Editorials
‘Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker’ – The Maternal Instinct to Kill in 1981’s Underseen Horror Gem
In the 1980s, it was too easy for a film like Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker to get lost in the horror shuffle. Icons like Freddy and Jason were coming into the world and franchise fever was catching. A “video nasty” label also did little to help this hidden gem find an audience overseas in the U.K. Yet after years of being trapped on VHS under the name of Night Warning, this film finally surfaced on both DVD and Blu-ray and, for a short time, the streaming service Shudder. Cult followers relived what might have felt like a fever dream back in the day, and new fans have since latched on to the film’s sensational excesses.
Since he was three years old, Billy Lynch (played by Jimmy McNichol) has only known one mother: Aunt Cheryl (Susan Tyrrell). He has been in her care ever since his parents were killed in a bizarre and gruesome car wreck. After his folks are snuffed out early on — the film’s original director, Michael Miller, delivered the grisly opener before being replaced by William Asher — Billy eventually forgets about them and grows into a seemingly well-adjusted teenager. Sure, his and Aunt Cheryl’s relationship is deemed a bit unnatural by outsiders, but so far it is nothing too alarming. Everything only starts to change when Billy talks about leaving home.
A mother’s love can be detrimental if not outright dangerous in the horror genre. The original Friday the 13th delivered a prime example of the “killer mommy” character; Pamela Voorhees’ maternal instinct caused her to harm anyone she blamed for her son’s accidental death. Shortly after that iconic massacre rose another malevolent matriarch whose crimes had everything to do with her child. Tyrrell’s character is considered an aunt in Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker, but her smothering is no less sinister or destructive.
Aunt Cheryl’s insidious transformation coincides with Billy’s maturation. His interest in girls, particularly high school sweetheart Julia (Julia Duffy), and his plans for college both trigger Cheryl. She accommodates Billy’s academic ambition after expressing dismay, however, this is not a compromise so much as it is a part of her master plan. Not long after getting the supposed thumbs-up to fly the nest, McNichol’s unaware character comes home on his seventeenth birthday to find his blood-spattered aunt holding a knife and standing over a dead man’s body.
Ahead of Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker’s very limited screening in theaters, Pocket Books issued a tie-in novelization. This adaptation of the screenplay, written by Joseph Brugo and Richard Natale, more or less tells the same story as the film, albeit with some significant differences here and there. For starters, the inciting murder is something more of a mystery in the book. The film hides nothing as Cheryl aggressively comes on to the TV repairman, Phil Brody (William Caskey Swaim), then stabs him repeatedly with a knife after he rebuffs her advances. However, the details surrounding Brody’s death are uncertain in the novelization until Billy learns the horrible truth about his dear Aunt Cheryl.
Keeping Billy close to home is Cheryl’s utmost priority, yet she still enacts a backup plan. Hence Tyrrell’s character getting dolled up for Brody’s ill-fated house call. If her pride and joy for the last ten-plus years is so determined to leave her, then Cheryl needs to find someone else to nurture and look after. Could Aunt Cheryl have been hoping to make Brody a father and herself a mother (again)? Or was it always her intention to kill someone in hopes that the legal and social consequences would ensnare Billy, forcing him to stay home with his aunt? Either way, Cheryl views the repairman’s death as a happy accident; creating chaos was her way of restoring normalcy.
Billy believes his aunt when she claims Brody attempted to rape her, but the police are less convinced. Especially Detective Joe Carlson (Bo Svenson), a man of many prejudices. Svenson’s portrayal as the bigoted cop is as alarming as it is convincing. Carlson gets it into his head that not only is Cheryl covering for Billy, the murder was the result of a gay tiff. Learning that Brody and Billy’s basketball coach, Tom Landers (Steven Eastin), were romantically involved only makes Carlson stick to his outlandish theory despite there being no evidence of Billy’s involvement with either man. The lawman is only going off a mistaken hunch and responding to his provoked homophobia. Now, the novelization does not make Carlson any less of a homophobe, but it does show where his irrationality and anger both stem from.
One of the biggest differences between the novelization and the film lies within Tom Landers, who is now Billy’s English teacher rather than his basketball coach. The coach in the book is a tertiary character named Nelson, and he has no significant bearing on the overall story. The change is jarring at first, but other than the different occupation, the literary version of Tom Landers is, more or less, the same sympathetic man whose partner was suddenly taken away from him. With this being a novel, Tom is granted more game time; readers get to know him better as he deals with his grief and plans a new future now that he has been outed. Although his screen counterpart does not have the same degree of character development, Eastin’s depiction is unusually progressive for ’80s horror. The film’s Landers is masculine as well as sensitive, not a degenerate, and he survives to the end.
While often lumped in with the decade’s slashers, Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker fits in far better with the “grand dame guignol” (or “hagsploitation”) films of yesteryear. Older women who are put upon or seen as past their prime — by society and/or themselves — transform into “psycho-biddies.” Resentment and an overwhelming sense of faded glamor are among the key factors fueling their eventual rampages. The blueprint for this entire subgenre, 1962’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, is a substantial inspiration for Stephen Breimer, Boon Collins and Alan Jay Glueckman’s story. Cheryl herself is too young to be deemed a psycho-biddy; Tyrrell was only in her mid-thirties when Butcher was first released. Nevertheless, the DNA of the archetype courses through Aunt Cheryl’s veins as she kills anyone who denies her a chance at motherhood.
Character actor Susan Tyrrell plunged into the role of Cheryl Roberts, making it her own and blessing Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker with a show-stealing performance. Tyrrell is indeed the big draw here, but the rest of this horror gem is surprisingly well-crafted, ripe for analysis, and should not go overlooked.
Horror contemplates in great detail how young people handle inordinate situations and all of life’s unexpected challenges. While the genre forces characters of every age to face their fears, it is especially interested in how youths might fare in life-or-death scenarios.
The column Young Blood is dedicated to horror stories for and about teenagers, as well as other young folks on the brink of terror.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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