Sisters (1972)
HORROR-THON 2020 • POD PEOPLE
7/10
DIRECTOR: Brian De Palma
STARRING: Margot Kidder, Jennifer Salt, Charles Durning
RELEASED: 1972
RUNTIME: 1 hour, 33 minutes
WATCH ON: HBO Max, Tubi
SCARE LEVEL: High tension, a couple of wince moments
BEST WATCHED: With someone you can grab during the split screen
This is Brian De Palma openly auditioning to be the next Hitchcock. He even hired Hitchcock’s composer. The funny part is he pulls it off and takes it somewhere Hitchcock never would have.
Danielle, a model and actress played by Margot Kidder, meets a guy named Philip on a tacky hidden-camera game show. They go on a date, and he ends up at her Staten Island apartment. The next morning, Danielle’s twin sister, Dominique, is supposedly in the next room. Philip gets a knife to the body.
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Across the street, a reporter named Grace sees the murder happen through the window. She calls the police. By the time they show up, the apartment is spotless and Danielle is all sweet with confusion. The body is literally inside the couch.
The cops shrug her off, so Grace hires a private investigator and starts digging into the twins’ past. It gets weirder from here: an asylum, some very unethical doctors, and a hypnosis sequence that goes somewhere I did not see coming.
MY HUMBLE OPINION
The murder sequence is shot in split screen. On one side, the killer cleans up; on the other, Grace watches and makes calls. You’re stuck watching both clocks at once, and the tension is unbearable in the best way. Bernard Herrmann’s score is doing a lot of the work, and I’m fine with that. It’s pure shrieking-strings panic, and it tells you exactly how to feel.
Grace is my favorite part. She’s a journalist who knows what she saw, and every man in the room treats her like she’s being hysterical. The real horror is her fighting for an hour to be believed. Something that hits a little too close to home.
The last act is a fever dream in grainy black and white. Some of it hasn’t aged gracefully, and some of it is so strange you have to respect it. The final shot is a man in the middle of nowhere watching a couch through binoculars. It’s one of the most deadpan endings in horror.
Fun Fact for Your Next Dinner Party
One of the film’s producers doubted anyone could be stuffed into a sofa bed, so Brian De Palma did it in one shot to show “you can, in fact, fit someone into the sofa bed.”