The final moment of ‘The Fabelmans’ shows the transcript of Steven Spielberg in his first contact with NBC, but avoids going into more detail about how the director’s career really began, and few can imagine that in his early works he was closely linked to horror movieseven with a television movie that was ahead of great classics of the genre such as ‘The Exorcist’ (1973) or ‘The Warren File’ (2013).
For many, his career begins with ‘The Devil on Wheels’ (1971), an excellent made-for-television thriller that is considered his film debut because it already distinguishes his characteristic visual imagination, but his television period began earlier, moving between supernatural atmospheres in the pilot episode of Rod Serling’s ‘Night Gallery’. The television writer and producer was popular in the 1960s due to the enormous success of his show ‘The Twilight Zone’, not only because of the quality of his work, but also because he introduced each episode with an enigmatic showman behavior, now very recognizable.
In 1969, Serling created a second series entitled ‘Night Gallery’ that continued to explore the weird, the bizarre and the macabre with a more terrifying tone. It was around this time that Side Sheinberg, Universal’s vice president of television, signed a television contract with a twenty-three-year-old director, Steven Spielberg, after being impressed by his short film ‘Amblin’ (1968), with which the young man obtained his first paid production contract: one of the three segments that would make up a pilot anthology.
Spielberg’s segment is titled ‘eyes’ and tells the story of a blind woman, rich and old woman who hires her doctor to perform an eye transplant operation to restore her vision, although only for twelve hours. The organ comes from a man desperate to pay off his debts, unaware that he will lose his sight forever in exchange for a paltry sum. The surgery goes off without a hitch, but the woman is plunged into a dark one night nightmare that will take her sanity.
A generational change united by horror anthologies
‘Eyes’ is the first time that Spielberg worked with great Hollywood talents, no less than with Oscar-winning screen legend Joan Crawford. Unlike some later commissions, on this debut he was given much more freedom to give it his own very colorful and bright visual look that set it apart from other episodes, thanks to cinematographers Robert Batcheller and William Margulies. Between the classic approach, with great production design by Howard E. Johnson, and the experimentation, the episode reaches an expressionist climax by trading a traditional setting for an inspired combination of sound design and deep surreal darkness.
There are some story points that are reminiscent of plot concepts from his great sci-fi piece, ‘Minority Report,’ which he did over thirty years later, but what is important is this contact with Serling, one of his heroes, whom he would pay homage to in one of his best productions of the 80s, which he also co-directed, ‘En el limites de la realidad’ (1983), a remake of the original series that would in turn inspire another undercover “remake” by Spielberg himself in the very remarkable ‘Tales amazing’. Due to the quality of his episode, Spielberg would be called to work on several more series.
We all know how good ‘The Devil on Wheels’ was, however, the TV movie that followed it didn’t make much of a splash. ‘something devilish‘ (Something Evil, 1972) is one of the least celebrated works of Spielberg’s early period, and somewhat unfairly, since, while not one of his best efforts, it is a story about demonic possession with a suspicious resemblance to ‘The Exorcist’the successful 1971 novel by William Peter Blatty, which was a year ahead of its adaptation.
The codes of the supernatural terror of the future
The curious thing is that he also did it with a possession of a child that was more reminiscent of the real case on which Blatty was basedand also pre-empts the blockbuster ‘The Amityville Horror’ from 1979. Many aesthetic elements common to his career are already featured here, from some clever camera moves to creepy sound effects, while making the most of a charismatic cast, headlined by Darren McGavin, who would become a horror icon that year with his reporter Kolchak, the character who inspired the creator of the ‘X-Files’.
‘Something Evil’ is about Marjorie (Sandy Dennis) a woman who moves with her family to a property in the country, while her husband Paul (McGavin) wants to be closer to his job in the city, but what they don’t know is that the previous owner died under strange circumstances. An abc of modern horror cinema, but whose tropes were not yet squeezed, with which the film is quite pioneering in many of them. In fact, in some ways it is reminiscent of ‘Poltergeist’, the Tobe Hooper classic written and produced by Spielberg.
In the hands of the director, the terror here is based on camera work and a wind machine that works every time something evil happens, such as the representation of possession by demonic forces, starting the trend that more than adults are the children who were really to be feared. Here, the Wordens’ son Stevie, child star Johnny Whitaker, is the center of chaos, but It can already be read between the lines that the father is too absorbed by his work—watch out for the film constant of the director of ‘Jaws’— as to pay attention to his family, and that is the tacit reason why the forces of evil get away with it.
Spielberg and the supernatural in the American way of life
The film already shares a symmetrical aura with the sentimentality of its filmography, so it is not surprising that a mother’s love is the crucial aspect for the resolution. In an ending that is basically an inversion of the one we will find in the first ‘Warren File’, in whose second part, in addition, there is a red nightgown that also visually connects with it. The script by Robert Clouse, who the following year would be directing Bruce Lee in ‘Operation Dragon’, channeled an interest in the satanic fashion since ‘Red Rose’ (1968), but also the plot of several novels of the time .
Domestic terrors that, in addition to Blatty’s, were found in books such as Tom Tryon’s ‘Harvest Home’, which would become a miniseries in 1978 and Robert Marasco’s ‘Burnt Offerings’, which was also adapted into ‘Devilish Nightmare’ and would inspire to Stephen King for his hit ‘The Shining’. In any case, a literature and films that certified that the horror in the 70s circulated about domestic anxieties and the huge Gothic castles were no longer necessary, accentuating contemporary elements and the social reality that would end up becoming Spielberg’s favorite environment: the suburbia.
The director’s horror tricks are very contained, the most we see are a pair of glowing eyes, a subtle touch, a jar of red jelly that glows and teleports without our knowing why, crying baby noises and a lensed approach. fisheye to indicate that something strange is going on. A curious oddity that encodes many elements of later more popular films and presents a director interested in the genre, whose first massive film was horror with a capital letter: the influential ‘Jaws’ (1975), with pieces of pure panic and scares in which he was already performing perfectly.