Fright (1971)

Director: Peter Collinson
Writer: Tudor Gates
Stars: Susan George, Honor Blackman, Ian Bannen and John Gregson

Index: 2025 Centennials.

There are plenty of things wrong with Fright that I can’t ignore, but there are also a heck of a lot of things right with it that I can’t ignore either. With half a century of hindsight, it’s an impressively powerful pioneer of a movie that deserves more attention and I’m happy to give it some as a celebration of Honor Blackman.

I wasn’t aware of it until now, but this is the progenitor of the babysitter in peril movie, a title only challenged by a short from the same year, Foster’s Release, with Dan O’Bannon as the proto-slasher. Here, that’s the similarly named Ian Bannen, who’s far from a one note slasher.

The plot isn’t a strong point, because it does little more than the tagline on IMDb states: “A babysitter is terrorized by the child’s father, escaped from an asylum.” That’s pretty much it for story but not for the film itself because the actors, the director and, surprisingly, the sound editor all bring a lot more to the table.

There’s even a haunting song to accompany the opening credits and Susan George arriving by bus for her babysitting gig. I’m rarely a fan of songs in movies because they tend to either be awful or gratuitous. Ladybird by Nanette is a moodsetter and a statement of intent, putting us on edge before anything even happens. It’s what music in movies should be.

George plays Amanda, who’s studying child welfare at college, and the part works well for her as a rehearsal for Straw Dogs, released only a month later. She’s been hired by Helen Lloyd to watch her three year old son Tara while she and Jim, who Amanda assumes is her husband, eat out at the expensive Plover Inn.

Helen, played by Blackman, meets her at the door and we clearly see that something is off. Downstairs she’s distracted. Upstairs, showing the babysitter to the baby, she’s more on edge, angry that Spooky the cat is in Tara’s cot. Back downstairs, she’s a bundle of nerves, jumping at anything. She reacts angrily to a joke about ghosts. She even points out that there’s a vault upstairs though Amanda must have forgotten by the time she needs it.

Eventually, Helen and Jim leave so they can eat and Amanda can do her job, but the nerves transfer over to the babysitter. Part of that is her boyfriend Chris showing up, as he seems intent on scaring her in this old dark house. “You could make a horror film in here!” he quips. More of it is already there before he arrives because of an impressive use of sound.

George is soft spoken as Amanda, Tara stays quiet upstairs and so the place is almost silent, except for a series of sounds intended to build tension. Spencer Reeve is the sound editor and he does a stellar job, even when the causes of these sounds were already clichés: a dripping tap, the mechanism of a clock, a washing rack outside bumping a tree branch as it revolves. Of course, there’s a call on the telephone and a knock on the door and a scream from Plague of the Zombies on the TV. Yes, we’ve seen all these—or rather heard them—before, but they’re all highly effective in this environment.

Over at the Plover, there’s a third for dinner and we start to get the back story. Chris tells it to Amanda too but she doesn’t believe him, as it plays so much into his juvenile scare tactics. Bottom line, Helen and Jim aren’t married; the occasion is her divorce from Brian Halston, a homicidal maniac who tried to kill her and is currently locked up in an institution; and their companion is her doctor, Gareth Cordell.

What follows is exactly what you expect. At the house, Brian torments Amanda, under the delusion that she’s Helen. She does manage to call the Plover but is cut off before she can get the news across. Helen realises the truth but is countered by Gareth who tries to reassure her that it’s all in her head. We know it isn’t and it would have been a better film if we weren’t let in on that this early, but it’s still effective.

George and Blackman are both excellent by bringing much more to their roles than Tudor Gates’s script demanded. Their partners aren’t as successful, but Jim is George Cole and Chris Dennis Waterman, who would meet in Minder eight years later; they don’t share any scenes here. Ian Bannen is similarly deep as Brian, an obviously damaged human being who believes everything he does is out of love for Helen. He stands as a stark contrast to a shallow Michael Myers in Halloween seven years later.

The good includes some superb shots from cinematographer Ian Wilson; the wild organist at the Plover; and a shocking ending that I was not remotely expecting, after the ones I was.

Unfortunately, the cops, led by an inspector played by Blackman’s actual husband, Maurice Kaufmann, feel like they’re in a black comedy and that doesn’t work. There’s bad here too.

All in all, though, it’s a fascinating picture to remember Honor Blackman on her centennial.

Her acting career was respectable for fifteen years before she became an overnight success, one of those industry paradoxes. She debuted in Fame is the Spur in 1947 but didn’t get credit or lines until Daughter of Darkness a year later. By her fourth film, A Boy, a Girl and a Bike, she’d gained the lead at the centre of a love triangle and she continued in lead roles and important supporting ones in British, Spanish and Italian productions, both on film and for television.

She was a name but not really a star until a revamp of The Avengers in 1962 for its second season. After Ian Hendry left, Patrick MacNee became the star and Honor Blackman joined as Cathy Gale, creating the template for the show we remember. A single, Kinky Boots, spoken or sung by the pair, was a surprise hit in 1990.

A pivotal role as Hera, queen of the gods, in Jason and the Argonauts, came during her run on The Avengers and then she was Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, not strictly a Bond girl but one of the most memorable characters in the series nonetheless. After that, she could choose what roles she wanted and she did well, whether on stage, in film or on television.

While none matched those three, she found many memorable moments in sixties films like Life at the Top, Moment to Moment and Shalako—which reunited her with Sean Connery—and a host more over the decades, from To the Devil a Daughter to Bridget Jones’s Diary.

I remember her later for guest appearances on the sitcom Never the Twain but her greatest success post-Bond was a nineties TV show, The Upper Hand, which ran for seven seasons with her as a memorable matriarch.

She almost made it to her centennial, dying in 2020 at the age of ninety-four. Her final role was in You, Me & Them on television in 2015.