“I’m a normal person!” – I Saw What You Did (1965)
William Castle is my favorite director, even though he is probably nobody’s nominee for the best director, which – as I said about House on Haunted Hill, which might be his magnum opus, at least for me – frees him up to be so many other things.
Despite this, I have not seen all of Castle’s films, and there’s a chance that I never will. This is in part because his filmography can be neatly divided down the middle. There are the movies he did as a working director, doing contract work for studios and without much creative control over what projects he was attached to.
I’ve seen some of these, and certainly elements of his later pictures are often detectable in them (especially, for example, in the first of his four Whistler films), but there’s also no denying that Castle’s ouevre changes considerably after the success of Macabre in 1958.
Macabre was not only Castle’s first film as both producer and director, it was the first thing he had done that could really be considered a horror picture, and the first time that he was able to flex the gimmick muscles that would become synonymous with much of the rest of his cinematic output.
So, when I say that William Castle is my favorite director, I’m referring to the gimmicky horror flicks that were his specialty starting with the self-funded production of Macabre. Even then, Castle was a prolific filmmaker, and I still haven’t seen quite all of the movies he released after 1958. As of last night, I believe I still have The Busy Body (1967) and Project X (1968) waiting for me. Before last night, that list included I Saw What You Did from 1965.
While I Saw What You Did had been on my list for a while and I already owned a copy, what finally gave me the nudge to get around to watching it is the mostly unrelated fact that we’re showing Dark Intruder (also 1965) at the Stray Cat Film Center next week.
I say “mostly unrelated” because there actually is an unlikely thread connecting Dark Intruder with I Saw What You Did. Though originally filmed as a pilot for a TV show called Black Cloak that never went to series, Dark Intruder actually got a theatrical release – on the bottom half of a double bill with I Saw What You Did.
I love Dark Intruder – and I loved I Saw What You Did – but that would really make kind of a terrible double-bill. Dark Intruder is a probably more literary than it needs to be slice of occult detective nonsense in a fog-shrouded San Francisco of the 1890s, with a surprisingly grim ending. I Saw What You Did is teenybopper Hitchcock as only Castle could do it.
They’re two great tastes, but I’m not convinced that they would taste great together.
Even while I say that William Castle is my favorite director, I have to acknowledge that I don’t love all of even his post-Macabre movies, and his comedies are often where his work falls the flattest for me. Zotz has its problems, despite a screenplay by Ray Russell; 13 Frightened Girls is probably going to be no one’s nomination for one of Castle’s best; and his truly bizarre 1963 remake of The Old Dark House is more interesting as curiousity than anything.
Many reviews of I Saw What You Did, which praise the film’s crackerjack premise but pooh-pooh Castle’s directing chops, made me worry that it would fall into that category. I needn’t have.
Along with my fondness for Castle’s directing, I also have a particular attachment to what I call “babysitter in peril” stories. These are exemplified by the endless array of Fear Street-alikes that were published throughout the ’90s by authors like R. L. Stine, Christopher Pike, Diane Hoh, Richie Tankersley Cusick, and many, many others.
I Saw What You Did is premium “babysitter in peril” stuff. The plot follows two high school friends who are having a sleepover while one of them’s parents are out for the night, who entertain themselves by making crank calls. Unfortunately for them, one of those calls reaches the wrong person – a man (John Ireland) who has just murdered his wife.
Castle is often accused of trying to be a poor man’s Alfred Hitchcock, and there’s certainly not nothing to that. While both Castle and Hitchcock were inspired by the success of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Diabolique, Castle actual beat Hitch to the punch of riffing on it, as Macabre hit screens two years before Psycho.
Nonetheless, there’s no question which of the two is the better movie, or which one had the bigger impact on the culture at large, and Castle was never shy about cribbing. Homicidal (1961) is basically Castle’s remake of Psycho, and he’s still borrowing a few years later in I Saw What You Did. There’s a clever inversion of Psycho‘s shower scene here, not to mention some nods to Hitch’s earlier voyeurism thriller Rear Window.
While critics are right to praise the clever conceit of I Saw What You Did, and Castle ekes occasional atmosphere from his setup – the film’s climax takes place on a wonderfully fog-shrouded set – what ironically makes I Saw What You Did work, and what makes it inescapably a Castle film, are the moments when the suspense isn’t operating.
For much of its running time, I Saw What You Did is like a noir adaptation of a Baby-Sitters Club novel, capturing the feel not only of being a teenager, but the vibe of a simple teenage hangout movie. While the audience may shortly be aware of the murder that sets the plot in motion, the protagonists don’t learn about it until near the very end of the film, and the two threads take an awfully long time to connect.
In the meantime, the biggest stakes are that the two girls might get grounded as a result of their mischief spinning out of their control – and yet, those are also the biggest stakes in their whole world. As such, I Saw What You Did becomes a film about being on the cusp of adulthood, especially for young women – a world at once exciting and thrilling and, ultimately, more dangerous and terrifying than it should be.
Early on, when Kit, the girl who lives in an apartment in the city, first arrives at the country home of her friend Libby, she asks if Libby isn’t lonely, living so far from everything. Libby replies that she never used to be, when she was little. Their life in the country was all she knew. Now, though, “It seems like everything I want is someplace else.”
There may have been some part of Castle that wanted to be Alfred Hitchcock. In his memoir, he fantasizes about one day winning an Oscar (the closest he ever got was producing Rosemary’s Baby for Roman Polanski to direct), but even as he does so, he turns the whole event into a sideshow production.
Ultimately, whatever aspirations of fame and critical approval William Castle may have nursed, he obviously loved filmmaking, he loved promotion, and he loved “scaring the pants off audiences.” But perhaps more than anything else, Castle loved the audiences who came to see his movies.
“Shake hands with the customers, sure,” Castle said, in an interview with Lynda May Strawn. “Meet the ticket taker, meet the candy girl, meet the audience. Shake hands with them, talk to them, find out what they’re all about. One cannot make a picture and know what a public wants, sitting in an ivory tower in a projection room, like some people I know. I think you have to go into theatres and see what the audience wants in order to have contact with them.”
And for Castle’s movies, those audiences were usually kids. Ten, twelve, up to the high school age of the protagonists of I Saw What You Did. That’s who a movie like this is for, and whatever you may think of the finished product (I love it), that affection for the audience comes through every step of the way.
