The Stepfather (1987)Everybody wants a perfect life and a perfect family, but "Jerry Blake" (Terry O'Quinn) is willing to kill to make his fantasy a reality. The Stepfather (1987) is a horror movie--one which would eerily presage the arrest of killer John List two years later--about a man (Jerry) whose true identity is an unknown, who from the first scenes in the film is shown to be both a killer and a master of disguise. A year after a prior massacre, Jerry has settled into a new life in a suburb of Seattle, married Susan Maine (Shelley Hack), and become the eponymous stepfather of the disgruntled Stephanie (Jill Schoelen), who suspects not all is right with her new guardian...and she's more right than she could imagine.
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Jerry represents the supreme manifestation of every child's fear when faced with a "replacement" for a parent. And Jerry is also man so wholly consumed by an idea of a perfect family, that he desperate to achieve it at any cost, even if it means destroying said family. The Stepfather volunteers that Jerry is a psychopath from the start in one of the most chilling of introductions. Covered in blood, dressed in flannel with a beard, Jerry looks a bit like a psycho lumberjack. He is still shaking from his most recent rampage; he showers, shaves, trims his hair, and gets dressed in a three-piece suit. This transformation from the camouflage of rugged outdoors man to yuppie realtor emphasizes that while there may have once been a "Jerry", there is now just the concept of one, his variable personae foreshadowing Bret Easton Ellis' Patrick Bateman from "American Psycho", and later the film of the same name. Without the opening scene and his departure from the carnage wrought by his mania--his erstwhile family lying dead in pools of their own blood---we might be inclined to think that Stephanie's teenage angst and mistrust of Jerry is unfounded. This dramatic irony speaks to Terry O'Quinn's captivating and insidious performance as the totally likable Jerry, one that often tempts you to pretend you didn't see that bloody handprint smeared down the flowered wallpaper on the stairs. Without that crucial preamble, The Stepfather would appear to be little more than a melodrama at first about the struggle to reconstruct the family after the passing of Stephanie's late father. (With the exception of increasingly frequent episodes revealing Jerry's faltering sanity, the film is deliberately framed to suggest this.) The opening music to The Stepfather is emblematic of Eighties-era horror, with looming and uneasy synthesizers, giving way to an almost saccharine, TV-movie-esque score when we are introduced to Stephanie--as if someone changed the channel to shield us from Jerry's frenzy. Knowing what Jerry is makes us not only sympathetic to Stephanie's doubts, but an accomplice to her quest to uncover if her stepfather is the notorious killer, whose terrible past is resurrected in a local newspaper story. Stephanie's instinctive fear of Jerry comes from sensing something unwholesome from him, although she is largely ignored or dismissed out of hand. Even her therapist, Dr. Bondurant (Charles Lanyer), doubts her perception of Jerry at first, convinced her primal doubts are representative of the kind of confusion that teenagers like her experience with the loss of a parent.
Jerry is a cipher more than a person, someone who has become so consumed by his concept of what his perfect life should be that any threat to it must be attacked with extreme prejudice. Hints of Jerry's past are coyly teased through The Stepfather, such as an abusive upbringing--overly strict and likely violent. The words Jerry echoes--"got to have order around here"--sounds like something he might have heard his father say to him, just before receiving corporal punishment. Jerry's the kind of person who seems convinced that he has to do everything to please everyone, a sort of "violent submissiveness"...something also associated with abuse. This suggests why he is so adept at sales in any form, as he know just what to say to create a positive response in his audience. Jerry was likely raised on television as his principal parent; he quotes lines from "Mr. Ed" with glee, and his comment about "father knows best" immediately brings the image of a "flawless" family from the Fifties to mind. Even when the present is far from what he would like it to be--including Stephanie's lashing out at school and getting expelled as a result--he lies to maintain the illusion, describing her as a "straight A student" and "member of the student council". Even these white lies would seem innocent enough in a normal person, but in Jerry they portend a deeper psychological fixation, and a complete removal from reality. Jerry's concept of the world seems to fully orbit the model of a perfect family; when he shows houses, he comments about how the homes are best suited for a family like the one he has. He constructs an intricate birdhouse--that coincidentally resembles the home of the last family he destroyed--and comments, again, that he hopes a family of birds will move in and make it theirs. Jerry's alternating moments between frenzy at some threat to his delusion and his superficial sweetness suggest that he is actually more crazy than evil, but all the more deadly as a result. Even his lethal outbursts seem to come from indignation at an attack on the institution of the family more than having his dreaded past revealed. The doubly ironic tragedy of Jerry's serial killing is that for someone who professes to love the idea of a family, his actions are so wholly destructive to it. This is made evident in the wake of his prior identity as Henry "Hank" Morrison, where his surviving brother-in-law, Jim Ogilvie (Stephen Shellen) has become utterly consumed with revenge--tracking Jerry down, sifting through the condemned homestead of his late sister, dredging up this horror again and again for clues. I think the moment that sells the complete sadness of the psychosis of Jerry and the destruction which follows him is a quiet moment when he looks on at a family meeting on the lawn of a house he sold, and you sense that behind his fake contact lenses, deep down he wants that reality more than anything. But Jerry was already gone the moment he let his horrible mania consume him, and what is left is an unquiet phantom that must be exorcised.
