The Night Digger (1971)

An aging spinster (Patricia Neal) leads a suffocating and dreary life taking care of her demanding, blind mother (Pamela Brown) in a rundown mansion. Into their lives comes a young drifter (Nicholas Clay) who the mother takes in as he fixes the house and garden in exchange for room and board. Neal slowly falls in love with the young drifter, unaware he is a dangerous serial killer. Based on the novel NEST IN A FALLEN TREE by Joy Cowley with a screenplay by Roald Dahl (CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY) and directed by Alastair Reid (SHOUT AT THE DEVIL). This twisted tale of deviance and a bizarre May-December romance plays out as a horror movie for most of its running time but director Alastair Reid and writer Dahl switch gears towards the end and give us a darkly perverse love story instead. Aided immeasurably by a marvelously atmospheric score by the great Bernard Herrmann and a strong central performance by Neal, the film manages to hold one's interest despite the uneven narrative which seems to be fighting itself as to which way it should go ... Hitchcockian thriller or Polanskian perversity and ends up neither fish nor fowl. With Jean Anderson and Yootha Joyce.