Visual Culture in Britain
ISSN: 1471-4787 (Print) 1941-8361 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rvcb20
‘I'm the Girl He Wants to Kill’: The ‘Women in Peril’
Thriller in 1970s British Film and Television
Peter Hutchings
To cite this article: Peter Hutchings (2009) ‘I'm the Girl He Wants to Kill’: The ‘Women in
Peril’ Thriller in 1970s British Film and Television, Visual Culture in Britain, 10:1, 53-69, DOI:
10.1080/14714780802686571
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14714780802686571
Published online: 15 May 2009.
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Peter Hutchings
‘I’m the Girl He Wants to Kill’: The ‘Women in
Peril’ Thriller in 1970s British Film and Television
Women in Terror
The victim is eternally and prototypically the damsel.1
It does seem that the most intense, lucid and powerful representations of
the states of fear and terror in Western culture are associated, more often
than not, with the feminine. The visual and aural repertoire of fear – the
panicked gesture, the eyes widened helplessly, the high-pitched scream –
somehow seems more apt or credible when expressed or articulated
through the body of the woman. By contrast, the spectacle of men in
extreme states of fear is an altogether rarer phenomenon in our culture
and when it does occur is often marked precisely as being exceptional or
unusual. To say this connects with patriarchal attitudes is, to put it
mildly, stating the obvious. Nonetheless, the question remains of how,
where and to what ends this connection operates.
This article presents an account of a group of British film and television
narratives from the first half of the 1970s in which the terrorization of
women was an integral element. These are referred to as ‘women in peril’
thrillers, although at the time they were presented just as thrillers, albeit
via marketing that – as we will shortly see – emphasized female fear. This
is by no means a large group of texts but it can be seen as constituting a
recognizable strand in British culture of the period. Indeed, one could go
further and argue that during this period the kind of female-centred
terrorization on offer here was particularly blatant and visible.
For evidence to support this view, one need only to turn to the poster
that advertised a 1972 double-bill release of Straight on Till Morning and
Fear in the Night, two psychological thrillers from the British horror
specialist Hammer.2 ‘WOMEN IN TERROR!’ is the unsubtle headline that
runs across the top of the poster in bold white lettering against a lurid red
background, while the space beneath juxtaposes images of Rita
Tushingham and Judy Geeson, the female leads from each film,
appearing suitably terrorized. The mere presence of such an item in
public circulation in Britain during the 1970s seems to support the claim
made in Molly Haskell’s groundbreaking feminist history of cinema From
Reverence to Rape that ‘From a woman’s point of view, the ten years from,
say, 1962 or 1963 to 1973 have been the most disheartening in screen
history’.3 Haskell goes on to find the anti-woman culmination of this
‘with the violent abuse and brutalization of A Clockwork Orange and
Straw Dogs’, two British-produced films that had been released in the
Visual Culture in Britain ISSN 1471-4787 print/ISSN 1941-8361 online
# 2009 Taylor & Francis http://www.informaworld.com
DOI: 10.1080/14714780802686571
54
the ‘women in peril’ thriller
year preceding Hammer’s 1972 ‘Women in Terror’ double bill.4 Both A
Clockwork Orange and Straw Dogs contained rape scenes that were
controversial at the time for their unprecedented explicitness and
controversial since then, especially in the case of Straw Dogs, for what
is often seen as their reactionary sexual politics and the way in which
they contributed toward a masculinist backlash against an emergent
feminism.5 Other British releases from 1971 – notably Alfred Hitchcock’s
Frenzy, which also contained an explicit rape scene, and Ken Russell’s The
Devils – could be taken as further confirmation of the misogynistic tenor
of the period, with this in turn providing the context from which the
‘Women in Terror’ double bill issued and within which it made sense.
Let us look again at that poster, however, and look closer this time,
considering in particular the connection between the lurid headline and
the images beneath it. What, according to the poster, do women in terror
actually look like?
Straight on Till Morning’s section is on the left side of the poster. It
juxtaposes the image of a young man’s face on the left with an image of
Rita Tushingham on the right as someone clearly in distress, her head
thrown back and her hands clasped against her ears. The relation
between these two elements is ambiguous. The man is staring blankly
into space, with the pale blue rendering of his face giving a sense of him
as a cool, detached figure. Tushingham’s image is more dynamic in
comparison, underlined by a stark high contrast rendering that sets her
apart from the man, as if they exist in different spaces or in different
registers. Yet more significantly, given the poster’s headline, Tushingham
is not performing any conventional notion of terror. Instead she adopts an
attitude more of anguish or despair, with her hands not in any obviously
Figure 1. The ‘Women In
Terror’ double bill.
Peter Hutchings 55
defensive position. By contrast, the advertising material for Fear in the
Night entails a simpler and apparently more straightforwardly generic
image of Judy Geeson being attacked from behind by an unseen assailant,
with the scene tinged an unearthly green.
As a whole, the poster offers something more enigmatic than its bold
headline might suggest. Throughout the 1960s, Hammer had been in the
habit of yoking together in double bills one of its gothic horrors with one
of its modern psychological thrillers, with the two linked primarily by
Hammer’s powerful brand name. Here again in the 1970s, it seems,
different kinds of material have been connected in a far from seamless
manner. This sense of the ‘Women in Terror’ label as a device covering
over what are actually different kinds of narrative is readily confirmed if
one turns to the films themselves. Straight on Till Morning was directed by
Peter Collinson, one of post-war British cinema’s more wayward talents
whose other credits included the salacious home-invasion drama The
Penthouse (1967), the glamourized cinema version of the television drama
Up the Junction (1968), and the babysitter-in-peril film Fright (1971) but
best known for what was, for him, the uncharacteristically cheerful caper
film The Italian Job (1969). Collinson was new to Hammer, and Straight on
Till Morning did not fit any of the company’s established templates.
