Taglines: Have you ever been scared out of your wits?
See No Evil movie storyline. In the countryside of England, Sarah returns to Manor Farm to live with her uncle George Rexton, her aunt Sandy Rexton and her cousin Betty Rexton after an accident with her horse where she was blind. Sarah knows the interior of the house by heart so she can independently move by herself. When her former boyfriend Steve Reding invites her to visit his horse farm, George and Sandy tell that they are going to visit a friend and Betty tells that she has a date so she will be alone for a couple of hours when she returns to the house.
Steve still loves Sarah and they ride together in the fields. When Sarah returns, a maniac has killed her family and the gardener Barker but she cannot see them dead. On the next morning, Steve gives a horse to Sarah and she leaves the animal in the stable. When she returns to the manor, she finds that her family was murdered and Barker that is still alive shows her a silver bracelet on the floor with the name of the killer. He tells that she is in danger since the killer will return to the manor to retrieve the bracelet. Barker dies and the killer comes back to the house. Will the frightened Sarah flee from him?
See No Evil, also known as Blind Terror, is a 1971 psychological horror-thriller film directed by Richard Fleischer and starring Mia Farrow as a recently-blinded woman who is stalked by a psychopath while staying at her family’s rural estate. Other starring are Dorothy Alison, Robin Bailey, Diane Grayson, Brian Rawlinson, Norman Eshley, Paul Nicholas, Michael Elphick, Christopher Matthews, Lila Kaye and Barrie Houghton.
Interviewed in 1997, writer Brian Clemens recalled that he wrote the script ‘on spec’ and Columbia Pictures told him: “‘Well, if Mia Farrow plays the lead, we’ll buy it,’ and she read it and liked it, and so they bought it and we shot it.'” The film was a co-production between the United Kingdom and the United States. Filming took place in Berkshire, England, with a mainly British cast and crew.
Film Review for See No Evil
YOU couldn’t move for so called ‘women in peril’ thrillers in the late 60s and early 70s. British cinema screens of the time were rammed with tales of vulnerable young women being pursued relentlessly in claustrophobic settings by crazy psycho killers. These stark but effective little affairs were usually short and tense and resembled something Alfred Hitchcock might have tossed off in an afternoon if he was in the mood to make an Italian Giallo thriller.
Director Richard Fleischer’s See No Evil (or, to give it its British title, Blind Terror) from 1971 is a perfect example of this short-lived trend. Written by master TV scribe Brian Clemens – whose Thriller TV series from the same era mined similarly sordid themes week in and week out – it’s a note-perfect reflection of early 1970s Britain in all its grim glory.
Everything is shot through a shimmering haze of grimy flock wall papered boozers, well-to-do country piles and simmering class resentment. Mia Farrow is Sarah, a young blind woman who returns to the scene of the riding accident that blinded her to recuperate with her wealthy aunt and uncle in their country mansion. The future Mrs Woody Allen is at her post Rosemary’s Baby vulnerable best here and she slowly cranks up the hysteria with impressive ease.
An old flame (played by Norman Eshley) calls by to help Sarah get over her trauma by taking her out on horseback once again, but as the couple head off riding across the fields, a psycho who has been stalking the family – and who we’ve only seen via a series of close-ups of their fancy cowboy boots (that Italian Giallo thriller debt again) – slips into the house and, thankfully off camera, butchers everyone there.
Once the timid Sarah returns, the real horror begins, as she innocently tramps around the house blissfully unaware various family members are lying in bloodstained messes all over the place. A sequence where she runs a bath for herself only to feel for a plug and find the naked corpse of her uncle instead is genuinely horrific, and the tension increases further when she discovers an identity bracelet the killer has left behind.
With his return imminent, the traumatised Sarah jumps on a horse and tries to make good her escape. There’s fun to be had guessing which of the parade of surly stable hands and hangers-on might be responsible, and there are a group of travellers living nearby who are initially blamed for it all – but the actual identity of the cowboy boots-clad assailant is kept secret until the final moments.
Sometimes dismissively compared to the undeniably similar but more complex 1967 thriller Wait Until Dark which gave Audrey Hepburn the tormented blind woman central role, See No Evil is very much its own beast and deserves a much better reputation than it currently has. Cold, genuinely tense and exhausting to watch this is a mini-masterpiece of mood and atmosphere.
See No Evil (1971)
Directed by: Richard Fleischer
Starring: Mia Farrow, Dorothy Alison, Robin Bailey, Diane Grayson, Brian Rawlinson, Norman Eshley, Paul Nicholas, Michael Elphick, Christopher Matthews, Lila Kaye, Barrie Houghton
Screenplay by: Brian Clemens
Production Design by:
Cinematography by: Gerry Fisher
Film Editing by: Thelma Connell
Set Decoration by: Hugh Scaife
Art Direction by: John Hoesli
Music by: Elmer Bernstein
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Columbia Pictures
Release Date: September 2, 1971
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