phone, but before Amanda can get more than a word out, the psycho at the house cuts the phone line. Helen is now positive that something very bad is going on, but shockingly, Jim and Dr. Cordell try to downplay her concerns again, telling her that phones go dead all the time, that if she heard a woman’s voice it was probably just Jim’s secretary, and that she shouldn’t worry her pretty little womany head about the very violent lunatic who once tried to kill her and is one hundred percent locked up in an extremely secure facility, yessiree.

Finally, she’s able to talk Dr. Cordell into calling the mental hospital, at which point he finds out that duh, Brian has escaped. Does he apologize to Helen for blowing her off? What do you think?

So they all scramble to get back to the house and contact the authorities, but even in the car, Jim is trying to minimize, telling Helen there’s no reason to think that Brian would be heading to their house; why, he’s probably hundreds of miles away by now, Jim says. Oh my GOD, dude. I know you’re just trying to calm her down, but where the fuck else do you think Brian would go if not back to the place where the woman he’s obsessed with lives with his biological son? Be real here.

Back at the house, Amanda opens the front door (I don’t remember why) and finds Chris’s bloody form leaning against the doorframe. After he flops into the foyer, another man comes in, claiming he’s a neighbor and heard all the commotion over here so came over to help. Now you know and I know that this is Brian the Psycho, but Amanda doesn’t seem to clue in to this for a fair few minutes.

Once Brian is inside the house, it becomes a sort of psychological cat-and-mouse tale with elements of a siege narrative when the Lloyds, Dr. Cordell, and the completely useless cops arrive on the scene. Amanda attempts to keep Tara safe from his father while also trying to keep her own ass alive, even trying to play along with Brian’s delusions that she is actually Helen. This culminates in an implied rape, by the way, though nothing graphic is shown (not like the rape in Straw Dogs, in other words).

As previously mentioned, this is a decent watch, nicely suspenseful and beautifully shot, especially in the buildup. I felt that Susan George and Ian Bannen went a wee bit over the top in their roles toward the end, but on the whole, it didn’t bother me all that much, and there were some legitimately nail-biting interactions between them. The character of Chris was irritating as fuck, but I think he was meant to be, and after he gets his face pushed in you don’t see much of him until the climax (when he gets killed for real).

There was a small bit of (intentional) humor in the subplot of the police being completely ineffectual and just standing around doing nothing while Amanda and Tara are being menaced inside the house, which got a wry chuckle out of me. The ending was also pretty satisfying, with Amanda being the one to dispatch the villain after everyone else’s wishy-washy methods failed.

This isn’t a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s an enjoyable thriller with great atmosphere and some good (if slightly unhinged) acting performances. It was cool to finally see the OG babysitter in danger movie after all these years, and interesting to gauge the extent of its influence on later films in this subgenre.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.