There are few things more dangerous than accepting a job looking after a rich old white man in a massive isolated house. You’d think horror movies would have taught people this by now. The moment somebody says there’s a locked room upstairs, a mentally unstable relative living in it, and a family history that could probably fill several police reports, the sensible response is to turn around, collect your handbag, and get the fuck out. Unfortunately, Meredith Stone (Patricia Pearcy) is not a sensible person.
Delusion is an early-’80s psychological slasher that sits somewhere between a gothic mystery, psychological thriller, and fairly restrained stalk-and-kill movie. It isn’t particularly interested in the sort of blood-soaked excess that would soon become commonplace in the slasher genre; instead, it takes its sweet fucking time establishing its characters and letting the atmosphere do most of the work. That makes it a bit of an oddity, particularly when you come to it expecting a conventional slasher.
Meredith is a nurse who takes a job caring for the elderly and wealthy Ivar Langrock (Joseph Cotten) at his Fairlawn estate. She’s welcomed by Ivar’s butler Phillip (Leon Charles) and his attorney Jeffrey (David Hayward), but almost immediately becomes fascinated by a locked room upstairs, where Ivar’s mentally challenged son Wilfred (Patrick Pankhurst) is being kept. Meredith develops a friendship with Ivar, while also revealing some pretty horrific details about her own family history, including her mother’s institutionalisation and her father’s bad touch.
Things become considerably more complicated when Ivar’s grandson Gabriel (John Dukakis) arrives at the estate following the accidental death of his parents. Gabriel has spent much of his life living on a commune in Arizona and wastes very little time making Meredith uncomfortable with his sexual advances. Shortly afterwards, the bodies start piling up, beginning with Gabriel’s dog being found hanging from a tree and Wilfred apparently throwing himself from his bedroom window.
From there, Delusion gradually turns into a whodunit. Phillip is crushed beneath a wine rack and beaten with a table leg, although the police initially dismiss his death as an accident. Jeffrey isn’t convinced and immediately starts pointing the finger at Gabriel. Then a detective (James Purcell) arrives at the estate, only to wind up dead himself, followed by gardener Alex (Abraham Alvarez), who gets attacked after discovering the detective’s body. It’s all fairly low-key stuff, but there’s a growing sense that somebody inside Fairlawn is responsible and that Meredith might be in considerably more danger than she realises.
The film’s deliberately subdued approach is probably going to be the biggest hurdle for anyone coming to it expecting a typical slasher. There aren’t many kills, and even when people are murdered the violence is generally brief rather than spectacular. This is much more interested in suspicion, character relationships and the question of who the fuck is actually responsible than it is in finding increasingly elaborate ways to murder people. And I quite like that about it.
There’s something appealing about the slightly stuffy atmosphere of Delusion. Fairlawn is exactly the sort of old mansion you’d expect to find in a psychological horror film, with locked rooms, strange family secrets, and people wandering around at night who probably shouldn’t be wandering around at night. The film doesn’t bombard you with scares, instead allowing the house and its inhabitants to gradually become more unsettling.
It also benefits enormously from its cast. Joseph Cotten brings a bit of genuine old-school gravitas to Ivar, and there’s something wonderfully strange about seeing a veteran of the likes of Citizen Kane and The Third Man wandering around an early-’80s slasher. Patricia Pearcy is also good as Meredith, particularly because the film gradually makes you question just how reliable her perspective actually is. John Dukakis gives Gabriel the right mixture of sleaze and instability, while David Hayward’s Jeffrey becomes increasingly important as the mystery starts closing in around Meredith.
And then the film pulls the rug out. Jeffrey discovers that Meredith’s story about her mother doesn’t quite add up. He has visited the hospital where she claimed her mother was being treated and discovered that her mother actually died while giving birth to Meredith. He then reveals that Meredith had been institutionalised for murdering her father, who had molested her, and accuses her of being responsible for the murders at Fairlawn.
Meredith responds to this revelation by attacking him with the same fucking table leg that’s already done more work than most of the cast. Thus revealing that she is the killer. The twist is hardly revolutionary now, and even contemporary critics were divided over it, with some considering it derivative. But it does at least give the preceding events another interpretation, and the film wisely doesn’t completely hammer the explanation into your skull. Meredith eventually attacks Ivar before he knocks her unconscious with his cane, and the film closes with her narrating her letter to her father, suggesting that perhaps she’ll return to Fairlawn one day to look after Ivar. It’s an appropriately strange ending to a strange little film.
Delusion isn’t a particularly exciting slasher, and anyone looking for buckets of gore or inventive death scenes is likely to come away disappointed. It’s slow, occasionally frustrating and far more interested in its psychological mystery than its murders. But there’s something quite charming about its deliberately old-fashioned approach, particularly now that so many obscure early-’80s slashers are remembered purely for their body count.
This is more of a subdued psychological thriller that happens to have a handful of murders than a full-blooded slasher. It won’t blow your fucking head off, but the combination of Joseph Cotten, the creepy old house, the increasingly murky family history, and the psychological twist makes Delusion an interesting curio from the early days of the slasher boom. It’s not a classic, but it’s certainly more interesting than its obscurity might suggest.
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