Marcus Hearn and Alan Barnes’ description of it as ‘an adventurouslyedited blend of kitchen-sink drama and psychosexual thriller’6 and Kim
Newman’s ‘an unhappy mix of social comment and psychosis’7 give
some sense of its generic awkwardness, with Rita Tushingham’s star
persona in particular lodged firmly in the British social realist tradition to
which the film in certain respects – in its attention to local settings and
detail, for example – seems to aspire but to which as a whole it does not
belong. In the film, a naive woman (played by Tushingham) becomes
involved with a mysterious young man who turns out to be a serial killer
of women. The poster image of Tushingham in distress with her hands
covering her ears occurs near the end of the film when, in a grotesque
attempt to communicate his feelings, the killer plays her an audiotape
containing a recording of his killing first a dog and then Tushingham’s
female flatmate. Appropriately enough for a film in which the narrative
drive is not particularly focused or strong, we never discover the eventual
fate of the Tushingham character, although the film’s abrupt ending
implies that she had not survived her final encounter with the killer.
As was the case with its poster presentation, Fear in the Night offers
more conventional Hammer fare. As written and directed by Hammer
stalwart Jimmy Sangster (who had scripted many of the early Hammer
horrors in the 1950s), it was the last in a series of psychological thrillers
that began in 1961 with Taste of Fear.8 Inspired by the commercial success
of Psycho (1960) but drawing much of their narrative inspiration from the
French suspense classic Les Diaboliques (1955), these tended to offer twistridden plots involving conspiracies designed to make sane people,
usually females, go mad. Fear in the Night – which had been planned by
Hammer as early as 1963 – is no exception to this. Judy Geeson plays a
newlywed who, it is eventually revealed, is being driven to a mental
breakdown by her husband and his lover. The poster image is taken from
56
the ‘women in peril’ thriller
the film’s opening sequence where Geeson is attacked by a mysterious
assailant, shown by the film’s conclusion to be a woman, the husband’s
lover. Both husband and lover end up dead, while Geeson survives, albeit
in a fragile mental state.
Two very different types of films join each other then in Hammer’s
‘Women in Terror’ double bill, each referencing a different tradition that
has its own conventions and history. Different strategies for representing
women are involved as well, with Straight On Till Morning playing up the
naivety of its heroine and only at the end plunging her into terror, while,
like its psycho-thriller predecessors, Fear in the Night has its heroine more
constantly terrorized but also presents her as an investigator, curious and
alert, seeking to find out what is going on around her. And before we
lump these films together with, for example, Straw Dogs or A Clockwork
Orange (or Frenzy or The Devils), let us note that, unlike these
controversial films, both Straight On Till Morning and Fear in the Night
are organized primarily around the perspectives of their lead female
characters. Even when we are presented with information unknown to
these characters, this only serves to secure further our empathy as we
wait in suspense for them to discover what we already know. By contrast,
Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange remain focused on principal male
characters, with their women characters considerably less centred or
developed and considerably more objectified. Even one of the more
sympathetic critical treatments of Straw Dogs suggests that the main
function of Amy, the rape victim and the hero’s wife, is to draw our
attention to inadequacies in the main male character.9
The rest of this article identifies shared preoccupations evident within a
small group of film and television stories but also finds a series of
uncertainties and tensions at work in different ways within particular
narratives. It does not claim that these thrillers in themselves constitute a
very important aspect of British cultural production; indeed their
commercial and cultural impact has proved limited both at the time of
their original release and since. But the article proceeds from the position
that an understanding of broad cultural features or themes – for instance
representational issues to do with gender identity in a particular period –
are best conceptualized via a sense of the often ragged and chaotic contours
of cultural production itself, and that attention to nuance and detail, and to
localized centres of production, are key aspects of this. Better this surely
than a more generalizing approach which too readily lumps together
disparate material and which too easily produces cohesion and overarching meaning. Interestingly, the thrillers to be discussed here rely on the
idea that nothing is what it initially appears – not situations nor characters
– and to a certain extent this is also true so far as their treatment of female
victims is concerned. From a distance, the thrillers might appear ostensibly
misogynist and objectifying, just as from a distance that ‘Women in Terror’
double bill looks pretty awful. Nonetheless, from closer up they – and
indeed the poster – are something different, not necessarily something
better or more progressive (however one defines that term) but undeniably
more complex and challenging. One might further argue that this complexity does not arise from any kind of sustained reflective awareness of
Peter Hutchings 57
gender issues informing the texts in question. Instead it derives from, and
remains an integral part of, generic imperatives. The suspense-driven need
to render characters opaque and suspicious, to hide motivation, to conjure
a world of perpetual threat and danger, leads inexorably to a thrilling
uncertainty about identity itself, an uncertainty that is often not dispelled
by narrative closure and which resonates well beyond the intentions of the
film- and programme-makers.
Landscapes of terror
Let us programme our own triple bill of British ‘Women in Peril’ films –
And Soon the Darkness (1970), Blind Terror (1971) and Assault (1971). This
will be a virtual programme since these films were never thus conjoined,
but they are linked in a number of ways beyond the fact that they offer
protracted terrorization of female characters.
