Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S1E38, "The Creeper"

This is a tense, bleak episode, easily up there with the best of the season, including the stories directed by Alfred Hitchcock himself. In fact, if you made Constance Ford’s Ellen Grant sleeker and more glamorous–and if you moved the action a bit uptown–it would feel like Hitchcock, all rising suspicion and free-floating perversion.

It’s so good that it’s easy to miss that its structure is almost nonexistent. It’s built like a nightmarish series of sketches, with only a few plot points–Ellen’s relationship with her husband, Steve (Steve Brodie), proving sounder that it seemed at the start is probably the best example–that really build or evolve. This is a kaleidoscopic carousel of paranoia.

The plot is simple. It’s a hot summer evening (this is the second AHP episode to make use of this kind of broiling, temperature-stoking heat), and a killer known as the Creeper has been strangling women. Ellen’s husband works nights, so she’s all alone. Wherever she goes, wherever she looks, she has to wonder: Are you the Creeper?

The seemingly endless possibilities are rendered vividly and with a welcome sense of the grotesque. Fittingly, everything gets worse as the night goes on and the rationality of the daylight fades away. It also moves closer to home, so we spend more time outside–in public spaces with witnesses–early on before moving back to a home that, far from being a safe shelter, is so incredibly violable that someone’s already in it by the time Ellen gets back.

The cast of characters is key here, and the episode assembles a high-quality rogues’ gallery: iconic character actor Percy Helton as the affable George the Janitor, who “smiles too much”; Reta Shaw as the brutally scornful neighbor Martha, giving her spite a fleshy, earthy weight; Harry Townes as Ellen’s slimy and slightly manic ex-boyfriend Ed. We could even include Steve Brodie as Steve, who starts the episode off in such a foul mood that we could see him, too, as on the edge of snapping. Later on, when he’s revealed as a mostly decent man, he’s the one who brings up how close to the surface potential violence always is: “Why do we do it, Ed? Why do we take it out on somebody else?”

Even as he’s grappling with that and recognizing his own potential monstrosity, he fails to recognize it in the person he’s talking to. Ellen knows who Ed is–“You like to hurt people, don’t you? I remember how frightened I was the first time I realized that”–but her husband doesn’t. The man a woman sees, alone in a relationship, is different from the man another man drinks with in a bar. At the end of the episode, when we’ve seen Ed break into Ellen’s apartment and manhandle and threaten her, when we’ve seen him turn up the radio to hide her screams, when we know he’s the kind of man she can only safely ask to leave in front of witnesses, it’s intentionally jarring to hear Steve still talk about him like he’s a nice guy who can keep Ellen safe.

What’s worse is that there’s something to it, as despicable as that is; it engages with the kind of threat evaluation calculus women are sometimes forced into. If she could know for sure that Ed wouldn’t kill her, would she keep him in the apartment after all? Would she risk an assault to possibly prevent a murder? It’s a dark question to be forced into.

As intimately disturbing as the Ed-Ellen “reunion” is, I wanted to highlight two performers:

The first, Alfred Linder, doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page: he only had a minor career in supporting roles, and not always in especially big productions. But he’s a key ingredient here as the shoemaker Ellen visits, and he’s maybe my favorite low-key disturbing element of the whole piece: the perfect way to embody and amp up her unease. (George does this a bit, but he’s such an obviously inappropriate Creeper candidate that he seems the likeliest red herring, which makes him more visible as a potential plot device than a shaper of the atmosphere.) Every bit of business he has is done well. I love that it starts off as entirely plausibly deniable in its creepiness. When he brings up the Creeper, is he trying to use a hot local news story to make small talk, or is he trying to juice her fear for his own entertainment? When he asks for her address, is it really to bring her husband’s shoes by himself, or does he want to stalk her? It’s only at the end of his scene when you get the beautifully weird bit of him tapping the card against his teeth, like he’s tasting the last bit of contact he had with her. Technically, even that could still be innocuous–it’s an understandable nervous habit–but Linder plays it with a shudder-inducing edge.

The other supporting actor highlight is Reta Shaw. Technically, like George, she’s particularly significant as a red herring–ooh, what if the Creeper were a woman?–but her venom makes her more than that. She doesn’t need to do any actual killing to make herself felt as this visceral, malignant force; whatever else she could prove, over this half hour, she is at best a woman who takes a vicious pleasure in other women’s misfortune. “I’ve nothing to be nervous about,” she says, savoring the news. “You don’t get murdered without a reason.” And that’s before she turns on Ellen specifically, looking at Ed’s departure and seeing not the aftermath of a near-rape but the aftermath of a seduction. Her willingness to allow Ellen to exist, always tentative and conditional, is redacted in a flash. It’s hard to imagine her ever repenting of this, either: she will cuddle Ellen’s misfortune close and cherish it. She’s Lottie from “The Baby Sitter” repainted in pitch-black, unsympathetic shades.

All in all, it’s more than enough to make us understand when Ellen wilts onto her sofa:

“I’m frightened enough already.”

“Of the Creeper?”

“I don’t even know anymore.”

The scariest thing isn’t that there’s a Creeper. It’s that anyone could be him, and that the potential for brutality is always simmering beneath the surface. The episode evokes that justifiable paranoia very well, building up a phenomenal sense of (again) nightmarish unease before finally giving us a dread-fueled climax. It may be minimalist in terms of plot, but it’s maximalist in terms of atmosphere and theme, and every performance is striking. While I singled out some of the minor players earlier, I also have nothing but praise for Constance Ford’s lead performance, too: she makes it heartbreaking to watch Ellen’s initially ordinary fright eventually fray her down until she feels like nothing but nerve endings.

The Twist: A relieved Ellen lets in the locksmith she’s been waiting for all episode, only to find out too late–via a frantic Steve, who called to check in on her–that she’s just invited in the Creeper. He kills her while Steve listens on in horror.

It’s a brutal, memorable, and incredibly well-staged ending. Once again, Herschel Daugherty–aided by an especially strong and thoughtful script by James Cavanagh–shows off his sense of pacing and scene construction, ratcheting up the viewer’s agony as Ellen leaves the receiver behind to open the door, letting us hear Steve when she cannot. The shot of the Creeper’s hands reaching into the frame (her frame: one last invasion of space) and wrapping around Ellen is downright chilling: perfectly composed for maximum dread. In the end, he’s not so much a specific man–if the episode has made anything clear, it’s that creeps are everywhere–but a specific (and deadly) action, so it makes sense that he ends up disembodied. An unwanted invasion of grasping power.

Directed by: Herschel Daugherty

Written by: Joseph Ruscoll (story) & James Cavanagh (teleplay)

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