SPOILER ALERT!
THE OTHER 1972
When I first saw The Other during its theatrical release in 1972, it left an imprint I’ve never quite shaken. The film washed over me with a beauty so haunting it hurt—a quiet devastation that crept in on the golden light of a sunny yet somber afternoon and lingered long after the credits faded. The film still has that effect on me. There was something almost unbearable in its tenderness, the way innocence unraveled into horror, each frame both a lullaby and a warning. I remember sitting in the dark, feeling as if the screen itself was breathing with sorrow and secrets, the story’s pain blooming inside me until it became somehow my own.
Even now, the memory of that first viewing feels like a bruise you press just to remind yourself it’s real: disturbing, yes, but also mesmerizing, impossible to look away from. It’s a film that compels me to return, to dig deeper, to give it the space it deserves at The Last Drive In—a place where I can finally unravel its strange, poetic ache and share the way it changed the shape of my heart and the essence of horror cinema. I’ll be delving deeper into the hauntingly idyllic yet menacing landscape of The Other in an upcoming piece, stay tuned for a closer look into the secrets of the Perry family farm, where twin boys embody two halves of a haunted whole, two currents swirling in the same dark stream, two reflections in a warped mirror.
In the haunted hush of The Other (1972), Robert Mulligan conjures a psychological horror that unfolds like a lucid dream beneath the golden haze of a Connecticut summer. The film’s surface is all sunlit nostalgia: tire swings, dusty barns, and the slow rhythms of rural life in 1935. But beneath this pastoral veneer, darkness coils and waits, ready to seep through the cracks of innocence. Here, evil is not a thing that comes from outside, but a shadow that grows within—a little boy, a secret twin, a buried grief, and a game that turns deadly.
Thomas Tryon’s work as a writer is marked by a haunting lyricism and a meticulous, almost sculptural attention to detail. After leaving behind a successful acting career (Tryon starred in The Cardinal 1963, directed by Otto Preminger, where he played the lead role of Stephen Fermoyle, a young Catholic priest.. On a lighter note, Tryon brought new meaning to “out-of-this-world romance” in the 1950s sci-fi gem I Married a Monster from Outer Space 1958—proving that sometimes, the real mystery is what your husband’s hiding in the spaceship out in the woods!) Thomas Tryon turned to fiction with a focus on psychological horror and the Gothic, crafting stories that linger at the edge of the everyday and the uncanny.
His prose is richly descriptive, conjuring vivid landscapes, whether the sun-drenched Connecticut countryside of The Other or the secretive, ritual-laden villages of Harvest Home, and suffusing them with a sense of unease and hidden menace. The latter, The Dark Secret of Harvest Home, a two-part miniseries aired on NBC on January 23 and 24, 1978, adapts Thomas Tryon’s chilling novel for television, with Bette Davis delivering one of her most commanding late-career performances as the enigmatic Widow Fortune—the iron-willed herbalist and matriarch whose presence anchors the secretive, ritual-bound village of Cornwall Coombe. Harvest Home delves into the dark undercurrents of small-town life, blending neo-pagan folklore with psychological suspense in a way that would influence later writers and filmmakers. His collection Crowned Heads turns a similarly unflinching eye to the glamour and secrets of Hollywood, revealing the masks and duplicity beneath the surface.
Tryon’s novels often explore themes of identity, duality, loss, and the corruption of innocence. In The Other, the fragile boundary between reality and imagination becomes a source of dread, as the young Nile’s internal struggle manifests in the world around him.
Stylistically, Tryon’s writing is atmospheric, precise, and deeply psychological. He builds tension slowly, favoring suggestion and implication over shock, and his stories are often suffused with a sense of nostalgia tinged with a creeping darkness. Critics have noted his ability to juggle large casts of characters with internal consistency and to imbue even minor figures with memorable detail. His work is also confessional, sometimes drawing on his own experiences and inner conflicts, and can be read as part of the American Gothic tradition, where the fear of losing one’s sense of self is ever-present.
In the landscape of 1970s horror, Tryon stands out for his elegant restraint and psychological depth. His novels are not just stories of terror, but meditations on the secrets we keep, the selves we hide, and the darkness that can bloom in the most familiar, ordinary places.
The Other orbits Niles and Holland Perry, identical twins whose bond is so close it seems supernatural. Their world is shaped by loss: a father dead in a cellar accident, a mother (Diana Muldaur) bedridden by grief, and a grandmother, Ada (Uta Hagen), whose Russian mysticism and gentle wisdom offer Niles a fragile anchor. Ada teaches Niles an arcane ritual called “the game”—a kind of astral projection that lets him slip into the lives of others, even birds in flight, a gift that becomes a curse as the summer’s tragedies mount. The twins, played with eerie naturalism by Chris and Martin Udvarnoky, move through fields and orchards with cherubic faces yet a feral grace, their matching blonde hair and secret glances hinting at a world only they can see.
Accidents begin to haunt the Perry farm: a cousin impaled on a pitchfork, a neighbor dead of fright, a baby drowned in a wine barrel. Mulligan, best known for To Kill a Mockingbird 1963 and Summer of ’42 (1971), directs with a poet’s restraint, letting horror bloom in the margins. The camera lingers on wind-stirred curtains, sun-dappled grass, and the slow drift of dust motes in an empty barn; it also quietly tracks the secretive movements of a boy in the bloom of childhood as he slips, unseen, through the hidden corners of the Perry farm and the broader pastoral landscape that embraces the nearby farms and their neighbors.
Robert Mulligan’s direction in The Other elevates the film into a psychological masterpiece by masterfully blending the innocence of nostalgia with a mounting sense of dread. Much like he did in To Kill a Mockingbird, Mulligan brings a gentle, observational style to The Other, using the rhythms of everyday life and a child’s perspective to let innocence and menace quietly intertwine.
Rather than leaning into overt horror tropes, Mulligan crafts a world that, on its surface, evokes the gentle rhythms of a Depression-era coming-of-age tale—sunlit fields, boys at play, and the warmth of family routines. But this idyllic veneer is a deliberate misdirection: Mulligan uses it to lull us into a false sense of security, only to reveal the darkness festering beneath gradually.
His approach is subtle and deeply psychological. Mulligan’s camera lingers on the ordinary—games in the barn, quiet moments with the grandmother, the stillness of the farmhouse, inviting us to inhabit the emotional world of young Niles. Mulligan’s restraint is key: he resists sensationalism, instead letting tension build through suggestion, silence, and the uneasy interplay between characters. The result is a pervasive sense of unease, as we become attuned to the small cracks in the film’s nostalgic façade
Mulligan’s greatest achievement is how he externalizes the film’s central psychological conflict. He draws natural, unaffected performances from the Udvarnoky twins, making the “good twin/bad twin” dynamic feel heartbreakingly real. Scenes unfold with a quiet intimacy that makes the eventual revelations all the more devastating. The director’s use of ‘on-screen’ sound—simple, natural noises like wind, footsteps, and distant voices—heightens the isolation and internal turmoil of the characters, especially as the story’s supernatural undertones begin to surface.
Ultimately, with his careful, understated guidance, Mulligan’s direction of The Other offers us not just a chilling film but a haunting exploration of hidden truths, a study in contrasts: sunlight and shadow, innocence and guilt, reality and delusion. By refusing to romanticize his characters or the era, he creates a claustrophobic atmosphere where the true horror is psychological, rooted in grief, repression, and the blurred boundaries between self and other.
Cinematographer Robert Surtees bathes the film in a luminous melancholy, every frame a study in contrasts—light and shadow, innocence and guilt, the living and the dead. Surtees was known for his innovative use of lighting and camera techniques, adapting his style to suit each film’s needs, whether lush Technicolor epics, gritty black-and-white dramas, or modern widescreen productions. His work is marked by a painterly attention to color, light, and composition—he could evoke sweeping grandeur in films like Ben-Hur and King Solomon’s Mines, or intimate psychological tension in The Graduate and The Last Picture Show. Surtees won three Academy Awards (Oscars) for Best Cinematography during his career. He received Oscars for his work on King Solomon’s Mines (1950), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), and Ben-Hur (1959).
He was a master of both spectacle and subtlety, able to create immersive, atmospheric visuals that served the story above all else. Surtees’s style is often described as chameleon-like: he brought a distinct visual identity to each project, whether through lavish location photography, expressive use of negative space, or nuanced lighting that heightened mood and character.