Thematically, for example, the three films can clearly be connected
with contemporaneous and subsequent developments in the horror
genre. In their countryside settings, they relate to a cycle of rural horror
production in both British and American horror cinema of the 1970s,
which includes from Britain Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and The Wicker
Man (1973) and from America The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and
The Hills Have Eyes (1977).10 They also anticipate conventions associated
with the American ‘slasher’ film of the late 1970s – notably in Assault’s
reliance on handheld subjective camerawork for the point of view of its
killer and in And Soon the Darkness’s early version of the slasher’s ‘final
girl’ female hero.11 In addition, Assault has been aligned with, and seen as
a British version of, the Italian giallo thriller of the 1960s and 1970s. The
giallo generic format sits between the crime thriller and, especially in its
reliance on extreme violence, the horror film, and Assault exhibits some of
its properties – with its black-gloved killer and its presentation of a main
character who has misrecognized an important event and subsequently
struggles to make sense of her own vision. The film’s potential giallo
status is further underlined by the iconic presence in it of Suzy Kendall, a
British actor who also starred in the Italian giallo films L’uccello dalle
piume di cristallo (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) (1970), I corpi
presentano tracce di violenza carnale (Torso) (1973) and Spasmo (1974).12
This way of making sense of the films is, however, essentially
retrospective, obviously so in the case of the slasher connections but also
so far as the giallo alignment is concerned. The term ‘giallo’ was not in
circulation outside of Italy in the early 1970s – those 1970s films now
sometimes classified as giallo were at the time marketed in Englishlanguage speaking territories simply as thrillers – and only since the
1980s has it been taken up elsewhere as a subcultural term usually
associated with a cult-ish fascination with Italian genre cinema.13 Even
within such a perspective, Assault is often seen as a failed giallo,
compromised precisely by its stolid Britishness: as Harvey Fenton
recently put it, ‘whilst imitating the form’s conventions it is doggedly
devoid of the delirious excesses which true gialli embrace’.14
58
the ‘women in peril’ thriller
In the more localized and parochial context of their production, these
films start to look considerably less striking, which helps to explain why
none of them generated any significant controversy on their initial
release. Critic Richard Combs’ 1971 review of Assault was typical in this
respect and engages precisely with those more conventional elements
that thirty years later Fenton would find so disappointing: ‘An
unremarkable throwback to those Fifties thrillers whose elements have
subsequently been scattered throughout any number of television
dramas, with just a little more gloss and amateur psychologising than
before’.15
Further underlining the extent to which these films sat unobtrusively
within pre-existing commercial structures is the fact that many of the key
filmmaking personnel associated with their production were well enough
established in the film industry to be thought of as ‘old school’ rather
than belonging to British cinema’s innovative or iconoclastic wing.
Assault was produced by Peter Rogers, by this stage an industry veteran
best known for the Carry On series but who occasionally dabbled in
thrillers, and directed by Sidney Hayers, a versatile filmmaker whose
directorial credits included two British horrors, Circus of Horrors (1960)
and Night of the Eagle (1961), the urban thriller Payroll (1961) and the
musicals Three Hats for Lisa (1965) and Finders Keepers (1966). Despite
being responsible for some distinguished genre films, Hayers never
developed a coherent overall style. Assault was one of three lurid thrillers
he directed in the early 1970s, the others being The Firechasers (1971) and
the Rogers-produced Revenge (1971), before departing for the United
States where he became a successful television director. As for And Soon
The Darkness and Blind Terror, they were written (or in the case of And
Soon The Darkness co-written) by the prolific Brian Clemens, another
long-established figure in the entertainment industry, who had begun his
career in the 1950s writing crime movies for the Danziger Brothers and
had subsequently acquired numerous television credits, most notably as
writer and producer of The Avengers. The director of And Soon The
Darkness was Robert Fuest, a production designer and director for
television throughout the 1960s, and Blind Terror was directed by
Hollywood filmmaker Richard Fleischer, whose previous credits
included 20000 Leagues Under The Sea (1954), The Vikings (1958),
Compulsion (1959), Fantastic Voyage (1966) and The Boston Strangler
(1968). Blind Terror was one of three films he made in Britain during the
1970s (the others being 10 Rillington Place in 1971 and The Incredible Sarah
in 1976).16
And Soon the Darkness (1970), Blind Terror (1971) and Assault (1971) all
operate comfortably, then, as popular generic entertainments. They do so,
however, in a manner suggesting that shifts are taking place at the time of
their production in what is deemed acceptable or appropriate subject
matter for this kind of cultural product, not in a way that necessarily
overcomes generic conventions but which at least disrupts or modifies
them. A limited relaxation in British censorship does seem to have
permitted the relatively overt referencing of rape evident in both Assault
and And Soon the Darkness.17 In broader cultural terms, these films can
Peter Hutchings 59
also be connected with what Leon Hunt, in a study of 1970s British low
culture, has termed ‘permissive populism’. Hunt argues that the 1960s
‘permissive moment’ – which incorporated both legislative measures and
various hedonistic discourses – undergoes a significant transformation in
Britain during the early 1970s. ‘On the one hand, there is the growing
visibility of more specific sexual political discourses. The feminist and
gay movements, in particular, perhaps sensed that they had not been
intended as the main beneficiaries of ‘‘liberation’’… At the same time,
there was a commodification of permissiveness, which allowed a less elite
crowd to ‘‘catch up’’, albeit sometimes via forms equally oppressive to
those not driven by the male heterosexual libido.’18
This sense of a loosening of codes of sexual behaviour percolating into
areas of the culture where it was previously unknown manifests in all
three thrillers. Assault, for example, clearly invokes pornographic visual
codes – for Hunt, pornography was a key vehicle for 1970s permissive
populism – both in a subplot involving pornographic photographs and in
the way that it presents the schoolgirl victims of a rapist in highly
sexualized terms. The scenario for And Soon the Darkness – two nurses
from Nottingham go on a cycling trip in France only to be stalked by a
rapist-killer – more subtly evokes a naive search for new sexual
experience in a manner suggesting that the liberating delights of 1960s
permissiveness have not yet reached its principal characters. ‘Did you get
your bum pinched’, asks Cathy, the more sensual of the two women, near
the film’s beginning. ‘No’, replies the straitlaced Jane, ‘that’s Italy. They’ll
do anything in Italy’. ‘What are we doing in France then?’ retorts Cathy
glumly. Shortly thereafter she describes their rural location thus: ‘It’s not
exactly swinging but it is dangling’, and a few minutes later, just in case
the audience has not picked up on her retro 1960s-speak, she comments
on the village of Landron, ‘Hey, swinging Landron’. By contrast, Blind
Terror opens with a more direct and brutal expression of commodified
permissiveness as its killer emerges from a cinema showing a double bill
of ‘The Convent Murders’ and ‘Rapist Cult’. Britain and the British, it
seems from all these films, have become thoroughly libidinized.19
Inasmuch as the three narratives associate the increased independence
and sexualization of women with male violence directed against those
women, then potentially they can also be seen as blaming the
provocativeness of women for the attacks, or at least using this quality
to explain a male pathology. In fact, the films seem less concerned either
with ‘punishing’ women for being sexual or with ameliorating male
inadequacies in the face of this. Instead they set out, and for much of their
suspense rely on, situations within which heterosexual gender relations
are dysfunctional in a manner that is not really resolved or assuaged by
the narrative process. This results in two emphases shared by the films,
albeit inflected in different ways – the isolation of women and, for want
of a better term, the creepiness of men.
