After her late life comeback in Robert Aldrich's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Joan Crawford was something of a hot commodity again. Pushing 60, she would never regain her former A-list altitude but she enjoyed name recognition with a new generation of moviegoers and that name retained a degree of star wattage. As had her Baby Jane costar Bette Davis, Crawford had entered the "horror hag" phase of her career. (She reteamed with Davis for Aldrich's Southern Gothic follow-up, Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte [1964], but quit the production shortly after the start of principal photography.) When she agreed to take the lead role in William Castle's Strait-Jacket (1964), as an unstable woman piecing her life together after a stay in a mental hospital (to which she had been committed for murdering her husband and his lover with an axe), Crawford had a roster of conditions - and number one was "no gimmicks." A journeyman director who honed his craft cranking out second features for Columbia's "B-hive," Castle had branded himself with a succession of promotional stunts: an insurance policy offered to those who might die of fright during Macabre (1958), a prop skeleton ("Emergo") flown over the heads of audiences watching House on Haunted Hill (1959) and "Percepto," an electronic buzzer that jolted the punters in their seats while viewing The Tingler (1959). Crawford and her handlers felt that this type of stunt was beneath her dignity and The King of the Gimmick agreed to take the high road... although he later gave away "bloodstained" cardboard axes at select theaters.

Strait-Jacket's boffo box office brought Castle and Crawford back together a year later for I Saw What You Did (1965). Based on mystery writer Ursula Curtiss' 1963 novel Out of the Dark, the film is a prescient and forward-looking excursion into the horror subcategory of teen terror. Although the body count here is exceedingly small (no contemporary cinematic UnSub would dare call it a night after only two kills), it's not difficult to discern the blueprint for such classics of the "slasher" cycle as Bob Clark's Black Christmas (1974), John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), Fred Walton's When a Stranger Calls (1979) and Wes Craven's Scream (1996) in this tale of high school-aged prank callers who prey on the wrong guy. (The film's precredit scene, a telephone conversation between juvenile leads Andi Garrett and Sara Lane, looks as though it were shot through the eyeholes of Michael Myers' Halloween mask.)

Joan Crawford worked only four days on I Saw What You Did and was paid $50,000, plus a percentage of the profits. Besides the favorable deal terms, she accepted the part because it kept her in the public eye and was better than most of the scripts she was being offered.

During the filming of I Saw What You Did Crawford took nips from her ever present flask of vodka during breaks and it obviously shows in her performance in certain scenes. Andi Garrett, who plays Libby in the film, was completely intimidated by her scene with Joan and was genuinely terrified when the older actress attacked her, pulling her hair and dragging her to the car in their big dramatic scene.

When an interviewer asked Joan why she was making I Saw What You Did, she replied, "Because I think the film will have a terrific identity with parents and audiences." George Cukor, who had known Joan for years and directed her in numerous films at MGM, later said, "Of course she rationalized what she did. Joan even lied to herself. She would write to me about these pictures, actually believing that they were quality scripts. You could never tell her they were garbage. She was a star, and this was her next picture. She had to keep working, as did Bette [Davis]. The two of them spawned a regrettable cycle in motion pictures."

Teens in peril were not unknown to genre filmmaking in 1965 but with few exceptions underage characters were slotted more reliably into the less punishing realm of science fiction: The Giant Claw (1957), The Blob (1958), The Giant Gila Monster (1959) and Teenagers from Outer Space (1959). A decade later, moviemakers faced much less critical resistance and public backlash for killing off teenagers but in 1965 Castle was probably wise to play it safe. Nonetheless, his depiction of the typical American suburb as a hotbed of roiling psychosexual restlessness, voyeurism, blackmail and homicide concealed behind a scrim of evergreen Americana (cinematographer Joseph Biroc shot Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life [1946]) argues for I Saw What You Did's significance as a linchpin between Peyton Place and Twin Peaks.

Producer: William Castle
Director: William Castle
Screenplay: William P. McGivern; Ursula Curtiss (novel)
Cinematography: Joseph F. Biroc
Music: Van Alexander
Film Editing: Edwin H. Bryant
Cast: Joan Crawford (Amy Nelson), John Ireland (Steve Marak), Leif Erickson (Dave Mannering), Sarah Lane (Kit Austin), Andi Garrett (Libby Mannering), Sharyl Locke (Tess Mannering), Patricia Breslin (Ellie Mannering), John Archer (John Austin), John Crawford (Trooper), Joyce Meadows (Judith Marak), Douglas Evans (Tom Ward), Barbara Wilkin (Mary Ward).
BW-82m.

by Richard Harland Smith