The Stranger Within Proved Richard Matheson a Genre Genius Even on an off Day

From 1969 to 1975, ABC put out weekly films. They functioned as TV pilots, testing grounds for up-and-coming filmmakers, and places for new and old stars to shine. Every month, Chloe Walker revisits one of these movies. This is Movie of the Week (of the Month).

William Shatner menaced by a gremlin outside his airplane, 20,000 feet in the air? That was him. Dennis Weaver menaced by an enormous truck all across the Californian desert? That was him too. He tortured Karen Black with a sentient doll, and a shrunken Grant Williams with a monstrously-sized house cat. (And audiences with his screenplay for Jaws 3-D!) Besides Stephen King, who has often cited him as an influence, is there another genre writer who had such an impact on movie and TV audiences in the second half of the 20th century as Richard Matheson? 

There’s a reciprocity to that relationship. Matheson has spoken about how “most of [his] ideas have come from films,” and the way he uses cinematic what-ifs as jumping-off points for his own writing. (On turning Dracula into I Am Legend: “If one vampire was scary, what if the whole world was full of vampires?”) The result is a body of work, both written and filmed, of unusual vividness, with grabby concepts fleshed out into stories of surprising depth and resonance.

Richard Matheson’s first feature screenplay was for 1957’s The Incredible Shrinking Man (based on his own novel). From then on, he was a mainstay on screens big and small, all the way up until his death in 2013—and, fittingly for a master of the spooky story, his influence extended even beyond the grave, with the Shatner/gremlin story adapted in Jordan Peele’s recent Twilight Zone series, and another I Am Legend adaptation currently in development. 

Much of Matheson’s 1960s were spent on Twilight Zone episodes (he penned 16, more than anyone except creator Rod Serling and his sometime-collaborator Charles Beaumont), screenwriting for the Roger Corman/Vincent Price/Edgar Allen Poe movie cycle, and some of the most underrated Hammer movies. If you were watching something spooky or suspenseful during the decade, there was a good chance that Richard Matheson had a hand in it. 

So it stands to reason that when the 1970s rolled around, he would gravitate toward the ABC Movie of the Week, which continuously excelled in the genre space in which he was so comfortable. Matheson wrote eight MOTWs in all, including the aforementioned Duel and Trilogy of Terror; the Dick Van Dyke alcoholism drama The Morning After, and The Night Stalker/The Night Strangler duo, which would go on to become the short-lived series Kolchak. 

The Stranger Within is actually one of Matheson’s least well-regarded ABC MOTWs, so the fact that it’s still tight and tense and full of surprises is an indicator of just how good he was at what he did. 

When Ann (Barbara Eden) discovers she’s pregnant one day, her main reaction is bafflement. Her husband David (George Grizzard) had a vasectomy three years earlier, to ensure her safety after a previous pregnancy nearly killed her. She’s not slept with anyone else during the entirety of their marriage. What’s going on?

Considering what happened last time she was pregnant, David really thinks she should have an abortion, but he respects her autonomy. He does his best to quash his suspicions around the paternity of the baby, too. He loves Ann, and he wants to trust her. But when her behavior begins turning very, very strange—she pours an ungodly amount of salt on all her food, keeps the thermostat below 50, devours whole books within a matter of minutes—David starts to wonder if his paternity suspicions should be resting not with another man, but with another entity altogether.

Although six years had passed since the release of Rosemary’s Baby, the film cast a long shadow over the entertainment landscape (see another MOTW, The Devil’s Daughter, released the year before The Stranger Within). The intersection of women’s bodies and the unknown things they may produce proved fertile horror territory for the still overwhelmingly male establishment. When you factor in the freshly inked Roe vs. Wade decision, it’s no wonder that so many of the ABC MOTWs were preoccupied with pregnancy. Nevertheless, the Matheson novelette he adapted into the MOTW, Mother By Protest AKA Trespass, was actually written in 1953 (more than a decade before Rosemary’s Baby), and that reflects the emotional depth running through a movie that doesn’t feel like it’s purely jumping on the cultural bandwagon. 