So far as the former is concerned, Julie, the school teacher who is the
main female character in Assault, lives alone in a large detached house,
while the principal female characters in both And Soon the Darkness and
Blind Terror are shown to be detached from their usual environments.
60
the ‘women in peril’ thriller
Jane and Cathy in the former are far away from their Nottingham home,
and Sarah in Blind Terror has been recently blinded in an accident and is
still coming to terms with what for her is a strange, new world. With this
detachment comes, in this kind of narrative at least, vulnerability, and
each film makes a great deal of the women’s awkwardness in their
respective environments. In the case of Blind Terror, this is literally a
physical clumsiness as Sarah stumbles over and across various items
(including the dead bodies of some of her relatives); for And Soon the
Darkness it manifests in the women’s difficulty in communicating with
the French locals (with the film resolutely refusing to subtitle the French
dialogue), while Assault contains numerous scenes where Julie is stalked
by a series of men, particularly in the vicinity of her own house.
At the same time, this isolation also serves to underline these women’s
independence. This is evident in their mobility – several significant
scenes in Assault occur in Julie’s own car, the cyclists in And Soon the
Darkness are defined precisely as travellers, and even the blind Sarah in
Blind Terror remains a skilful horse rider able to escape the clutches of the
killer on horseback.20 It is also apparent in the fact that these women
either already have jobs to support themselves or, in the case of Sarah,
who is about to commence physiotherapy training, are looking for such a
job. While a subplot in Blind Terror involves Sarah’s having to choose
between re-establishing her pre-blindness relationship with a relatively
wealthy horse-breeder and her new career, this is never resolved, and in
all these films one gains a clear sense of women who are leading their
lives without reliance in any significant way on men.
This leads us to the men in the films, who, frankly, form a sorry bunch.
The psychologies and motivations of the villains in each – the rapistmurderers in And Soon the Darkness and Assault and the psychotic mass
murderer in Blind Terror – are not elaborated in any detail, and these
characters remain ciphers throughout. Their actions are played out within
a context where the majority of men are suspects for the crimes around
which the narratives are organized. Importantly, this is not in the
interests of generating a whodunnit investigative structure; there is
minimal reliance here on the process of detection or the discovery of
clues. Instead each film offers a series of suspenseful events, at the end of
which the identity of the killer is abruptly revealed to the female
protagonist when he attacks her. As critic Gordon Gow noted of Blind
Terror on its original release: ‘Almost every man in the cast is a red
herring. In fact suspicion is thrown around so freely that I began to think
they might even have the sauce to confront us at the end with a face that
we hadn’t even seen before’.21 The substitutability of men, and an
accompanying arbitrariness in the matter of the killer’s identity, aligns
intriguingly, although no doubt inadvertently, with emergent feminist
discourses on male sexual violence that located its cause more in social
structures of power and subjection than in individual criminalities (with
the key publication here being Catherine Mackinnon’s 1975 book Against
Our Will: Men, Women and Rape). The provocative idea that all men are
potential rapists becomes, in the case of Assault and And Soon the Darkness
at least, the literal truth. Indeed, given the perfunctory revelation of the
Peter Hutchings 61
killers’ identities, the aura of suspicion hanging over masculinity is not
dispelled even after the apprehension of the killers.
This has implications for the representation of men other than the
killers. For example, each film contains a candidate for the female
protagonist’s affections, with the possibility of a conventional romantic
conclusion involving the formation of the couple being present in each, if
only temporarily. None of the films delivers this kind of conclusion,
however, such is the confusion created around male identity in general.
Julie acquires a doctor boyfriend in the course of Assault but he rapidly
becomes a suspect in the rape-murder case, primarily because of
increasingly suspicious behaviour – showing up where he shouldn’t,
taking a too close interest both in the case and in Julie – that is not fully
explained away even after we know that he is not actually the killer.
Sarah’s ex-boyfriend in Blind Terror, who unusually for this type of film is
not a suspect in the killings, does get to rescue her, although, as with
Assault, there is little or no sense at the end that he will form a couple
with Sarah.
