"Horror" Review: Are You In the House Alone? edited by Amanda Reyes (2016, Headpress)

If you came of age anywhere between the 1960s and the 1990s, especially if you lived somewhere the cable companies didn't service, or had parents who refused to pay for the added luxury of satellite or other expanded media options, and remember the good old days of the "ABC Movie of the Week" or "USA World Premiere Movie" events, then holy cow, are you ever the primary audience for this book!

What books like The Psychotronic Video Guide and plenty of other awesome books are to the made-for-cinema experience, Are You In the House Alone? is to early evening to late-at-night, stay-at-home fare broadcast into your living room at no extra charge thanks to regular commercial breaks.

Are You In the House Alone? has one of the best subtitles of any film studies book ever written. In case you can't see it on that tiny cover scan, here it is in all its amazing glory:

Growing up with gargoyles, giant turtles, Valerie Harper, the Cold War, Stephen King, & co-ed call girls -- A TV Movie compendium 1964-1999.

What more can you say to that except, "HELL YEAH!!"?

You'll notice the book has an editor as opposed to an author. That's because Amanda Reyes didn't write the whole thing (although she contributes tons of content), but rather helped draw everything together. The first 106 of the book's 337 pages consist of essays written by various authors concerning different subjects. Reyes herself opens the book with "Leather & Lace: A List of the Made for TV Machismo & Small Screen Scream Queens of the 1970s That Rocked Our World", a six-page love letter to stars like Karen Black (Trilogy of Terror), Elizabeth Montgomery (The Legend of Lizzie Borden), and Donna Mills (Curse of the Black Widow), along with reminiscences on the Scream Queen telefilms of the era, such as 1971's Five Desperate Women, 1970's Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate, and 1979's A Vacation In Hell.

But the other side of the spectrum are those movies featuring men so manly, you could swear you added length to your dong just watching them do their macho thing. She's talking, of course, about legendary small screen actors like William Shatner (Pray for the Wildcats), David Janssen (Smile Jenny, You're Dead), and everybody's favorite X-Files inspiration, Darren McGavin (The Night Stalker). These men starred in such ruggedly macho pictures as 1973's Deliver Us From Evil, 1974's Killdozer, and 1975's The Kansas City Massacre, always ready to put their lives on the line to save the damsel in distress and kill whoever or whatever was menacing Anytown, USA, whether it was creepy serial killers or sentient construction equipment.

After that amazing opening, we get further tributes to the wackiness and depravity from folks like Lee Gambin (Bless the Beasts & the Networks: Eco-Horror Hits the Small Screen), Jennifer Wallis (Rape-Revenge & Rape Response: Narratives of Sexual Violence & Justice in the TV Movie), and the one you're most likely to flip to upon purchasing the book, Lance Vaughan's Scratching On Glass: An Introduction to Stephen King on Televion, which looks at the veritable cornucopia of King's ouvre translated for home audience viewing.

Especially this one.

But it gets better! There are essays covering the rise of the TV Miniseries; the popularity of the TV reunion films (think Andy Griffith, Gilligan's Island, and so forth); the TV films of Wes Craven; how the Cold War was viewed through the lens of the tele-film; small-screen adaptations of larger-than-life comic book heroes; and even a look at the depressing realities of the TV biopic and small but brutal made-for-TV exploitation genre. There's even an essay on how the TV movie brought the realities (and sometimes the unrealities) of topics like sexual abuse and the satanic panic into our living rooms. In fact, the book's title is taken from the television adaptation of Richard Peck's hard-hitting teen novel of the same name, which depicted the sexual assault and rape of a young woman by the "golden boy" of the richest family in town, and all the (in)justice money can buy. Are You In the House Alone? (the TV movie) came out in 1978, but it feels timely even forty years later, where "golden boys" with "promising lives ahead of them" like Brock Turner, Trent Mays, and Ma'lik Richmond can commit heinous sexual violence against unconscious or non-consenting women, and even disseminate photographs of their underage victims across the internet, yet walk away with a slap on the wrist, assuming they're penalized at all.