Recommended for: Fans of a chilling horror movie and character study of a serial killer whose insanity makes him an example of the true worst-case scenario for a stepparent. The casting of Terry O'Quinn in The Stepfather is pure genius, as his kind and heartwarming personality is played as far against type as possible to provoke an unnerving sense of unease in the audience.
Jerry is a cipher more than a person, someone who has become so consumed by his concept of what his perfect life should be that any threat to it must be attacked with extreme prejudice. Hints of Jerry's past are coyly teased through The Stepfather, such as an abusive upbringing--overly strict and likely violent. The words Jerry echoes--"got to have order around here"--sounds like something he might have heard his father say to him, just before receiving corporal punishment. Jerry's the kind of person who seems convinced that he has to do everything to please everyone, a sort of "violent submissiveness"...something also associated with abuse. This suggests why he is so adept at sales in any form, as he know just what to say to create a positive response in his audience. Jerry was likely raised on television as his principal parent; he quotes lines from "Mr. Ed" with glee, and his comment about "father knows best" immediately brings the image of a "flawless" family from the Fifties to mind. Even when the present is far from what he would like it to be--including Stephanie's lashing out at school and getting expelled as a result--he lies to maintain the illusion, describing her as a "straight A student" and "member of the student council". Even these white lies would seem innocent enough in a normal person, but in Jerry they portend a deeper psychological fixation, and a complete removal from reality. Jerry's concept of the world seems to fully orbit the model of a perfect family; when he shows houses, he comments about how the homes are best suited for a family like the one he has. He constructs an intricate birdhouse--that coincidentally resembles the home of the last family he destroyed--and comments, again, that he hopes a family of birds will move in and make it theirs. Jerry's alternating moments between frenzy at some threat to his delusion and his superficial sweetness suggest that he is actually more crazy than evil, but all the more deadly as a result. Even his lethal outbursts seem to come from indignation at an attack on the institution of the family more than having his dreaded past revealed. The doubly ironic tragedy of Jerry's serial killing is that for someone who professes to love the idea of a family, his actions are so wholly destructive to it. This is made evident in the wake of his prior identity as Henry "Hank" Morrison, where his surviving brother-in-law, Jim Ogilvie (Stephen Shellen) has become utterly consumed with revenge--tracking Jerry down, sifting through the condemned homestead of his late sister, dredging up this horror again and again for clues. I think the moment that sells the complete sadness of the psychosis of Jerry and the destruction which follows him is a quiet moment when he looks on at a family meeting on the lawn of a house he sold, and you sense that behind his fake contact lenses, deep down he wants that reality more than anything. But Jerry was already gone the moment he let his horrible mania consume him, and what is left is an unquiet phantom that must be exorcised.
Recommended for: Fans of a chilling horror movie and character study of a serial killer whose insanity makes him an example of the true worst-case scenario for a stepparent. The casting of Terry O'Quinn in The Stepfather is pure genius, as his kind and heartwarming personality is played as far against type as possible to provoke an unnerving sense of unease in the audience.