I love 70s made for TV horror movies. Because they needed to really unnerve a wide audience quickly but weren’t allowed things like sex, gore, or a budget, they figured out other ways — sometimes music or cinematography but usually just very clever & subtle writing.

Richard Matheson was the king of this — take a look at the short film Bobby (the last segment of the anthology movie Dead of Night), which (while the direction, by Dan Curtis, is gorgeous) gets chills from… two actors, one of them a child, and no fx beyond flashing lights. And it’s because Richard Matheson knows how to write a line of dialogue whose subtext is so twisty that it makes you want to rip your skin off to get at the bugs squirming beneath.

As soon as the protagonist of Bobby says “my son, who drowned by accident”, you know it was no accident — at least, not completely. As soon as we meet the ressurrected Bobby, we know his story is bogus. Did the actress flub “tetragrammaton” as “terragrammaton”, or is this in fact the reason the son came back in a demonic manner — i.e., that she failed to gain the protection of YHVH? If it’s an accident, it’s a brilliant one. Who in the general audience would catch that?

The power of writing in these things is maybe better illustrated by a worse-made movie — The Babysitter (1980), starring William Shatner. The…