The Night Walker (1965)

Why do these screams matter?

An outlier in the hagsploitation oeuvre, William Castle’s The Night Walker inverts a majority of the tropes associated with the subgenre.  Unlike other hag horror films that view a character’s single status with suspicion and as shorthand for potential monstrosity, The Night Walker implies that the confining state of marriage is the real danger to be avoided. Trapped in an unhappy marriage, Irene Trent (Barbara Stanwyck) spends her days navigating her husband’s jealous paranoia and fits of rage. When Howard is killed, Irene begins to have recurring dreams of a paramour she names The Dream (Lloyd Bochner). As the dreams grow increasingly surreal, Irene fears that she is losing her sanity.

In our first scream, Irene has retired to her bed after being warned by the arson investigator that she can no longer enter her late husband’s laboratory due to safety concerns. After a fitful night’s sleep, she awakes to the rhythmic sounds of Howard’s cane. Wondering if her husband somehow managed to survive the explosion, Irene follows the sounds into the closed-off room where she is confronted by an angry Howard.

Horror films typically rely upon shock and repulsion to heighten the emotional response of the audience and we see both of those aims reflected in Irene’s scream. She is shocked to discover that her abusive husband is still alive and is reacting to the threat he still poses. But for the audience, the camera’s lingering on Howard’s scars and the swelling musical accompaniment indicate that Howard’s monstrosity is now outwardly visible which compounds Irene’s extreme reaction. The association of bodily difference to monstrosity is a hallmark of hagsploitation and is obviously troubling, but the film does do something a bit different with it. In hag horror, it is typically the woman who has some aspect of her physicality framed as undesirable, typically with either fat phobic or ableist undertones. This difference is then used to imply a potentially threatening deviance. But here, Howard is assigned the traditional “monstrous” attributes which makes the coding of Irene’s questionable mental state come across as less dangerous and more sympathetic.

Complicating this reaction is the revelation that Irene’s discovery of Howard may have only been a nightmare. Because the film ebbs between a dream world and a waking world, the audience is never completely certain which of Irene’s experiences are imagined and which are real. If we accept the moment as a nightmare, which it appears to be based upon Irene’s waking to discover Howard’s laboratory is still padlocked, then Irene’s reaction becomes more complicated. Rather than being one of simple shock, her scream now reads as a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The audience knows of Howard’s jealousy, his penchant for recording Irene’s private moments, and his attempts to isolate her from outside interaction. This knowledge, coupled with the scene in which Howard beats Irene with his cane in a fit of anger, positions Irene as an abused wife and complicates the motivations underscoring her screams. She is shocked to see him still alive, but, more importantly, she is terrified that the abuse she has known will now continue. When one considers that in the 1960s domestic violence was typically swept under the rug (the Archives of General Psychiatry even published a study in 1964 extolling the ‘therapeutic benefits” of wife beating), this film’s suggestion that a woman could experience long-term crippling psychological trauma from such abuse is frankly revolutionary (Dockterman).

Our second scream takes the subtle indictment of marriage that runs throughout this film and makes it overt. In what we believe to be a dream world, Irene is taken by her Dream Lover to a church to be married but when she is asked to declare her vows, Irene remains mute. Despite her not agreeing to be wed, the priest declares the two married. This scene then morphs into Howard standing at the altar and Irene, again, finds herself married by the priest despite her vocal objections.

It should be noted that at no point does Irene consent to be married. Harkening back to the film’s opening narration, which suggests that in dreams “maybe you can get away after all,” Irene’s dream life offers an opportunity to create an existence for herself independent of marriage. That she exercises silence and then objection in both wedding scenarios demonstrates her desire to divorce herself from any and all matrimonial institutions. Not even her Dream Lover and the masculinized perfection he represents are enough to make Irene want to commit to heteronormative domesticity. That the priest, witnesses, and organ player are all mannequins adds to the sense that Irene is being ushered into an institution that will render her utterly without agency. Here, Irene’s screams are a deliberate assertion of her voice; a voice continually silenced in the waking world (and even in her dream world) by her oppressive marriage to Howard. This reclamation of one’s voice, particularly in relation to marriage and the domestic sphere, echoes Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and offers a way for audiences to understand “the problem that has no name” (Michals). Published in 1963, the book explores the stifling impact marriage can have on women’s personal and professional lives. The Night Walker takes this idea of the connection between marriage and having one’s voice silenced and magnifies it.

This tension between agency and marriage also factors into Irene’s relationship with Joyce (Judi Meredith), a young woman recently hired at Irene’s beauty shop.  Throughout the film, Joyce subtly gaslights Irene into questioning her own sanity and the film leaves it open as to how much of a threat Joyce poses to Irene. The end reveal that a recently murdered Joyce is in cahoots with George, her husband, to steal Irene’s inheritance (and possibly her life) is yet another indictment of how the bonds of marriage can turn toxic, especially when women are pitted against one another. Irene’s scream is a recognition of how marriage as an institution can separate women from other women and create divisions that leave women vulnerable.

Works Cited

Dockterman, Eliana. “50 Years Ago, Doctors Called Domestic Violence ‘Therapy’.” Time, 25 Sept. 2014.

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. 10th anniversary edition, Norton, 1974.

Michals, Debra. “Betty Friedan.” National Women’s History Museum, n.d.

The Night Walker. Directed by William Castle, performances by Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Taylor, and Judi Meredith, Universal Pictures, 1964.