There are two main quandaries to The Stranger Within. The first and most genre-fitting: Just what is Ann brewing in there? The second, though, is arguably even more interesting. 

TV movies are traditionally home to husbands that are more monstrous than the actual monsters; in comparison, David is almost distractingly kind. You cannot begrudge him being at least a little suspicious that Ann has cheated, considering the wealth of evidence suggesting so, and his eventual willingness to trust her even as that trust seems to fly in the face of basic biology is really quite touching. As we’re waiting to see what makes its way out of Ann’s belly, Matheson’s screenplay has us reflecting: Could we trust the ones we love that much? So much that it doesn’t really make sense? The way those two questions work in harmony adds a texture and humanity to The Stranger Within that sets it apart from the pregnancy panic pack.

As Ann’s pregnancy progresses at an unnerving speed (by the time she’s three-and-a-half months along, the fetus is seven months developed) her behavior becomes all the more erratic. Barbara Eden is asked to play many different shades here, and even as her performance gets bigger and more alien, the flickers she gives of a scared woman taken over by an unknowable entity keep her turn grounded in emotional realism. And although David has little to do but look upon the whole process in mounting horror, the way George Grizzard radiates decency and genuine, loving concern does a lot to keep us invested. However bizarre the events get, it’s easy to believe in the couple that are facing them. 

That pitting of regular people against the terror of the unknown was a Matheson hallmark. It’s worth noting how Ann and David have no agency here. She’s subject to the whims of the “baby.” He can do nothing to help her, however much he wants to. They have even less control than Dennis Weaver does against the demon truck in Duel, or William Shatner against the gremlin in “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” All they can do is wait, and hope they survive whatever happens in the end. 

Matheson didn’t think much of The Stranger Within. In a 2002 interview with the Television Academy he said, “I wasn’t crazy about it; I didn’t like the way it was directed…I thought it was miscast…She [Barbara Eden] was okay, I thought she did quite a good job, and her husband I thought was good, the rest of the people I didn’t care for. I didn’t care for…the pace of it, the way it ended.”

He wasn’t wrong about most of what he said. Lee Philips’ direction is largely flat and uninteresting, with visual flourishes pretty much confined to the many shots of billowing curtains. The supporting actors are not particularly good, but their parts are so peripheral to the story that it doesn’t really matter. The narrative is pacier in the first half than the second, but once you get to the ending—and on that subject, Matheson was dead wrong—that doesn’t matter too much either. The ending, one of the few visually striking sequences of The Stranger Within, underlines the unknowability of the whole situation with a haunting beauty, leaving us in a mesmerizing fog of ambiguity that lingers beyond the closing credits. 

Still, Matheson wrote such a proliferation of movies and TV shows, and had such a lot of his pre-existing work adapted into them, it’s telling that he remembers one of the least heralded in significant detail. It’s also interesting to reflect upon how someone with decades of experience in the film and TV industries never once ventured into the director’s chair himself (though he does have two associate producer credits, on 1963’s The Comedy of Terrors and 1977’s The Strange Possession of Mrs. Oliver). After mentioning his frequent disappointment with the direction and acting in his projects in the Television Academy interview, the interviewer asks if he’d ever considered directing.

“I thought about it for a time,” Matheson said. “This agent said if all you’re going to do is direct and protect your writing, don’t do it, and I discovered consequently that that’s the only reason you should go into directing: To protect your own writing. Why else go into directing, unless you want to be a director? But I never did…I’m a homebody, I like to stay home and write my scripts.” 

Matheson wrote 29 novels, over 100 short stories and a vast array of teleplays over his career; he clearly valued the time to create such a gargantuan output—ultimately, he was just too prolific to afford to be protective over each one of his many adapted projects. It seems inevitable that the movie playing in his head as he was writing rarely matched up to the one that actually made it to our screens, and over his long time in the business, that was a reality he learned—albeit, grudgingly—to live with. And yet as this month’s Movie of the Week shows, even the projects Matheson considered disappointments were often full of merit. There could hardly be a better testament to a writer so often adapted for the screen that even his reject pile contains films as engaging and atmospheric as The Stranger Within.

Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.