Terence Young's Wait Until Dark (1967)

We haven’t shown a lot of suspense thrillers during the last five years of Film Club screenings. Part of the reason is that Film Club exists to present great movies you haven’t had the opportunity to see previously. But people tend to be skeptical or reticent or just plain foot-draggy about committing to something they’re unfamiliar with. This explains why Hollywood spends so much money on promotion (sometimes a third of the entire production budget); they want to acquaint you with the product so you won’t be intimidated by it even if that means spending millions on product tie-ins at McDonald’s. Hey, if you’ve played with the toy, the movie must be great.

Film Club doesn’t have millions of dollars. We barely get Blue Sheet announcements done on time. The consequence of that is that we end up asking you to come to see movies on faith rather than a (false) sense that you know what you’re going to be seeing. And often you don’t (although if you’re reading this, you did – thank you.) We’ve learned that some genres are easier sells than others – romance, action, animation, anything with Johnny Depp. Others are more difficult, and one of those is the suspense thriller.

When we elect to show a suspense thriller that’s older, two issues pop up. First, there’s the unfamiliarity with an “older” film. If you’ll allow us a soap box moment, let us just say that it’s sad how controlled Americans are by PR, advertising, and the productization of important things like art, politics, and even religion. Everything is packaged for us. Open the New York Times Book Review and 15 books will be reviewed, the same 15 books you’ll find reviewed in other literary journals, the same 15 books you’ll see ads for in literary media. Some of those books are very good, but 25 years ago some of the books reviewed and celebrated during any given week were also good, but have been forgotten. Why? Not because they turned out later not to be good, but because the marketing machine has moved on. Old doesn’t sell; new sells. And now you buy Twilight and Jim Butcher novels instead of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Anne Rice novels. Those are old. No one is talking about them. And even if you did pick the old ones they might not feel the same as the newer ones.

That’s the second problem with the suspense thriller genre, the genre itself has evolved and when we look back we don’t see stories told in a familiar (there’s that word again) way, the way we’re used to. Watch Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) some time. See if you don’t laugh when Bela Lugosi slinks out of the shadows and raises his hands up, claw-like, like he’s about to play an awesome chord on an invisible piano. You can almost hear a million parodies getting ready to say “bluh, buh-luh, buh-luh; I vant to drink your bluhd!” Were people really scared by that in 1931? They certainly aren’t now.

Now we want realism. And we want blood (just like Dracula). And we want dismemberment. It shocks us to think that in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), the film that started the modern slasher genre, the hockey-masked Michael Myers terrorizes and murders all those high school kids, and there isn’t a drop of blood in the movie. Carpenter was going for psychological horror.

The same is true of Henri-Georges Cluzot’s Diabolique (1955), a terrific French film about a boarding school head-mistress who murders her adulterous husband and hides his body in the murky school swimming pool, only to find it missing when the pool is drained the following spring. Psychological horror.

And the same is true of Wait Until Dark (1967), tonight’s film about a blind woman (Audrey Hepburn) terrorized by three thugs who think a doll stuffed with heroin is hidden in her apartment. Although it’s directed by Terrence Young (who previously directed three of the first four James Bond films), this is Hitchcockian suspense. Does that genre still thrill? Are we still fitted with the buttons it pushes?

In the week leading up to this screening, every adult who noted that we’re showing Wait Until Dark has stopped to comment on what a great film it is, especially one scene in particular. The students we’ve chatted with, who don’t know it, are skeptical. Maybe they’re a little afraid. Because, really, the unknown is often scary. We’re more comfortable with the familiar. Maybe we should take more risks. After all, it’s only a movie.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser