As with any kid—whether it’s your own or some crazed Manson hippie living and crapping in your crawlspace—you eventually just want them gone.

By Paul Mavis

With a bare-bones Hallowe’en having passed (we didn’t have the money to buy candy this year, so we handed out “Biden 2024” coupon booklets…hope the kids can read Chinese), I had an uncontrollable hankering to go back to my roots and look for some 1970s made-for-TV horror. And since my editor has been rather forcefully reminding me that I’m running behind on my monthly review quota (he had my bartender’s legs broken), I’ve been re-visiting all the old standbys, including titles like Trilogy of Terror, Salem’s Lot, and of course that genuine masterpiece, Dan Curtis‘ The Night Stalker.

As great as those and so many other 70s horror MTVs are, everybody has seen and written about them already, ad nauseum. One excellent outing that I don’t think gets enough attention is Crawlspace, the CBS suspenser which premiered on February 11, 1972. A typically classy production from the “Tiffany Network,” based on Herbert Lieberman’s creepy novel, written by Ernest Kinoy, directed by John Newland (replacing Buzz Kulik midstream), scored by Jerry Goldsmith, and with a sterling cast that includes Arthur Kennedy, Teresa Wright, Tom Happer, Eugene Roche, and Matthew Cowles, Crawlspace‘s deliberate, chilly atmosphere is decidedly different than the more fast-paced, lurid pleasures of the usual 70s MTV horror. However, it’s certainly no less effective than those in unsettling the viewer. Had it had more of a legitimate home video presence these past decades, I’m certain it would have a higher recognition factor.

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Highly educated (and no doubt liberal) New Yorkers Albert and Alice Graves (Arthur Kennedy and Teresa Wright), have left Brooklyn Heights for a small, rural town in New England (location work in and around Norwich, Connecticut). Albert has a bad ticker, and Alice likes being a housewife, so the two appear quite comfortable, settling into a quiet, retiring life of light yard work, working at the loom, and reading early edition poetry books by the fireplace, in their period-correct, rather too-tastefully appointed farmhouse.

With a punishing New England winter rapidly approaching, the first order of business for any transplanted city folk playing at Yankee farmer is getting in a supply of heating oil and seeing to the furnace. When rather…intense, slow-talking heating oil employee Richard Roy Atlee (Tom Happer) does just that for the Graves, he’s rewarded with an out-of-the-blue dinner invitation from Alice. Albert, somewhat bemused by this inappropriate act, plays along, going so far as to allow an insistent Richard the use of his early edition of Blake poetry. Later, neither one can—or will?—account for their actions towards Richard.

Three weeks later: no heat. The heating oil company sends out another man, who tells an inquiring Albert that Richard was just a flaky vacation sub who split without even picking up his pay. He also tells Albert to keep his crawlspace closed up—animals in there would really stink it up. But Albert already knows that Richard had come back to the crawlspace in the intervening weeks, since several personal items were down there…including Albert’s book of poetry.

Now listening for Richard every night, Albert and Alice realize Richard is living in their crawlspace. Maternal Alice doesn’t mind at all (“He seems nice enough,” she twitters after Richard sneaks upstairs and eats one of her pies), but Albert isn’t so sure. He’s afraid, at least at first. Not wanting to provoke Richard, he puts a padlock on the cellar bulkhead, locking out Richard.

But that doesn’t stop Richard, who’s found a home, and who’s going to keep it. The childless Albert and Alice finally fully give in to their thwarted parental instincts and try and make Richard less a feral barn cat and more an adult stay-at-home child. However, the increasingly erratic Richard won’t be tamed.

Even when Richard breaks the law, with the town sheriff (Eugene Roche) gently warning the Graves that they don’t know what they’re doing, having Richard staying with them, the Graves cover for Richard. Soon, the Graves are switching back and forth between caring and covering for the unstable, threatening Richard, and fearing him…before events turn homicidal.

There’s no way I could ever forget watching the frightening Crawlspace, way back in ’72 (that Friday night, it was either this—and I always opted for an MTV—or Sanford and Son and the premiere of Clint Eastwood’s Two Mules for Sister Sara on NBC, or ABC’s original “TGIF” line-up of The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, The Odd Couple, Room 222, and Love, American Style). It obviously had an effect on me. For the rest of that winter, every time I heard the furnace kicking over, I started flipping out, yelling, “Richard Roy Atlee is in our crawlspace!” My parents politely slapped my face and informed me that we lived on a concrete slab, but still…I was pretty sure there was someone in our ducts.

I haven’t read Herbert Lieberman’s book since I was a kid (we had the popular paperback with the two eyes staring out from the cover), but I remember it detailed a more extensive relationship between Richard and the Graves than is shown in this short 75-minute telemovie. Critics and readers who always hate how novels are cut for movie adaptations would no doubt grouse about losing critical scenes in the book like Albert and Richard exploring Richard’s favorite hide-out (a cave), and Albert teaching Richard to flyfish (Richard is a bit more hands-on in the book, as well, doing the Graves’ laundry and even some baking—when my wife heard that, she crabbed, “Why can’t we find a whack-job like that holed-up in our shed?”).

Lieberman, one of those skilled, now largely forgotten popular writers of horror and suspense shoved aside when that overrated hack Stephen King came along, obviously had more space in his novel to develop the Graves’ interactions with Richard, in order to deepen the suspense (and frankly, to fill out a novel-length piece). In less than an hour and a half running time, Crawlspace doesn’t have that luxury. Like most MTVs from that time period, it has to get right to what’s going on, and fast.

And in this case, at least, Crawlspace‘s abbreviated, abridged narrative works to the viewer’s favor. With even the two main characters—let alone us—not quite sure why they’re immediately inviting this complete stranger into their home, the viewer is left unsettled, right at the offset. If we don’t see Richard exactly “charming” the Graves here (the way he’s introduced…there’s no way you’d want him to stay in your house one minute longer than necessary), then why in the hell are these two seemingly normal, educated, grounded adults engaging with him in such a foolhardy and ultimately dangerous manner (a dramatic shorthand aided immensely by the solid, weighty—and importantly likeable—thespic presence of old pros Wright and Kennedy)?

Crawlspace opens with an unseen Richard hooking up the oil truck hose to the Graves’ tank (the “baby” reverse-engineering the umbilical cord to his newly-adopted “parents”? Hmmm…I rather like that, yes), before he awkwardly enters the farmhouse to let them know he’s done. And bang: a tentative, hopeful Alice invites the wide-eyed, too-intense young man to dinner, while we immediately think, “Are you crazy?” It happens so fast within Crawlspace, we don’t have time to get our head around it. Off-balance (rather like a strange nightmare, particularly whenever wildman Happer shows up and the Graves don’t even blink), we see the Graves’ naive, increasingly risky behavior continue, and we keep saying, “Wait a minute—you shouldn’t do that.”

To Crawlspace‘s credit, the emphasis stays on the Graves, not Richard (as it would undoubtedly today). Richard is given a few lines throughout the movie to emphasize that he’s clearly unbalanced and a rising threat, but that’s it. We don’t need any further explanation of what’s obvious: he’s off his nut, and he’s dangerous, too. You can play the “Is Richard a religious figure?” (why does he scrawl the red-herring, “God,” on the cellar bulkhead?) or “Is Richard doing a reverse-Vietnam vet/hippie ‘coming home’ commentary on America in 1972” game if you want—but ultimately it’s just that: a game. It’s all supposition. Crawlspace isn’t really interested in exploring Richard’s raison d’etre, but it shows very clearly what Alice and Albert are up to.

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During a critical scene later in the movie, where Richard fails one of the Graves’ fairly simple “civilizing” tasks of having him go to the market for some shopping, the director, John Newland (who the following year would direct the far more obvious, far less effective Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark) doesn’t show what actually happened. We see the set-up, including teenager Matthew Cowles bullying Richard, but we never really know if Richard’s $20 was indeed stolen, or if Richard attacked Cowles, pulling him over the counter as the store owner later testified.

Crawlspace‘s focus isn’t on what, exactly, Richard did. What’s important is that Albert covers for him when Richard later trashes the store, putting the owner out of business. The incident highlights not Richard’s increasingly aberrant behavior (we know he’s trouble the first time we see him), but rather Albert’s moral corruption after digging in with his ill- conceived “parenting” of Richard.

Throughout Crawlspace, the work’s suspense and dread comes largely not from Richard, but rather from watching the Graves’ falling deeper and deeper into a self-made mess they only make worse with their laughable good intentions (a far more interesting field of exploration, frankly, after so many genre exercises focusing on the whys and wherefores of crazed killers). Rich retiree transplants coming to a small, rural community where they already don’t belong (that old New England tradition of treating anyone as a newcomer who hasn’t had family in the area for at least a 100 years), they create their problem by inviting a total stranger to become part of their family—a stranger whose actions would give pause to a saint—before ignoring their own eyes as to what’s progressing with Richard.

When the sheriff (the always great Eugene Roche) gives them the lowdown on the local drugged-out hippie scene, and quite sensibly tells the Graves they’re making a big mistake keeping transient Richard in their isolated home, the Graves don’t listen, acting as if they’re offended the small-town cop would butt into their affairs (of course they’re snobs: they’re book-educated New Yorkers). They compound this miscalculation when Richard destroys the market. Instead of listening to the sheriff tell them to choose between being with the community or against it, they stubbornly choose Richard, lying for him even though they know he’s broken the law, and ruined a man’s business.

