After airing on The ABC Friday Night Movie, The Babysitter (1980) achieved cult status via its VHS release in the early eighties. The film casts a pre-Remington Steele Stephanie Zimbalist as Joanna, the eighteen year old psychotic orphan looking for a family. The Babysitter is, as far as made-for-TV movies of this period are concerned, a superior thriller whose main strength is in the direction by Peter Medak. Medak followed-up his classic film The Changeling (1980) with The Babysitter and imbues the latter film with the same ominous atmosphere and slowly escalating tension.
The Stephanie Zimbalist character Joanna is motivated by the traumas of abandonment and rejection that she experienced during a lifetime in foster care. But the horrors and thrills of The Babysitter don’t revolve around these emotional experiences but rather around the fear that a family member or co-dependent is capable of abuse. As Joanna manipulates her way into the family of Dr. Benedict (William Shatner) and his wife Liz (Patty Duke Astin) she drives a wedge between the couple, making each wholly dependent upon her. The human need for intimacy and trust is what Joanna preys upon and any threat to either is met with passive aggressive emotional violence.
Although these themes are universal, The Babysitter frames them from a masculine perspective. The dramatic beats of the thriller genre coincide with Joanna’s seduction of Dr. Benedict and the coalition that Joanna forms with Liz and Liz’s daughter Tara (Quinn Cummings) against Dr. Benedict. Liz and Tara may suffer the bulk of Joanna’s abuse, but it is the weight of Joanna’s manipulations against Dr. Benedict that drive the narrative forward. The anxieties that The Babysitter exploits as a thriller target straight, heterosexual white males with families.
The John Houseman character Dr. Lindquist’s role in The Babysitter is imported directly from John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). Lindquist fills the same niche as Dr. Loomis which suggests that Joanna is somehow akin to Michael Myers. Though both antagonists may be sociopathic, the sphere of Joanna’s violence is predominantly emotional as opposed to Myers’ physicality. When Joanna kills it is done subtly to look like an accident. The horror of Michael Myers is that he is some supernatural force of evil while Joanna is a very human and familiar type of monster.
The Babysitter, when viewed today, may be an acquired taste reserved for cult movie aficionados but there is no getting around the fact that Stephanie Zimbalist’s performance is awesome. Zimbalist balances a cold and very real cruelty with a campy after-school special warmth as Joanna manipulates the Benedicts. It is her performance that carries The Babysitter and really sells the duplicity and deceptions required of the Joanna character. The Babysitter still frightens more than forty years later, remaining superior to its remakes and imitators.