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That's the first part of the book, and even if that's all there was to it, it would be worth reading. But Act II is where things really heat up. Pages 78 - 324 are dedicated to reviewing the best and the worst of these flicks, sometimes arranged by subject matter (Stephen King naturally gets an enormous section all to himself, as do a variety of multi-evening TV Miniseries events like Roots), but mostly arranged alphabetically by title and broken down by time period. These run 1964 - 1979, 1980 - 1989, and 1990 - 1999, with a short afterward dedicated to Cable and the TV films of the 2000s. The sheer volume of tele-films covered in these final 250 pages is staggering, showcasing everything from Raymond Burr's Perry Mason TV fare and stuff you'd never suspect Andy Griffith was involved with, to small-screen disaster pics and nuclear apocalypse nightmares like The Day After. That one in particular bring chills to my spine even today, because I remember growing up under the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction and the jingoistic saber-rattling of Reagan-era Cold War politics.

With so many different contributors from so many different backgrounds, Reyes did a remarkable job giving the book the feeling of a singular voice with a broad range. The individual authors all shift their tones appropriate to subject matter, so expect some frank talk about the sexual politics of the 70s when Jennifer Wallis covers The Rape of Richard Beck, but a decidedly lighter and jovial one when she reviews the best (and perhaps only) serial-killer-stalking-senior-citizens film you'll ever need to watch: Isn't It Shocking?.

Packed throughout Are You In the House Alone? are a ton of black and white pictures. Some are there merely to illustrate the actors appearing in a particular film, and occasionally you'll get one of the VHS or DVD box art (these types of movies were often aired once or twice then never seen again, so the ones which did get home video releases are certainly in the minority). My favorite, though, are the advertisements, clipped from local newspapers or TV Guide, with their gaudy taglines and cast lists designed to make sure as many folks as possible had their eyes glued to the set come 9 PM Tuesday.

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Are You In the House Alone? is that rarest of film studies books, one which is both scholarly and serious in its interest in the materials, and yet isn't afraid to call a spade a spade and point out the obviously overwrought, the hilariously heinous, and the deceptively dirty where it sees such. I guarantee that even the most well-read cinephile with the most comprehensive library of taped-off-TV VHS collection imaginable will still find dozens of movies they've never heard of or had forgotten about in the intervening decades. This collection is to made-for-TV fare what Grady Hendrix's Paperbacks From Hell is to the unapologetically trash era of horror novels. Whether you read through it from start to finish as I did, or use it like a reference guide to help you track down stuff long-buried in your subconscious; if you ever stayed up late because you had to know Where Have All the People Gone?, who The Best Little Girl In the World was, or why Lynda Carter answered the Hotline, then Are You In the House Alone? will make you feel like you're among friends.

Because you are, @janenightshade. You are.

Five incredibly well-deserved Laughing Clowns out of five!

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Once you've finished reading though, then comes the hard part: tracking down all these bizarre classics, most of which are long out of print (assuming they ever received a video release after the fact). But what TV stations consigned to history's dustbin, modern technology (and people with tons of recorded VHS tapes) is helping to resurrect. One of my favorites for tracking down these cultural artifacts is TVfanatic's YouTube channel, a veritable paradise of full films, TV promos, commercials, and other twentieth century goodies. All the video clips used in this article, with the exception of the first, come from his channel.

In fact, it was his video on Made-For-TV books to buy which turned me on to Are You In the House Alone?:

He's adding new TV movies to his channel all the time (his most recent uploads came just three days ago), and he's coming up on his four-year anniversary. So the next time you have 90 minutes to two hours to kill, can't find anything good on Netflix, and need something to keep you entertained, drop by his channel, scroll through the videos, and see what strikes your fancy. If it's on his channel, chances are it appears in Are You In the House Alone?. Looks like you've got some serious reading and watching to get down to, partner.