Source: My own scan
Television scares and I go back a long way. I had quite the over-active imagination as a child, so even something as innocuous as a jump scare could send me over the edge into terror. I have vivid memories of my mom racing to cover my eyes when a TV spot promoting a new horror film like Alien or Halloween II came on the tube, because otherwise I'd work myself into an inconsolable mess for ten minutes, then continue to dwell on what I'd just seen (or what I thought I'd just seen) all night when laying in bed.
In fact, one of the scariest things I had ever personally witnessed on television haunted me for literal decades until I uncovered the secret. All I could remember was a room engulfed in flames, a wall of stuffed animals coming to life and screaming in pain as the fire touched them, and a girl crying as she watched toy soldiers marching towards her through the flames while their heads exploded. I saw this horrifying sequence while sitting in the living room of my grandparents' house when I was around nine years old, and it's never left my memory. It's my personal "nightmare fuel", and I was forty-one years old when I finally found out that sequence came from the re-run of an episode of Fantasy Island from 1978 entitled, appropriately enough, "The Nightmare".
Here's the exact clip, in case you want to have trouble sleeping tonight:
TV Nightmares and I are good buddies is what I'm getting at, and I've made it my business now that I'm older to experience all the awful things which traumatized me at such a young age. I said I was older, not necessarily wiser.
So when I saw Are You in the House Alone?, I knew I had to snap it up. After all, what better way to learn about all the potential trauma I missed out on by virtue of not having been born yet, right?
Made-for-television movies hold a morbid fascination for me. I feel like their limitations on budget and what broadcast regulations would permit frequently forced them to over-promise and under-deliver. These weren't traditional cinema fare pared down both for commercial breaks and to excise sex, violence, and foul language from the print, no. These were specially produced for the small screen and came pre-fitted with ad slots and a lack of any content deemed too objectionable. And yet, they often covered topics apropos of the day, whether that was the mutually-assured destruction pacts of the Cold War immortalized in movies like The Day After, child abuse in daycare facilities (Do You Know the Muffin Man?), the Satanic Panic which helped launch Tom Hanks' career courtesy of Mazes & Monsters, or the always-topical issues of sexual assault (Don't Touch My Daughter), alcoholism (The Boy Who Drank Too Much), kidnapping (The Abduction of Kari Swenson), obscene phone calls (The Secret Night Caller), vampires preying on the innocent (Kolchak: The Night Stalker), natural disasters (Meteor), animals on the rampage (Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo), technology gone berserk (Killdozer), or people secretly living under your house (Crawlspace).
The front third of the book consists of individual chapters about specific genres or types of pictures which present an overview of a particular point in TV movie history, whether it's the arrival and demise of the USA World Premiere Movie, a rundown of Stephen King's prolific made-for-TV ouvre, a look at the rape-revenge and rape-response films decade by decade, or an essay about all the means nature had at her disposal to excise us from the food chain. These are all excellent in their own right, penned by Reyes and numerous other contributors like David Kerekes (author of Killing For Culture), Kier-La Janisse (author of House of Psychotic Women), and Lee Gambin (regular contributor to Fangoria magazine) among others. And if the entirety of the book was presented in this format, it would still be a top-notch publication with plenty of info to offer the sort of nutbag who devours these things whole.
But the true star of the show is the enormous Reviews section, broken down by categories, which list hundreds of these silly, schlocky, sometimes scary, sometimes surprising low-budget treasures. While the essays are great and cover a wide variety of topics, it's this section to which you will return again and again like an addict seeking a fix, in search of the next film in what will become a maddening and obsessive hunt.
See, with other film review guides, you're pretty much assured you can lay your hands on a copy of the movie in question. Depending on the film's age and who owns the rights to it, that might mean hauling the VCR out of the attic and out-bidding some other schlub for the tape via online auction, or it could mean a quick search on your favorite streaming service, but virtually every movie released to theaters in the last thirty years has received its own subsequent distribution on home video.
When it comes to the made-for-TV crowd though, you might be fighting an uphill battle. That's not to say some of these pictures haven't found a second life through the DVD bargain bin or even the occasional A-list treatment though. The Rape of Richard Beck from 1985, for instance, got a DVD release in 2004 courtesy of Kreative Digital Entertainment under the Steven Seagal-esque title, "Deadly Justice", and every Stephen King made-for-television film or mini-series got a later video release thanks to name recognition alone. For the most part though, these movies were the very definition of limited-run. The network made them, broadcast them once, then forgot about them because they had eleven other films to get in the can that year. So if you weren't at home and in front of your television at 9pm Saturday evening October 24th, 1981 with the station tuned to CBS (or didn't own a VCR you could program), then you missed Dark Night of the Scarecrow, because they weren't likely to broadcast it again.
In fact, an awful lot of the movies discussed in the book exist now only within the confines of the viewers' memories, or courtesy of some enterprising individual who dumped a thirty-five year old VHS tape on to YouTube and has thusfar avoided a copyright strike. That's an awful state for such an enormous segment of TV history, but more and more studios are becoming aware of the value of these relics, along with their potential revenue-generating possibilities. The aforementioned Dark Night of the Scarecrow, for example, got the Blu-Ray treatment back in 2012, and is currently available for viewing through Amazon's Prime video service. So while your prospect of tracking down any single one of these movies may be sketchy at best, there are still more of them available through legal or quasi-legal means than might be expected.
Are You in the House Alone? is a time capsule, documenting a decades-long period of recent history which, nevertheless, remains mostly forgotten or ignored today. For weirdos like me though, its cover price provides an E-ticket ride through a dusty, neglected corner of cinema which nevertheless teems with fascinating, alluring, cheesy, and surprising attractions I guarantee you're young enough to have never heard of before, or old enough to have forgotten all about.
Or maybe, like me, you have your own special brand of childhood trauma nightmare fuel you remember from the small screen. No promises, but Are You in the House Alone? might help you find it so you can confront it again and put it back in the past where it belongs.
If you're looking to get a glimpse into some of the films covered by this book, a great place to start is this YouTube channel run by TVFanatic, which hosts dozens of these single-run broadcast relics, along with trailers, TV spots, news clips, promos, and similar fare.