And Soon the Darkness takes this onto a yet more pathological level. The
handsome off-duty police officer with whom Jane becomes involved in
her search for her friend Cathy certainly has the potential to be a romantic
lead. His behaviour is extraordinarily suspicious and menacing, however,
again to an extent that is not explained away by the revelation that he is
not the rapist-murderer. He shouts at Jane, taunts her and chases her, this
to the point where she, perfectly reasonably, knocks him unconscious.
Shortly after, she is attacked by the killer, and the man she has just hit
staggers to her rescue. As usual in these films, a woman might be
incapable of saving herself but the man who saves her does not then win
her, with the convention of the hero coming to the rescue thus revealed as
a residual element shorn of its association with couple-formation. As if
further to undermine the heroic status of the male rescuer, he is
paralleled or connected with the killer that he attacks – in Assault both
hero and villain are doctors, in And Soon the Darkness they are both police
officers, and in Blind Terror the killer turns out to be the hero’s employee.
A striking feature of this apparent inability to separate out the good
men from the bad is the extent to which both Assault and And Soon the
Darkness render the rural landscape itself in pathological terms, in effect
suffusing it with a monstrous male desire that cannot be readily located
within any one individual but is dispersed across all of them. In a way,
this might be seen as lifting the blame from men for their behaviour,
blaming it instead on a sexual drive that overpowers them. But it also
suggests a model of male identity that is fraught and anxious and
through which self-confidence and any kind of authority are impossible
to achieve. This is most evident in Assault. In many ways, this is the
crudest of the three films but its very crudity facilitates a direct approach.
In particular, the film makes great visual and aural play of an electricity
pylon in the vicinity of which a rape, a rape-murder and other dramatic
events are staged (see Figure 2). Assault’s opening sequence concludes
with the first victim looking up at the pylon as her rape commences.
There is an all too obvious, and grotesque, phallic significance to the
62
the ‘women in peril’ thriller
Figure 2. Assault: the scene
of the crime, landscape
with pylon.
pylon, but it also possesses an alienating, unearthly quality, evident in the
contrast between its metallic geometry and its sylvan setting and more
particularly in the loud electronic sound that it emits. This humming is
heard on several occasions as various characters proceed through the
woods, and as a sound it is more reminiscent of science-fiction cinema
than it is of a thriller. Indeed the film teeters in places on the verge of
being an alien-centred or possession drama, with male desire figured as
an external force that transforms otherwise weak men into monsters. It is
relevant in this respect that when called upon to identify the rapist-killer
whom she has briefly glimpsed, Julie can only describe him as a demon.
Appropriately, Assault concludes with the rapist-killer not captured by
the police or ‘hero’ but instead ascending the pylon only to be incinerated
by a discharge of electricity. The ineffectual men at the pylon’s base look
on while the rapist is in effect consumed by an energy that has driven his
actions but that cannot be encompassed within his body.
The country road along which the two women cyclists travel in And
Soon the Darkness is similarly a site of masculine menace (see Figure 3).
Described by one of the locals as a ‘bad road’, it turns out to be the scene
of an earlier rape-murder and is populated by a series of men behaving in
an irredeemably suspicious manner. After becoming separated from her
friend, Cathy vanishes into this landscape never to be seen alive again,
and Jane spends the rest of the film investigating the countryside,
discovering previously unseen spaces within it until, amidst a collection
of mysteriously abandoned caravans, she finds Cathy’s dead body and
shortly thereafter encounters the killer. In effect the killer emerges from
this landscape and is associated with it throughout. We do not see him in
the scene in which he stalks Cathy; instead we view Cathy as she
gradually becomes aware of an unseen presence in the woods that
surround her. And in his final meeting with Jane, his identity as a killer is
revealed, as is also the case with Assault, via a transformation in his
behaviour again redolent of possession in its abruptness and in its lack of
connection with any of his previous actions or behaviour.22
Peter Hutchings 63
Figure 3. And Soon the
Darkness: the bad road,
Cathy in foreground.
Blind Terror too places its female protagonist within a rural landscape
that eventually becomes unwelcoming, albeit this time with little or no
emphasis on male sexuality. The killer here is not a rapist but instead,
inasmuch as he is assigned any motivation at all, is driven by class
hatred, murdering a wealthy family simply because, the film suggests,
their car splashed some water on his boots. Even when he attacks Sarah
while she is in the bath at the end of the film, his motivation is not sexual
but rather to recover from her an object that he thinks will incriminate
him. Blind Sarah’s journey through the landscape thus becomes less an
investigation of a mysterious masculinity and more an extended
experience of extreme and protracted suffering. In the first half of Blind
Terror she is generally positioned within her relatives’ large and
luxurious country house, with the film’s many wide angle shots
emphasizing this as an enclosing and safe domestic space, from which
she ventures only in the company of others. Ejected from that space at the
film’s halfway point on discovering that all her relatives have been
murdered, she flees cross-country, with her increasing desperation
correlated to the increasingly desolate rural settings into which she
stumbles. She ends up in a grim quarry, far from the rural idyllic settings
seen earlier in the film, covered in mud and surrounded by abandoned
machinery before being discovered by the ex-boyfriend. During this
flight, the character’s blindness induces a wilder and more gestural
performance style than that offered by the more watchful and cautious
Jane in And Soon the Darkness. Indeed the rather perverse point of this
part of Blind Terror seems to be to produce abject female terror as an
extended spectacle, one that is dependent, in its emphasis on total
physical abandonment, on the woman’s not actually being in danger – the
killer does not pursue her once she has escaped from the house – and
consequently not having to focus on having to defend herself. By
contrast, Sarah’s earlier movements while inside the house, and in close
proximity of the killer, are much more controlled and considered.
