When you’re looking for freebies to watch, it helps to get some advice of what to see. Particularly if it’s older (and more likely to be available). I hadn’t heard of Night Watch until I saw it in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre list of really scary movies. Granted, this was nearly a half century ago and many horror classics had yet to come. Still, I was surprised at just how “ho-hum” Night Watch was. Yes, it has a twist ending that makes some of the foregoing less credible, but that little hook was kind of neat. Otherwise, the pacing is slow and the characters largely unsympathetic. And scary it is not. Granted, had I seen it as a young man in a theater, that might’ve made a difference. I know that Fatal Attraction really bothered me in those circumstances.
The story of a rich couple with a traumatized wife and an unfaithful husband, it has trouble garnering the sympathy of some viewers. Elizabeth Taylor’s acting is pretty good, and the setting (lots of British thunderstorms), and some good, creepy music do help the mood. And if you’ve seen Rear Window and Gaslight a bit of this will look familiar. Taylor’s character thinks she sees a murdered person in the adjacent house and as her hysteria increases nobody will believer her anymore. Of course, her husband is having an affair with her best friend (who is living with them), so what could possibly go wrong? The movie’s generally not considered horror, although a number of King’s favs aren’t.
That got me to thinking about what the scariest movies would’ve been to me back then. Keep in mind that most of my childhood fare was Saturday afternoon monster movies. If we move it ahead a few more years, say to the early-mid eighties, I was in college and saw more that was properly scary. Of course, I didn’t see the really scary stuff until I lost my job at Nashotah House. So by the mid-eighties my scare list would have included Jaws, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Psycho, and a Dracula movie that I didn’t catch the title of and for which have been trying to locate the specific scene that really set me off. Oh, and The Cross and the Switchblade. I was a child with many obvious phobias, and my mother didn’t allow really scary viewing. A couple episodes of The Twilight Zone really bothered my young psyche. Perhaps I need to put together a post on movies I’ve seen since then that fall into the Danse Macabre time frame. There’d definitely be things scarier than Night Watch in there, I assure you.
