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Night of Fear (1972)

Dir: Terry Bourke

A young woma' (Carla Hoogeveen) takes an accidental detour while trying to avoid a collision with an oncoming lorry.
Driving down this unknown dirt track she crashes her car and knocks herself out.

Upon waking she sees a leering, bedraggled, man (Norman Yemm) coming towards her, with a big axe.
She runs away from him through the woods and comes upon a strange house…..

 

The dialogue-free, seemingly unrelenting in its slowness, opening 5 minutes of “Night of Fear” does not give the viewer much confidence in the supposedly intense (so nasty it was banned in Australia at the time) nature of Bourke’s movie.
But then, as quick-fire as the rest was slow, the movie suddenly slams you in the face as the deranged loon in the woods (who we shall call ’The Nutbag’) finally grabs his unwary prey (Briony Behets, “The Long Weekend”) in a clothes ripping, body slamming, scream-filled moment of madness that is all the more effective due to it’s deliberate introduction.

The weird, minimalist score of drones and chimes that has played over this opening sequence suddenly lurches into a rather frenzied opening credits score where those wonderful 70’s yellow credits are inter-cut with some of the scenes of madness to come.
The credit sequence also throws up the film’s chequered history as the first title to appear is “Fright”, as “Night of Fear” (which literally gets ripped out “Fright”) was originally going to be the first of 12 stories in an Australian TV horror series (though shot in 35mm), hence the sadly short 50 or so minutes running time.
This never came to be due to just how warped and grotesque this opening film was, in Australian film generally at the time and in TV in particular at any time, even today!
It later got a cinema release instead, but aside from a few old VHS releases "Night of Fear", perhaps Australia's first true horror film, had pretty much vanished until it hit DVD recently.

Again an extended, rather mundane, post-credit sequence suddenly leads us into something more unsettling as we see ‘The Nutbag’ feeding his rats bloody strips of meat, the girl and her boyfriend making love in the woods (amazingly this tame scene was one of the censor sticking points!) and the girl driving along the road, all edited back and forth in a series of swift cuts and scored with an increasingly chaotic score of electronic drones, whistles and burps.

Aside from some very dated 70’s TV style music during this opening thankfully the rest of the score is that discordant, bizarre, electronic warbling we had during the pre-credits sequence which adds just so much insane atmosphere to the entire enterprise.
Another unusual aural choice is the lack of any dialogue (bar screams, groans and mad grunting) in the entire film. In fact the film was shot with no sound and all the sound effects were added, expertly, later on.
The lack of dialogue of course means the simplistic, one dimensional, initial set-up (literally just a woman being terrorised) stays that way for the duration as no real characters can be created and revealed with no words ever spoken.
But again (like the music and the slow lead-ins to ultra-intense scenes of insanity), it’s a strange device that manages to instil the film with a genuine, oh so very 70’s, sense of nightmarish dread.
It’s literally horror film making cut right back to the bone!
All this is helped no end by the two lead performances, with Yemm (who sadly never got out of the TV ghetto) turning in a superb backwoods nutter performance and Hoogeveen doing the screaming, confused victim shtick with great aplomb.

Director Terry Bourke shows us that he knows his stuff even before most of this stuff even existed (well, except for “Spider Baby” perhaps)!
This is two long years before the classic, 70’s back-roads, psycho insanity of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and yet here, in this discordant, shrieking, minimalist wallow in the violent and the grotesque is all that brutal, screaming, leering nastiness of that glorious decade of American Exploitation movie-making that Tobe Hooper’s masterwork truly kicked off.
But “Night of Fear” is earlier, it’s Australian...and it was made for TV!

Like “TCM” there is little gore (though in fact there is actually a bit more bloodied weirdness here than in “TCM”) but we certainly have that unsettling, leering, attitude to threat, degradation and violence (both physical and psychological) that so epitomised the 70’s Exploitation film.
But unlike “TCM”, and more like the films to come later, the film is given a, still pretty damn strong today, sexual edge (Christ knows what he was thinking in 1972 for TV!), Bourke makes no bones about the lusting nature of his killer character.
Be it during a truly bizarre and out-there nightmare sequence involving the nude girl tied down to a table as the naked ’Nutbag’ slowly walks towards her, moaning and groaning, with the bloodied skull of a female victim held over of his groin, or the bleak, amazingly sick, finale that sees the grunting, panting ‘Nutbag’ getting down with his grimy self in no uncertain terms, "Night of Fear" embraces the psycho-sexual horror with great verve.

And time and again we see that Bourke knows his Exploitation art as the camera zooms in on screaming mouths, pleading eyes, tear/grime streaked faces, ripped cloth and partially bared flesh with almost as much driving energy as his psycho character.
Like all the greats of Exploitation film making, then and now, Bourke grabs the back of the audience’s head and rams their faces into the screaming violence and shrieking madness unfolding before them.

The production design, by New Zealander Gary Hansen, is also spot on (you have to love the literal ‘rat house’) and here we have one of the truly great, unsung, psycho lairs of all time.
The filth, dirt, dereliction and charnel house grotesquery on display here certainly match the great killer’s lairs of “TCM”, “Death Trap”, “Deranged“ and “Tourist Trap".
It’s no surprise that Bourke would use Hansen again, 2 years later, for “Inn of the Damned”.
All this great design and general chaos is perfectly caught on film, via some classic Exploitation style cinematography, by Peter Hendry.

It is a real shame that “Night of Fear” was not extended into a feature (with perhaps some dialogue added) as I think it would certainly have become an (almost lost) must-see movie for Exploitation fans that would rank right up there with all the classics.
But as it is “Night of Fear” can’t truly be called a real movie so it sadly falls between the two stools of wildly impressive, utterly shocking, what the hell were they thinking episode of a TV show and a promo reel for the feature length Exploitation movie that would never appear.
But as a skilfully crafted, bizarre, twisted, sometimes gruelling, extended exploitation sequence (that could grace any actual Exploitation feature you could name), which is simply missing its remaining 30 minutes, “Night of Fear” is a true gem that any and all fans of Grindhouse/Drive-In/Exploitation cinema should check out right away, even if the very end sequence is a bit weak and redundant.
It’s on a great double bill DVD with Bourke’s “Inn of the Damned” and is an essential purchase for sleaze 'n' grime connoisseurs.

Little note: Pause the film during the quick edit nightmare scene, that flashes on ‘The Nutbag’ reaching for the camera and newspaper clippings where a swastika appears in the clippings, and you will see that the article below the ‘creepy’ headline ‘Heeding the cry for blood’….is actually a story about cricket!