64
the ‘women in peril’ thriller
In certain respects, Blind Terror is the purest of the ‘women in terror’
films from this period, so devoted is it to generating intense images of a
woman in a state of terror. That this terror becomes increasingly detached
from the threats posed by men – one striking scene has Sarah isolated in a
large field crying for help with not an enemy or a friend in sight –
bestows upon parts of the film a near abstract quality. Assault and And
Soon the Darkness are more attuned to a continuing sense of male threat
but they too contain elements of abstraction in their presentation of
women exploring alienating, part-stylized landscapes. These landscapes
speak in fact of a general breakdown in gender relations, something that
the films do not explore or explain as such but which nevertheless shapes
the worlds that they conjure up. And Soon the Darkness concludes with
another couple of female cyclists setting out across rural France; at the
end of Blind Terror we are shown a rubbernecking crowd observing the
bodies of the murdered being taken away from a position close to that
from which the killer first observed the house in the opening sequence,
and Assault begins and ends with the pylon. The implication of this
shared return to the films’ beginnings is that nothing has really changed
or been resolved, and that violence will continue to erupt from the most
mundane of locations.
Thriller
At first glance, the British television anthology series Thriller, which ran for
forty-three episodes between 1973 and 1976, seems an obvious continuation of the woman-in-peril format, with episode titles such as ‘Lady Killer’
(April 14, 1973), ‘A Coffin for the Bride’ (June 1, 1974), ‘I’m the Girl He
Wants to Kill’ (June 8, 1974), ‘Death to Sister Mary’ (June 15, 1974),
‘Screamer’ (January 4, 1975) and ‘If It’s A Man, Hang Up’ (April 12, 1975).
Thriller was created by Brian Clemens, co-writer and co-producer of And
Soon the Darkness and writer of Blind Terror, who also wrote thirty-two of
its episodes and co-wrote two others, with the remaining nine all adopted
from his storylines. Given this authorship, a recycling of elements familiar
from the earlier films is not unexpected. Accordingly, central female
characters are frequently shown as independent either by virtue of having
careers or in some cases inherited wealth, with the dangers they encounter
often deriving from that independence and an attendant vulnerability. So
in ‘I’m the Girl He Wants to Kill’, a female officer worker is trapped inside
her office block at night and stalked by a psychotic killer, a female librarian
is similarly trapped in the library where she works in ‘File It Under Fear’
(June 2, 1973), women seeking employment suffer terrible fates in the
ominously titled ‘Good Salary, Prospects, Free Coffin’ (May 10, 1975),
while in several episodes wives are threatened by husbands keen on
obtaining their money (for example, ‘The Next Victim’ – April 17, 1976 – or
‘The Next Scream You Hear’ – July 6, 1974) and in one case (‘Ring Once For
Death’, February 23, 1974) that is reminiscent of the class hatred evident in
Blind Terror a wealthy widow is terrorized by her own butler.
A revealing example is ‘If It’s A Man, Hang Up’, a stalker story in
which Suzy, a young model, is spied on and then directly threatened by
Peter Hutchings 65
an unidentified man. As with the earlier films, most men in the story are
suspects by virtue of their creepy behaviour, including two pathologically
possessive photographers, an obsequious caretaker, a besotted police
officer and an Italian who, while playing with his knife, utters such
sinister statements as ‘You call women ‘‘birds’’ over here, and eventually
all the birds fly the nest – unless you clip their wings’. In the face of this,
Suzy’s independence is defined through her supporting herself financially and her possession of a large, well-appointed flat, as well as in her
column for what one of the photographers refers to dismissively – in a
rare passing reference to feminism - as a ‘women’s lib magazine’.
In the course of the narrative, Suzy’s flat is repeatedly invaded by men
and she eventually escapes, or rather is driven out of it, in the company of
the young police officer with whom she has developed a tentative
relationship. They end up in an isolated cottage where, in a rapid
procession of plot twists, Suzy discovers the dead body of one of the
photographers, is menaced by the sinister Italian, who is knocked
unconscious by the police officer, is then menaced by the police officer
whom she shoots dead, and is attacked by the real villain, the dead
policeman’s fellow officer, who himself is stabbed to death by the now
recovered Italian (see Figure 4). And so it goes. The concluding tableau –
traumatized woman in the company of her wounded male rescuer, with
no sense of any romantic possibilities between them – refers us back to
the conclusion of And Soon the Darkness. Nonetheless, there are some
important differences, both aesthetic and format-specific, which bestow a
distinctive quality upon these particular women-in-peril thrillers.
As already noted, films such as And Soon the Darkness and Assault
centre on an expansive exterior landscape; even the more domesticated
Blind Terror moves its female protagonist decisively out of the house for
the latter part of its narrative. Thriller episodes are not like this, and this is
inextricably bound up with their identity as televisual entertainment.
Like much 1970s television drama, they were shot mainly on video within
a studio, with occasional filmed inserts for exterior locations. What this
Figure 4. ‘If It’s A Man,
Hang Up’: Suzy prepares
to shoot the wrong
suspicious man.
66
the ‘women in peril’ thriller
tends to do is move the drama indoors into houses or places of work,
with most key events taking place in the studio and with exterior shots
used mainly for scene-setting. A reliance on domestic settings is a
particularly significant feature as it helps to align these dramas with a
Gothic thriller tradition in which women investigate a domesticity that
hides dark secrets.23 Key cinematic examples of this include Gaslight
(1940 and 1944), Rebecca (1940) and The Spiral Staircase (1945), and story
elements offered by Thriller are in some instances traceable back to these.
For example, the inaugural episode ‘Lady Killer’ is a perverse reworking
of Rebecca, in which the Rebecca figure turns out to be alive and plotting
with the husband to murder his new bride.
