The best way to sum up Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker is to say that it’s mesmerisingly weird – both in its plot and in its origins. It was directed by William Asher, who is better known for gentle TV comedy series such as I Love Lucy and Bewitched: this film is – to say the least – a change of pace. A domestic psychosexual horror which morphs into a slasher, it has a few echoes of Pete Walker here and there, but it’s very much still its own beast. It doesn’t move from the sublime to the ridiculous, but rather holds both in balance throughout its runtime. None of its given titles – Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker, Night Warning nor Protégé of Evil – really make sense, but that’s okay. That’s not really the point.
We start innocuously enough, with a family trip: two young parents are leaving their toddler son Billy in the capable hands of his loving aunt Cheryl (Susan Tyrrell) while they head off to visit grandma: all perfectly normal. However, soon there’s a (horribly protracted) problem: the car’s brakes don’t work. Being in an American car, dad probably can’t change down through the gears to slow himself down, though that’s not the only reason that both parents are killed as the car weaves from one side of the steep-sided mountain road to another. The upshot is that Billy is orphaned.
Fourteen years pass by, as they have a habit of doing. It seems that Aunt Cheryl stepped in to raise basketball-mad Billy, in a fairly comfortable middle-class home stacked with Catholic iconography and – photos of Billy. Aunt Cheryl is a little overbearing: clue number one. Clues number two and three are a little harder to miss: we see her rummaging through Billy’s wallet, less than happy to see that he has a condom in there, and then waking him up by purring in his ear. But for the moment, at least, Billy is none the wiser, because this is all he’s ever known. He has a few other things going on: there’s some jealousy and conflict in his basketball team with a guy called Eddie (a young Bill Paxton, who unfortunately disappears from proceedings rather early on). Then there’s girlfriend Julie (Julie Linden) and the odd squabble.
But the biggest problem for Billy, and one which we see blown up to immense proportions, is his error of growing up. He’s delighted when he gets a chance at a college sports scholarship: Cheryl is very much opposed to the idea, and it’s from this point that the veneer of domesticity begins to crack. Disaster (well, the first disaster) strikes on Billy’s birthday: Cheryl knifes a TV repairman after making a clumsy attempt to seduce him; by chance, as he’s looking through the window at the time, Billy finds himself complicit, and initially tries to cover for his aunt’s story – that the repairman tried to rape her, so she killed him in self-defence. This brings them into contact with Detective Carlson (Bo Svenson), a deeply unpleasant man who doubles up by being profoundly useless at his job, but his unstinting attention to the case definitely ups the ante in an already tense situation.
As Cheryl tries to reassert control, and as Carlson (together with the slightly less useless, albeit Safeguarding Awareness Course drop-out Sergeant Cook) continue investigating the repairman’s murder, Billy gets hit the hardest. Poor, sympathetic Billy, well played by Jimmy McNichol, who briefly ended up in light entertainment after Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker – appearing in The Love Boat). He gets caught between clashing moral attitudes, both his aunt’s and Carlson’s, so whilst the film is definitely a domestic horror, it stands in for a bigger picture, too. It’s hard not to use the word ‘microcosm’, so – here it is. Something very interesting here is how the normal and the functional intrude onto the dysfunctional, not the other way round: visits from Julie, or well-meaning neighbours, are what initially complicate things. The prospect of Billy heading off to have a normal life is total anathema to Cheryl. Carlson can’t allow himself to believe that Billy is ‘normal’, either.
This brings us to how fascinatingly unreconstructed the film is. It’s not all that unusual, of course, to see and hear things in older films which wouldn’t fly today, and in a way this is all part of the time capsule effect which we get so often in films of this vintage, and older. But still, look at the way Carson interrogates Cheryl on her marital status, designating her as a lesbian when it turns out she’s neither married nor divorced. Then there’s his immense paranoia about Billy’s sexuality, reflecting casual and institutional homophobia in increasingly pig-headed, unpalatable ways. But, hey, these attitudes are still around, and Coach Landers (Steve Eastin) is one of the film’s sole decent, measured individuals, despite being threatened and outed by Carlson as a ‘fag’. It’s clear we’re meant to see Carlson as just as dangerous as Cheryl in several respects, and to understand that he has the weight of powerful institutions behind him, too. One monster facilitates the behaviour of the other, when it comes down to it.
In terms of performances, though, Svenson may be good, but Tyrrell is brilliant. Going from inappropriately flirtatious, to overwrought, to authoritarian, she dominates the screen. Sure, some of the final act exposition could use a little more work, and the film’s slasher mode shifts things quite a long way from where we started, but Cheryl is always queasily interesting to watch, giving a very physical performance. Nothing is phoned in. Representing something of the warped maternal drive which has been used to designate psychotic females for generations, she adds something else – societal expectations around marriage, and childbearing, are brought to bear here too. Carson speaks for some of these, but it runs deeper than that.
Little wonder that this title ended up on the DPP 39 Video Nasties list – it’s basically a shopping list of all the elements that the 80s censors disliked enough to prohibit. Still, Severin have stepped up and put together a phenomenal presentation here: the film looks very much of its era but colourful and crisp. There’s a wealth of extras, too: audio commentaries, interviews with stars and crew, a cinematic trailer and a TV spot. It comes highly recommended. Take a look.
Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker was released on 4K UHD/Blu-ray on 13th May 2024.