Joseph Ruben is no stranger to the crime subgenre, having dabbled
in the Alaskan hostage film Joyride and the criminal defense drama True
Believer while also having a deft hand in the horror genre ala Dreamscape,
Sleeping with the Enemy or The Good Son.His finest hour as a film director is a stock
trade serial killer film called The Stepfather, a thriller which spawned
two sequels and a 2009 remake, that’s best remembered for character actor Terry
O’Quinn’s transformative tour-de-force performance.Loosely based on the crimes of mass murderer
John List though having much in common with The Iceman Richard Kuklinski,
the film is widely regarded as second to Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer as
the scariest crime thriller of the 1980s.
Based on an original story co-written by Carolyn Lefcourt,
Brian Garfield and Donald Westlake, The Stepfather opens on a bearded
Henry Morrison (a chameleonic Terry O’Quinn) cleaning off the blood and shaving
off the hair to become the clean-cut well-dressed businessman called Jerry
Blake.Casually strolling past the
bloodbath of his making, he proceeds to start his life anew by marrying a widow
named Susan Maine (Shelley Hack) living with her delinquent teenage daughter Stephanie
(Jill Schoelen).
Meanwhile the brother of the dead wife murdered by the man
is hot on his tail trying to track him down and avenge her death.One evening Stephanie runs to retrieve some
things from the basement when she catches her stepfather Jerry raving like a
lunatic and grows suspicious of who the man really is and drums up her own investigation.Still, The Stepfather wasn’t born
yesterday and starts deciding whether or not to keep or kill his new family
unit before moving onto the next one.
A clear influence on Adam Wingard’s The Guest for how
it introduces the handsome communally respected everyman into the unsuspecting
homes of a broken family before revealing his true colors, The Stepfather is
a film that rests almost solely on the shoulders of its leading actor Terry O’Quinn
who changes into more different characters than most Peter Sellers or Eddie
Murphy films while waving around a real sense of psychotic and dangerous
multiple personalities at war with one another.Take for instance moments where O’Quinn shifts in between personas and
he gets details confused or mixed up which little kids of neighboring families
can’t help but notice. Visually the film is striking for how it takes an ordinary
household interior and makes it into a scare maze thanks to future Pleasantville
cinematographer John W. Lindley and the electronic score by Patrick Moraz
is sheer nightmare fuel with high pitched shrill sonic screams that ratchet up
the dread.Mostly though, this is an
actor’s movie with Terry O’Quinn making the nameless shape-shifting antagonist
one of the scariest villains in silver screen history.So deep are his fangs sunk into this role and
so believable are his shifts in personality, he makes an otherwise caricature
into a flesh-and-blood real-world monster whose dark presence radiates off the
screen.
Made on a tight budget, The Stepfather became a minor
hit raking in $2.5 million at the box office and cementing Terry O’Quinn’s
performance as among the scariest of all time.
Inexplicably not one but two sequels were generated, one of which was
without O’Quinn’s onscreen presence and went straight to video. Years later a slick sanitized PG-13 remake with
Dylan Walsh came out to mixed reviews despite being a decent moneymaker itself
but like most souped-up Hollywood remakes of low budget indie classics it was
eventually forgotten while the original still reigns a wave of terror that hasn’t
aged or lost its sharp edges since it was first released. Easily one of the most frightening horror
films in cinema history thanks to an iconic and timeless leading performance.