In her study of Gothic television – which for her includes Thriller –
Helen Wheatley points out that this kind of entertainment ‘is terror/
horror television which takes place, and is viewed, within a domestic
milieu’.24 In other words, there are potentially uncanny resonances
between the dramatic setting and the location of viewing. To a certain
extent, this might also be extended to those workplace locations that are
presented precisely as mundane and familiar. This quality of ‘ordinariness’ is arguably augmented by the use of video, which is often seen as an
inferior recording technology to film because of its lower image
resolution but which is particularly well-suited to conveying a sense of
the quotidian.
The scene of the body-strewn cottage at the end of ‘If It’s A Man, Hang
Up’ also suggests a certain hyperbolic quality in plotting, a quality that is
singularly lacking in the altogether more linear styles of film such as And
Soon the Darkness. One can argue that it is the anthology format itself that
drives this, especially in the case of a long-running show such as Thriller.
The generic requirement to surprise viewers with unexpected plot
developments produces a veritable parade of thrilling attractions, of
which women-in-peril is just one element, albeit an important one and
itself subject to constant variation. For example, some episodes focus on
men in peril, although usually in relation to domesticated settings. In a
ceaseless search for that next outré plot twist, ‘Once The Killing Starts’
(February 2, 1974) goes so far as to have a man terrorizing himself, a man
who has murdered his wife and believes he is being blackmailed about it
only to discover that he has been sending the blackmail letters to himself
while in a guilt-ridden fugue state.
Even those episodes focused on women in peril are far from identical,
with different types of woman being placed in different kinds of story
situations ranging from the supernatural to the more common psychologically based scenarios. Some episodes ramp up the threat to an extent
that it becomes ridiculous; for example, ‘A Killer in Every Corner’
(February 1, 1975) has a woman being chased through a house not by one
homicidal maniac but three, all operating independently of each other.
Other episodes venture into far more disturbing territory, notably
‘Screamer’, an early version of the rape-revenge drama that would
become a feature of the thriller and horror genres from the late 1970s
onwards, albeit one in which the plot twist involves the avenging woman
turning out to be a mentally disturbed figure who fantasized the rape.
Peter Hutchings 67
As already noted, a favourite theme – evident in half a dozen episodes,
with clear cultural antecedents, and particularly suited to Thriller’s
claustrophobic domestic realism – is the wife threatened by her husband.
Here the woman usually turns out to be a weak figure heavily reliant on
the help of others (with what for Thriller is a characteristic perversity,
‘The Next Victim’ has its wheelchair-bound wife saved from her
murderous husband by a passing serial killer). The working women
who feature in other stories are usually much more proactive in
defending themselves, although men still come to their rescue with
boring regularity. The idea that a woman might save herself apparently
remains just beyond the grasp of the programme makers, and perhaps
the culture of the period generally.
One quality shared by And Soon the Darkness, Assault and Blind Terror is
that they tend not to question the identity of their central female
protagonists; instead it is the male characters who are the enigmas. In
contrast, Thriller’s innovatory plotting does sometimes lead to situations
in which it is the identities of women that become uncertain and a
suitable arena for plot twists. At its crudest, this involves having women
revealed as villains – as a witch in ‘Spell of Evil’ (June 16, 1973), as the
Devil in the horror-themed ‘Nurse Will Make It Better’ (January 11, 1975),
as a romance-obsessed female stalker in ‘Sign It Death’ (March 9, 1974),
and as a more traditional femme fatale in ‘Death in Deep Water’ (May 22,
1976). ‘Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are’ is more interesting and
considerably more inventive. It begins as a variation on such film thrillers
as So Long at the Fair (1950) or Bunny Lake is Missing (1965). A woman by
the name of Cathy More claims that her female travelling companion has
mysteriously vanished during a visit to a country hotel. No one else
seems to have seen this person, and the other guests as well as the police
come to believe that Cathy is mad or a trouble-maker. Eventually she
finds another guest, a personable young man, who did see her
companion, and shortly thereafter the hotel owner, a man with a history
of sexual violence, is arrested. So far, so conventional, with a woman
finally being vindicated via the help of a man. But then comes one of
Thriller’s more impressive plot twists. It is revealed that Cathy and the
young man are in fact lovers who have already murdered the companion
for her money and that Cathy has staged the events in the hotel to throw
suspicion on the hotelier.
‘Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are’ (in retrospect, the
playfulness of the title is something of a giveaway) continues with
Cathy in an apparently troubled state, as if guilt-ridden over what she has
done. So when she heads to a nearby tower, her lover thinks that she is
contemplating suicide and rushes to join her. She promptly pushes him
over the edge to his death. We are then given a close-up of her face as she
shouts triumphantly ‘Sucker’. Subsequently she is apprehended by the
police and begins to laugh maniacally. But is this really hysteria or
madness or just the latest in a long line of performances? Perhaps
surprisingly, Thriller does not oblige with any kind of clear-cut answer.
In many respects, this is an emblematic moment for the series, with the
traditional woman-in-peril scenario around which the show is largely
68
the ‘women in peril’ thriller
organized itself thoroughly subverted in the interests of an arresting plot
twist. Instead of the pleasure afforded by closure and the defeat of the
villain, the pleasure of this moment seems bound up with the pleasure of
performance and personal transformation, of reversal and surprise, of
victims becoming victimizers (and vice versa), of scenarios overturned, of
the truth constantly being deferred, with us, the audience, always and
inevitably placed in the position of credulity, placed in fact as the sucker.
