Don’t Open the Door (1975)

May 23, 2007

by Nathan Shumate

Produced and directed by S.F. Brownrigg
Written by Frank Schaefer and Kerry Newcomb
Starring
- Susan Bracken
- Larry O’Dwyer
- Gene Ross
- Jim Harrell
- Hugh Feagin

Given that the era has a reputation for libertine self-indulgence, it’s puzzling to find so many horror titles through the ’70s and early ’80s which are presented in the form of a forbidding imperative. Odder still that, despite the undercurrent of reactionary morality found in such archetypes as the “Final Girl,” few of these cautionary titles have any sort of moral import; there is not, to my knowledge, any slasher movie entitled “Don’t Have Sex With Your Boyfriend!” No, the actions specifically warned against are simply prosaic acts of life and association — opening the door, going in the woods, looking in the basement, answering the phone, etc.; perhaps this cultural subtext indicate a deepseated fear that the most mundane and unremarkable actions necessary to modern life could themselves be a source of peril.

Or perhaps I’m just speaking out of my nether end, and there’s no deeper significance to any of it. Whichever is true, director S.F. Brownrigg helped lay the groundwork for the titling cliche, having given us Don’t Look in the Basement (1973) a couple of years previous to this feature. The two movies share more than a distinctive grammar; both are Texas-made regional horror films in the last waves of regional cinema before summer blockbusters and nationwide openings paved over the market. Both share several cast members. Both are rather low-key in their pacing, at least compared to today’s caffeinated horror films. And both are rather odd fits for their titles.

“You can have your fuzzy hat back when I’m good and ready!”

I tell you, though, what smalltime horror films excelled at before they were all shot on video by student auteurs is the realism in their casts. Not that they were great actors; most of them usually rose to the level of community theater performers only with great effort. But they were real. They were normal people. Which meant, in a decade as ugly as the ’70s, that they were ugly. No underwear models looking for their big thespian breaks here; this was a decade that reveled in its ugliness, and ’70s drive-in horror flicks showcase it like nobody else.

In the present instance, the ugliness is centered on old Miss Harriett (Rhea MacAdams, who never utters an intelligible line of dialogue), a declining old woman in the semi-forced care of the Judge (Gene Ross) and his wife Annie (Annabelle Weenick) in the small Texas town of Allerton. The Judge, along with his cohorts in the community, has apparently been conspiring to drug old Harriett, though the exact reason is never explained beyond him wanting the house. Whatever the reason, Annie acts out of guilt and, despite her husband’s threatenings, surreptitiously calls Harriett’s one living relative, her granddaughter Amanda, who grew up in Allerton but left thirteen years ago.

Amanda (Susan Bracken) is now all grown up in the big city, but when she gets the call she immediately drops everything to… well, to have some flashbacks first, but also to come to Grandma’s side. The flashbacks concern her reasons for leaving Grandma’s house and Allerton, and they seem like pretty good reasons to me: She was the one to discover her mother dead with a knife sticking out of her, the victim of a prowler who had been calling the house repeatedly. The case was never solved, you know. These cases never are.

Not much good against prowlers, but if she encounters a loose bouquet of flowers, she’s ready!

So back in Allerton after an extended absence, Amanda immediately comes into conflict with those community pillars involved in the vague conspiracy against Grandma: The Judge, whom you’ve already met; Dr. Crawther (Jim Harrell), the weak-willed physician who’s been feeding Grandma drugs beyond those prescribed, and who refuses to admit her into a hospital on Amanda’s insistence; and Mr. Kearn (Larry O’Dwyer), an obsequious little fellow with John Denver glasses who runs the local museum and historical society, and the only one who doesn’t treat Amanda’s homecoming like a fart in an elevator.

It doesn’t take long for Amanda to also become the center of whatever strange situation eventually took her mother’s life. She begins to get strange breathy phone calls from someone who seems to know far too much about her daily activities, and as the camera helpfully shows us, this caller is actually in the house, using the unknown spaces in the walls to move around and the gaps between boards to spy on Amanda’s bubble bath. (Before you conclude that this movie is drawing on When a Stranger Calls (1979) for inspiration, remember that Don’t Open the Door was made roughly four years before Carol Kane took her babysitting job.) Being a big city girl, she takes the standard “obscene caller” routine in stride, until things start getting weirder.

“What’s that? ‘Psycho‘? Never saw it, sorry.”

She immediately calls on her pseudo-boyfriend Nick (Hugh Feagin), whom we met as she left to come home to Allerton, for help. Nick, conveniently enough, is a doctor himself, and thus takes over care of Grandma and gets her admitted to the local hospital over Dr. Crawther’s objections. But with Grandma out and Nick at the hospital taking care of her, that leaves Amanda alone in the creaky three-story house. Just her… and the telephone.

In fact, the further the movie goes, the more you realize that it should have been titled Don’t Answer the Phone instead (since nobody else was going to use that title until 1980). It could also have been called Don’t Expect Too Much Overt Horror,, as it’s really more of a low-boiling suspense piece rather than a horror flick. It seems much shorter than its 85 minutes; the pacing is relaxed enough that an admittedly thin storyline doesn’t run out before the end or seem like it’s padded. It helps, of course, that every house in smalltown Texas is three stories tall, and people always have occasion to take the shadowing spiral staircase all the way to the top. Most of the creep factor comes from Larry O’Dwyer as the breathy, giggling, singing psycho in the walls (yes, that’s a spoiler, but the audience was meant to figure it out pretty early). That’s the other great strength of regional horror flicks; they may not be able to always find great actors for the sympathetic characters, but somehow there’s never a shortage of apeshit psychos. It’s enough to make you wonder, really…

Don’t pull the phone any farther! You’ll strangle the cameraman!

Not that the acting here is bad, at least for the production circumstances. Susan Bracken has a hard role as Amanda, portraying a gradually increasing case of nerves, and any disappointments with her performance should probably be seen as directorial shortcomings, not thespian ones. Gene Ross as the Judge is chockful of Southern-fried menace, though it’s interesting that his character, as venal and self-serving as it is, is shown in the end to still be preferable to that of a giggling telephone psycho. Hugh Feagin as Nick is mostly off-stage as the Voice of Reason to Amanda’s escalating fears, and the doctor gets himself whacked fairly early on.

The largest disappointment comes from the ending, which seems like nobody really had any idea what to do, so they fall back on a very bad idea: Having someone go “movie crazy.” You know what I mean: When fear and trauma drives a character so far around the bend that not only do they behave irrationally, but their actions are utterly out of character — killing people at random, laughing hysterically, voting for Nader, all that sort of stuff. It’s not a satisfying conclusion; it’s simply a louder way of saying, “Um, the end!”

“Yes, I’m the Judge. Yes, I’m both ugly and bleeding. What’s your point?”

So final assessment: Mild and competent, doesn’t drag or dawdle despite the pace, makes good use of the shadowy interiors of its central location, anchored by a consistently creepy psycho performance (I sure hope it was a performance). You may be annoyed by the dated music and the choppy editing thereof, and you may be frustrated by the several scenes in which Amanda aaalllllmost shows a nipple. But it’s not a bad little film, and it’s been largely forgotten less because of its own merits and more because of that other Texas-made independent horror film that overshadowed all the others.