THE BABY: Home Is Where The Horror Is

A com­mon mis­con­cep­tion with up-and-coming film­mak­ers is that a film must test the bound­aries of explic­it­ness to shock.  The truth is that extreme con­tent is just one tool in the film­mak­ers arse­nal, the sim­plest to use and the least effec­tive if leaned on too heav­ily.  Real hor­ror comes from delv­ing into the psy­chol­ogy, moral­ity and emo­tions of the audi­ence.  If you can do that with skill, you don’t have to pile on the explicit shocks because you’ll be get­ting the audi­ence where it counts — in the most vul­ner­a­ble cor­ners of their minds.

The Baby is exactly this kind of hor­ror film because it creeps the viewer out on a vis­ceral yet purely psy­cho­log­i­cal level.  It all begins with the premise: Ann Gentry (Anjanette Comer) is a social worker who has cho­sen to take on the case of the Wadsworth fam­ily.  Mrs. Wadsworth (Ruth Roman) is the matri­arch of the clan and she lives in a Los Angeles home with her grown daugh­ters, Germaine (Marianna Hill) and Alba (Suzanne Zenor).

However, the focus of Ann’s work is the only man in the Wadsworth home: Baby (David Manzy), a grown man so men­tally hand­i­capped that he has the men­tal­ity and abil­i­ties of an infant.  He doesn’t speak, he crawls instead of walks and is totally depen­dent on the care of his mother and sis­ters.  Ann quickly becomes sus­pi­cious of Baby’s fam­ily, as it seems they want Baby to remain their help­less lit­tle boy for­ever.  She engages in a bat­tle of wills with Mrs. Wadsworth, try­ing to get Baby freed from his prison of a home.  As the stakes get raised, it is revealed that Ann has a trauma of her own to cope with — and that the Wadsworth clan is will­ing to go to dras­tic mea­sures to keep Baby at home.

With a premise that out­landish, you could be excused for expect­ing The Baby to be a crazy camp-fest packed with lurid shocks.  However, the film is dis­arm­ingly sub­tle in its attack on the viewer’s psy­che.  Screenwriter Abe Polsky has enough con­fi­dence in his premise to build its inten­sity in a grad­ual fash­ion, grad­u­ally ratch­et­ing up the ten­sion as the dif­fer­ent, dis­turb­ing angles of the sto­ry­line slowly come into view.  By the time the film reaches its finale, the steady slow-burn approach of the script ensures that it has a gen­uine emo­tional and psy­cho­log­i­cal punch.

Better yet, Polsky doesn’t lean on the bizarre nature of his con­cept to make the film work.  He devel­ops the story and its themes with unex­pected depth: the film has a lot to say about child abuse, the social and psy­cho­log­i­cal dynamic between a mother and her chil­dren and the endur­ing trauma that can be caused by a hole in the fam­ily unit.  The author also invests his story with three-dimensional char­ac­ters that give the viewer a gen­uine rea­son to get invested in his outré plot­line — and it’s worth not­ing that this is a rare hor­ror film where women play almost all the cru­cial roles.

The sub­tlety and crafts­man­ship of the script­ing extends to Ted Post’s direc­tion.  Post was a vet­eran jour­ney­man direc­tor with tons of cred­its in both t.v. and film — includ­ing two for Clint Eastwood, Hang ‘Em High and Magnum Force — so he brings a sure­footed, unfussy sense of craft to the pro­ceed­ings.  He’s savvy enough to under­stand that the film’s bizarre premise speaks for itself so he avoids flashy frills and sledge­ham­mer tech­niques.  That said, when it’s time to go for the throat — par­tic­u­larly dur­ing the tense finale — he brings a con­fi­dent verve to the film’s mechan­ics of suspense.

Post is also to be com­mended for get­ting intense but con­trolled per­for­mances from his cast.  This is a key rea­son for why The Baby is as effec­tive as it is: the actors under­stand that the threat of some­one com­ing unglued car­ries more power than an actual expres­sion of hys­te­ria itself.

Comer makes for a sym­pa­thetic audience-identification fig­ure hero­ine, yet also art­fully reveals a trou­bled side to her char­ac­ter that gives her scenes an added charge.  Hill and Zenor pro­vide nice a con­trast to each other as the daugh­ters: Hill has a haunted qual­ity that is creepy in a quiet way while Zenor brings a casual sadism to her role guar­an­teed to unnerve the viewer.  However, it is Roman who steals the show as the matri­arch, find­ing a more mod­u­lated ver­sion of the battle-axe char­ac­ters that Joan Crawford and Bette Davis made famous in their 1960’s “crazy old lady” hor­ror flicks.

It’s also worth not­ing that Manzy deliv­ers a truly impres­sive per­for­mance as the title char­ac­ter.  More than any other ele­ment of the film, his char­ac­ter had the great­est poten­tial of slip­ping into a campi­ness or self-conscious strange­ness that could have sunk the entire film.  Thus, it is a plea­sure to acknowl­edge that Manzy plays the role with great care, liv­ing up to the eccen­tric con­cept behind the char­ac­ter but inform­ing Baby with a level of human­ity and inno­cence that makes the audi­ence sym­pa­thetic to his plight (once they get over the shock of who he is).  His facial expres­sions and body lan­guage sell the character’s odd nature with­out over­stat­ing it — and Manzy’s work is thus the engine that dri­ves the film.

Finally, this review would be remiss if it didn’t briefly men­tion the film’s stun­ner of an end­ing.  Without get­ting into spoil­ers, The Baby has the kind of coda that hits you like a ton of bricks even if you see it com­ing.  Its final moments man­age to be tragic, oddly mov­ing, darkly funny and emo­tion­ally cathar­tic all at once.  Simply put, it’s one Your Humble Reviewer’s favorite end­ings in the his­tory of cinema.

In clos­ing, it might be a cliché to say “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” — but The Baby is the kind of film for which this cliché was invented.  Even way back when, they didn’t make ‘em like this — and this film retains every ounce of its qui­etly sub­ver­sive power. For that rea­son and many more, The Baby gets Schlockmania’s high­est recommendation.