Particularly with the scenes of Albert trying to communicate and reason with an unhinged Richard, Crawlspace becomes almost an intentional parody of that time-worn TV storyline convention: the kindly old couple who offer first a place to stay—and then themselves, as family—to a wayward “orphan” who just needs a smile and a hug…a little love. Alice, re-awakened to her maternal need after mothering her own sickly husband (and remembering her sister’s snotty passive/aggressive comments about how lucky she was not to have children), reaches out first and most strongly to Richard, doing all the superficial things that she thinks makes a mother a mother to her son (knitting Richard a sweater, baking him pies, including his name on Christmas cards, and decorating the house for him for the holiday).

At first, Arthur remains unmoved, saying Richard isn’t their responsibility. However, it’s strongly implied that Albert goes along out of a rather snide attitude of, “Well…let’s see where things go,” satisfying his own intellectual curiosity with this “experiment,” rather than reigning in his wife with her dangerous notion of making Richard a “son.” After all, he first responds to Richard when his own intellectual affectations are stroked: he visibly warms to Richard’s insistence on borrowing his book of Blake poems.

Later, Albert “plays” at being a father, getting Richard a new suit, and even a job lead, all the while trying to converse, Robert Young-style, with the wild-haired, wild-eyed Richard, who’s scrabbling about in the crawlspace darkness, with Albert trying to reason with Richard like he’s a recalcitrant cat who won’t come out for a friendly back scratch. Kennedy, marvelously pretentious and oblivious in his fake-commanding way, is extremely funny having these one-sided “conversations” with Richard. After imploring Richard not to shit down in the crawlspace—Kennedy and Wright first discovering their “son’s” spoor smell, is priceless—an unseen Richard manages only a scratch sound, to which a willfully clueless Albert grandly replies, “Fine! Fine! Thank you!”

Both Alice and Albert waver back and forth in their ultimately shallow commitment to the arrival of their new “child” (Albert’s own bewildered, “What are we doing?” exclamation after his guilt trip on Richard to join their Christmas celebration, is immediately forgotten when Richard—looking like a cross between Charles Manson and Wolverine, comes upstairs in a suit and tie). But after Richard’s actions become more and more egregious, Alice completely “abandons” Richard. A two-day trip to Boston with Albert results in a jealous, raging Richard destroying her loom with a huge butcher knife. And that’s the end for her.

Like a child tired of playing “house,” Alice loses it, telling Albert how “free” she felt being away from Richard during their trip. She recounts a horrific dream where she’s nursing a wild demon with dirty, rotten teeth biting her (again, the casting is spot-on here: we never want to hear such awful things coming from angelic Teresa Wright). Later, disabused of her “menopausal fantasy” (as Albert labels it), she flat-out hopes the cops kill Richard…can you imagine Margaret Anderson wishing that on her own child?

Albert, meanwhile, becomes more myopic concerning Richard, insisting to a contemptuous Alice that they owe Richard…something (Alice sneers, “He’s nothing to us!”). Albert, the intellectual, the poet, can’t admit his fantasy of being a wise, stern parent is a farce with the delusional, paranoid psychopath Richard. Even when a hysterical Alice screams, “He’ll never let us go! He wants us to love him!”—which she clearly refuses to do, and which she may realize, she’s incapable of doing—Albert can’t let go of his “suburban Dad” fantasy: he’s still lecturing Richard about mistreating his car, with Albert lying again to the sheriff when events are going critical.

SPOILERS ALERT! The real horror of Crawlspace‘s satisfyingly violent ending isn’t the mayhem itself (Laughing Academy graduate Richard gets points for laying that axe squarely in teenage town bully Cowles’ chest), but rather the realization that all of this could have been avoided if Albert and Alice hadn’t given into their fantasies of being elderly parents to a wayward orphan, but more critically, if they had been more skeptical about their notion that they could “hide” from the realities of the world, their lives, and the true nature of their “son.”

No matter how nicely Alice made over her picture-perfect farmhouse, the addition of a “son” who wandered out of the woods didn’t end her boredom and emptiness—it wound up destroying her life. Albert didn’t really escape the jungles of New York for the “peace” of rural life (rowdy teens attacking their home is fairly innocuous compared to stupidly indulging their parental dreams by harboring a feral lunatic in his crawlspace), nor escape his bad ticker with “quiet living.” Earlier, Richard made it quite clear: he doesn’t like strangers, and small, cramped spaces make him feel safe (“You know where you are,”). Too bad Albert and Alice didn’t listen to him; in his own addled, psychotic way, Richard was the more grounded.

PAUL MAVIS IS AN INTERNATIONALLY PUBLISHED MOVIE AND TELEVISION HISTORIAN, A MEMBER OF THE ONLINE FILM CRITICS SOCIETY, AND THE AUTHOR OF THE ESPIONAGE FILMOGRAPHY. Click to order.

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