He’s Watching, Always Watching: Are You in the House Alone?

As Are You in the House Alone? (1978) begins, the camera creeps up a lovely little suburban neighborhood walk and to a nondescript house, enters through the front door and finds a disturbing scene. Young Gail Osborne (Kathleen Beller) lies on the floor of a contemporary living room, beaten and abused. As the authorities carry her away, we can tell something terrible has happened here but not necessarily the uglier details. The truth comes out at the hospital when she reveals that she was raped. By whom? “I can’t tell you. You won’t believe me.” From here, the story back tracks to her life in the days leading up to this incident and introduces a bevy of suspects for us to choose from.

Could it be her new beau, the A-student with a possessive streak Steve Pastorinis (Scott Colomby)? Or maybe her bff’s wise assed best friend Phil Lawver (a young Dennis Quaid)? Or maybe her jealous ex, E. K. Miller (Randy Stumpf)? Is it the photography teacher, Mr. Elden (Alan Fudge), who encourages his students to make self-portraits special by altering themselves, getting more macho or (shudder) sexier? Could it be someone else who is close to her?

Well, one thing is clear: as Gail starts her new relationship, someone is watching her, someone is leaving increasingly aggressive/violent/insulting notes for her in her locker. Someone is prowling about through that sinister point of view camera. Neither Gail’s overprotective mother, Anne (Blythe Danner), nor her cool as a cucumber father, Neil (Tony Bill), will be able to keep this predator away from her, either. She is prey, and the beast is coming for her.

Are You in the House Alone? has one of those titles that could easily fall in to the women in peril suspense thriller genre so popular in the 1970s. It seems tailor made to nest right alongside the subsequent thriller, When a Stranger Calls (1979), but don’t let that fool you, it actually predates such flicks. Likewise, the opening looks a bit like Halloween (also 1978) sans mask effects, but this movie predates Carpenter’s classic by over a month. It is a Made For TV picture made during the height of second-wave feminism. Though it styles itself after thrillers of the day, it has a specific message it wants to impart.

The contents gets some added grit from the use of teens in peril instead of full-on adults, making the thing a more squicky cautionary tale both for the victim’s age group as well as their parents, asking the first group “Are you as safe as you believe?” and the second group “Do you know where your children are? Are you listening to them closely enough?” All important questions.

The mystery aspect of the film, the whodunnit part, is actually resolved earlier than expected. Shortly after the hour mark, we catch up to the picture’s opening scenes. What follows is fallout from that revelation, turning the story from a cautionary tale to something a little meatier. You see, the perpetrator of the crime might well never see jail time because he’s a part of a privileged family. He might well do this again, and although she would prefer to go as far from the school and the crime as possible, to live with her Aunt in Connecticut, Gail must face her fears and her assailant in order to gather enough evidence to put him away.

It’s fascinating to see how some behavior surrounding the topic itself has changed in the last fifty years. A school teacher who encourages his students to take sexy pictures was “ok, whatever,” back then; these days, it reads far, far more unsettling. Likewise, the blasé attitude that a counselor like Rouillard (Ellen Travolta) has to an anonymous message calling a student a tramp and making veiled threats to get her is equally unsettling. And the idea that the victim of sexual assault can be painted as a seductress in a court of law because she’s … shamefully not a virgin? That can’t happen anymore—oh wait, yes it can. Anyway, some things have changed for the better, while other things remain glaringly, awfully the same.

The teleplay from Judith Parker takes its core from a novel by Richard Peck. That book emerged in the pre-YA era, alongside thrillers for and about teens by folks like Lois (I Know What You Did Last Summer, Gallows Hill) Duncan and Robert (I Am the Cheese, The Chocolate War) Cormier. That book is a slender volume, a perfect length for the story it wants to tell. It provides a terrific spine for the film (which transplants the setting from New England to California), and Parker’s adaptation is a solid one. From a structural perspective, the piece starts off with a doozy, backtracks into slow-burn territory, and winds up in a final stretch that feels like a less openly sleazy Brian DePalma thriller. Being shot to air on television, the flick is more suggestive about the torments perpetrated upon its characters, but it is a little more powerful for being less in-your-face though the last lines heard in voice over are a little too on-the-nose for my preference. Some folks need a sledgehammer to drive home a message, others can be relied upon to read between the lines. The end aims for the lowest denominator.

This is due in no small part to the acting. Kathleen Beller does a fine job as the shy girl who is slowly emerging from her teenage chrysalis thanks to a newfound love. The script gives her plenty to work with, including a challenging home life as well as a horrific crime. Her character runs the gamut emotionally speaking, and her development over the piece is believable.

Blythe Danner surprises as the mother character. At first, she is just a one note taskmistress, but as the teleplay unfolds, we get a much more sympathetic approach to her character, seeing the reasons why she acts the way she does. Here is a woman who married too early, who didn’t get to see all the opportunities the world has to offer, a woman who wants her daughter to succeed in ways she could not. However, the only way she knows how to do this is with the stick instead of the velvet glove. In some ways, she’s forcing her kid right along the track she took, and she knows that she’s not doing things right. It’s a delicately layered performance that starts out giving us every reason in the book to dislike this character but turns that on its ear by the end.

There are several good performances, as well. But those two are the standouts. Of course, it’s always good to see an actor who has gone on to a solid career in one of his early roles. Dennis Quaid’s character does not get a lot of screen time, but his boy next door charm and his ability to deliver a memorable performance is used to good effect here. According to IMDB (take it with a grain of salt), he’d been in a handful of projects before this and he would have many more following. Back then, he was a good-looking kid with some craft, working on his career. He would go on to some great stuff as well as a bit of a downturn followed by an upswing. That’s a career, though.

Director William Grauman had a solid career in television, with over eighty directorial credits to his name. He touched on numerous properties like Murder She Wrote (1984-1996) and V (1984), moving seamlessly between series and TV movies. Here, he brings a good approach for the subject matter and drawing out solid performances from his predominantly young cast. Aside from the clothes and a few of the attitudes, the film has not aged poorly.

Sadly, this sort of movie would go on to live a new (though far less respected) life as part of the Lifetime channel. A young girl gets in over her head and has to face off with a grinning predator who abuses system loopholes to escape punishment. It’s the core scenario for many a movie, but in Are You in the House Alone? it works quite well because of the care it takes to present its characters as rounded people and giving them an interesting arc/journey. The same cannot be said for flicks of the same vein that followed it.

Are You in the House Alone? is one of those movies that appeared and could have easily disappeared due to its medium. Made For TV flicks have not received the attention they deserve, though an audio only segment on the Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray edition from Amanda Reyes does shine a light on its enduring value. This film is a quirky piece on its own, and it is also an invaluable time capsule of an era that is not so far off (1978 is less than 50 years gone, after all). Is it great viewing? Well, it’s a well-constructed thriller that happens to be about a ripped from the headlines sort of topic that would feed into hundreds of episodes of episodic series like Law and Order and its many offshoots a few decades later. The film is also a sensitive character study, and a slow-burn watch.

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Are You in the House Alone is available in DVD and streaming editions. It is also the first of three Made For TV movies included in the recent Televised Terror, Volume 1 Blu-ray boxed set from Vinegar Syndrome.

Next week, we will continue our exploration of the Televised Terror set with the second flick, a 1980s serial killer/police procedural thriller called Calendar Girl Murders. It is available in DVD and streaming editions.

Writing for “He’s Watching, Always Watching: Are You in the House Alone?” is copyright © 2021 by Daniel R. Robichaud.

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The Televised Terror, Volume 1 boxed set is a limited-edition item, which is only available direct from Vinegar Syndrome.