There is playfulness at work here that contrasts strongly with the
underlying bleakness evident in And Soon the Darkness, Assault and Blind
Terror. It might well be a playfulness driven by the need constantly to
refresh a particular set of story formats but arguably it leads to moments
of revelatory insight alongside moments of undoubted reaction and some
crude stereotyping. The image of Cathy laughing is of particular
importance to this for it can be seen as an image of resistance, one that
taps into what Tania Modleski has described as ‘the subversive potential
of woman’s laughter’.25 Yet the resistance it offers is indissolubly linked
to subjection and victimhood; it emerges from this and in some way
seems to confirm it, putting that subjection into process, playing with it,
mocking it, but never entirely discarding it or moving beyond it.
Conclusion
It would be too neat and easy to label these women-in-peril thrillers as
naive or unreconstructed. Certainly they are either completely unaware or
only dimly aware of the developing feminist movement, while in
comparison later cultural renditions of women-in-peril situations are often
much more self-conscious about the sexual politics of their scenarios.
Perhaps the best way to place the thrillers discussed here is as the product
of a transitional moment in culture, one in which there is a growing
dissonance between established popular-generic conventions and a
broader social reality. Of course, this is evident more widely, not just in
British popular culture (for example, some interesting thematic parallels
could be drawn between these thrillers and 1970s British horror films) but
in the cultures of other countries. Within this transition, these thrillers seem
especially parochial (even Thriller, which often featured imported
American stars), but at the same time they deliver up a compelling picture
of doubt and uncertainty with particular regard to gender identities. This is
never articulated in a reflexive way but neither is it accidental or incidental.
Instead it turns out to be an integral feature, for it is the perception of
identity as unstable, and the accompanying sense of not knowing for
certain who we are, that drives these narratives and that renders them not
just inventive, suspenseful, mysterious, fascinating and in some instances
depressing but also, most of all, thrilling.
Notes
1 Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (London: British Film
Institute, 1986), 42.
Peter Hutchings 69
2 To view the poster in its full-colour glory, go to Marcus Hearn and Alan Barnes, The Hammer Story
(London: Titan Books, 1997), 65.
3 Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987), 323.
4 Ibid.
5 For a sympathetic discussion of some of the issues raised by Straw Dogs, see Stephen Prince, Savage
Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies (London: Athlone, 1998), 125–40.
6 Hearn and Barnes, The Hammer Story, 65.
7 Kim Newman, ‘Psycho-thriller, qu’est-ce que c’est?’ in British Horror Cinema, eds. Steve Chibnall and
Julian Petley (London: Routledge, 2002), 77.
8 Ibid., 71–81 for a relevant discussion.
9 See Prince, Savage Cinema, 129.
10 For interesting and relevant discussions of Blood from Satan’s Claw, The Wicker Man and other rural
British occult horror films, see Leon Hunt, ‘Necromancy in the UK: Witchcraft and the Occult in
British Horror’, in Chibnall and Petley, British Horror Cinema, 82–98; and Tanya Krzywinska, A Skin
For Dancing In: Possession, Witchcraft and Voodoo in Film (Trowbridge, Wiltshire: Flicks Books, 2000),
72–116.
11 For the formulation of the ‘Final Girl’ concept, see Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws, 35–41.
12 Gary Needham discusses the giallo format in ‘Playing with Genre: Defining the giallo’ in Fear Without
Frontiers: Horror Cinema across the Globe, ed. Steven Schneider (Godalming: Fab Press, 2003), 135–44.
13 For a discussion of this, see Peter Hutchings, ‘The Argento Effect’, in Defining Cult Movies: The
Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste, eds. Mark Jancovich, Antonio Lazaro Reboll, Julian Stringer and
Andy Willis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 127–41.
14 Harvey Fenton and David Flint, eds., Ten Years of Terror: British Horror Films of the 1970s (Guildford,
Surrey: Fab Press, 2001), 13.
15 Richard Combs, ‘Assault’, Monthly Film Bulletin (March 1971): 44.
16 In his history of 1970s and 1980s British cinema, Alexander Walker refers to Blind Terror, dismissively
and in passing, as an example of ‘the New Violence of Hollywood films’. In part, this is
understandable given the film’s American director and star (Mia Farrow), but, despite Walker’s
dismissal, the English credentials of Blind Terror are very evident both in a cast full of recognizable
English character actors and in the film’s reliance on an English landscape: Alexander Walker,
National Heroes: British Cinema in the Seventies and Eighties (London: Harrap, 1985), 24.
17 For an account of British film censorship in the 1970s, see Tom Dewe Mathews, Censored (London:
Chatto and Windus, 1994), 189–216.
18 Leon Hunt, British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation (London: Routledge, 1998), 21.
19 Connections can be made here with some more lurid British exploitation films from this period which
also engage with a sexualized British landscape, notably a series of films directed by Pete Walker. For
a discussion, see Hunt, British Low Culture, 142–59 and Steve Chibnall, Making Mischief: The Cult Films
of Pete Walker (Guildford, Surrey: Fab Press, 1998).
20 For an illuminating account of ‘mobile women’ in 1960s ‘Swinging London’ films, see Moya Luckett,
‘Travel and Mobility: Femininity and National Identity in Swinging London Films’ in British Cinema,
Past and Present, eds. Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson (London: Routledge, 2000), 233–45.
21 Gordon Gow, ‘Blind Terror’, Monthly Film Bulletin (November 1971): 60.
22 For a relevant discussion of alienating British landscapes, see Peter Hutchings, ‘Uncanny Landscapes
in British Film and Television’, Visual Culture in Britain 5, no. 2 (2004): 27–40.
23 Helen Hanson offers an account of the female gothic tradition in cinema in Hollywood Heroines:
Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film (London: I B. Tauris, 2007).
24 Helen Wheatley, Gothic Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 7.
25 Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (London: Methuen,
1988), 19.