Robert Surtees’ cinematography in The Other does more than capture the surface beauty of rural Connecticut—it’s deeply psychological and emotionally charged, shaping how we experience the story’s innocence and dread. His lens bathes the landscape in a nostalgic, sunlit glow, evoking the wistfulness of childhood memories and the illusion of safety. But beneath this golden veneer, Surtees subtly unsettles us: the camera lingers just a little too long on empty fields or quiet spaces, making the familiar feel uncanny and hinting at the darkness threading through everyone’s lives.
Jerry Goldsmith stands alone as my favorite composer—his music doesn’t just stir emotion; it resonates with me on a deeper, more elusive frequency, moving me beyond sentiment into something profound and ineffable. His melodies linger in my psyche, awakening feelings that words can’t quite reach.
For The Other, Goldsmith’s score is a minor-key lullaby, its gentle unease winding through the film like a half-remembered nursery rhyme. Each note seems to hang in the air like mist over a golden summer field—beautiful, yes, but edged with sorrow, as if the music itself is mourning something it cannot name. In The Other, Goldsmith doesn’t just underscore the narrative; he breathes life into its shadows, weaving a spell of longing and liminal otherworldliness. His music is the film’s secret language—evocative, haunting, and utterly inescapable.
The acting is quietly devastating. Uta Hagen, in one of her rare film roles, brings warmth and gravity as Ada, her love for Niles tinged with anguish and forboding as she begins to glimpse the truth. The twins are remarkable: Chris Udvarnoky’s Niles is all wide-eyed vulnerability, while Martin’s Holland flickers at the edge of the frame, a phantom of mischief and malice. The supporting cast includes Victor French, John Ritter, Jenny Sullivan, and Lou Frizzell, not to mention Diana Muldaur, who brings a quiet, aching vulnerability to the role of Alexandra, the twins’ incapacitated mother, grounding the story in a lived-in reality, their performances understated but deeply felt.
Key scenes unfold with a kind of dream logic: the twins’ secret rituals in the barn, the grandmother’s desperate attempt to save Niles from himself, the final conflagration that leaves the family farm blackened and cursed. The film’s great twist—that Holland has been dead since spring, and Niles, unable to bear the loss, has kept his brother alive through “the game”—arrives not as a cheap shock, but as a slow, dawning horror. The revelation is less about the supernatural than about the wounds of grief and the perilous power of imagination.
The Other intentionally leaves the question of the supernatural ambiguous. The narrative blurs the line between psychological disturbance and genuine supernatural influence, never fully revealing whether Niles is simply taking on Holland’s malevolent nature as a coping mechanism for grief and trauma or if he is actually channeling his dead twin’s spirit through “the game” taught by Ada.
Throughout the film, Niles commits a series of increasingly disturbing acts, attributing them to Holland, much like a dissociative split or a child’s desperate attempt to avoid facing his own actions. The story is told entirely from Niles’s perspective, which is itself unreliable, further complicating the truth of what’s happening. The presence of “the game”—a form of astral projection or psychic play—adds a layer of supernatural possibility, but the film never confirms whether this is real or simply the product of Niles’s imagination and psychological unraveling.
There are specific moments, such as Ada’s confrontation with Niles at Holland’s grave and the surreal, dreamlike tone of the final scenes, that reinforce this ambiguity. We are is left to wonder: Is Niles possessed, delusional, or both? Is Holland’s influence a literal haunting, or the manifestation of Niles’s fractured psyche?
In the end, the film’s refusal to provide a clear answer is part of what makes it so haunting and enduring. The horror lingers precisely because it is unresolved, leaving us to grapple with the possibility that the true evil may lie within, or just beyond the veil of reality.
Mulligan’s film stands apart from the more sensational horror of its era. It eschews gore and jump scares for something quieter and more insidious: the terror of what we carry inside, the violence that can bloom in the most beautiful places. In the landscape of 1970s horror, it is an underappreciated outlier—a film that draws its power from suggestion, atmosphere, and the ache of loss. Its images linger: a ring wrapped in a handkerchief, a boy’s face reflected in a well, a barn consumed by fire. By the end, the sunlit fields are stripped of innocence, the pastoral dream transformed into a nightmarish reverie.
The Other is a film of haunted silences and poisoned summers, a story where evil wears the face of a child and the greatest horrors are the ones we cannot see. It is a minor-key masterpiece, as beautiful as it is disturbing—a ghost story whispered in broad daylight, and a reminder that sometimes the scariest monsters are those we invent to survive.
