ABCs of Horror 3: “I” Is for Intruder (1989)

Paste’s ABCs of Horror 3 is a 26-day project that highlights some of our favorite horror films from each letter of the alphabet. The only criteria: The films chosen can’t have been used in our previous Century of Terror, a 100-day project to choose the best horror film of every year from 1920-2019, nor previous ABCs of Horror entries. With many heavy hitters out of the way, which movies will we choose?

Director Scott Spiegel’s Intruder, in a sentence, is like the greatest slasher film of 1981 to come out in … 1989.

In response to a statement like that, it’s perfectly understandable to ask how much difference such a relatively small gap in time would actually make. Film geeks and even general horror fans often think of the 1980s as a broad period that contained the slasher movie boom, without realizing quite how much that period is stratified into “early” and “late” eras, which catered to a rapidly evolving viewer base. Suffice to say, the state of the slasher film in the beginning of the 1980s was very different–much more grounded, sincere and earnestly shocked by its own bloodlust–than the more imaginatively silly excess and increasing self-parody that marked so many entries in the genre by the decade’s end.

Look no further for a case study in this phenomenon than a franchise like the iconic Friday the 13th, which kicked off the commercial slasher boom by luridly capitalizing on so many of the elements that Carpenter’s Halloween had helped to codify. In 1980, and through the first handful of sequels in 1981, 1982 and 1984, the series is content to hang around Crystal Lake and run through the motions without ever quite committing to killing off its hulking brute of an antagonist, recognizing that doing so would be discarding a potent cash cow. But after finally doing so in 1984’s Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, the back half of the decade starts evolving the series in rapid, increasingly outlandish fashion. By 1986 (Part VI: Jason Lives), Jason Voorhees is now an indestructible, undead golem. By 1988 (Part VII: The New Blood), he’s being opposed by a telekinetic heroine, in a direct parody of Carrie. And in 1989 (Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan) he’s appearing to a young woman via empathic visions of his young, deformed self, even as he stalks high school students aboard a “cruise ship” to New York City. Even Camp Crystal Lake had finally been discarded, along with most semblances of what a Friday the 13th movie previously looked like.

Intruder, on the other hand, is a film you’d watch and swear that it had to be a relic of 1980 or 1981, only to be shocked that it rolled in at the same time as the likes of Halloween 5 or A Nightmare on Elm Street 5. It’s a throwback in all of the best ways: A single-location, low-budget slasher with a mystery killer and some of the most shockingly gory slayings (and ridiculous practical effects) the genre has to offer. At a time when most filmmakers working the genre had stopped attempting to genuinely shock anyone, Intruder was still going for the jugular.

Much of that strength is derived from the simple novelty of the film’s setting: Intruder is set in a large suburban supermarket as the night crew learns that the place is shutting down and they’re all about to be laid off. Forced into a night of “slashing” prices for a going-out-of-business sale, they’re haunted by an unwelcome presence that starts picking them off one at a time, utilizing every piece of heavy duty industrial machinery that a roving psychopath might be able to find in a market. And that’s the entirety of the premise, and a major factor of what makes Intruder feel so odd in 1989: It is absolutely nothing more or less than the initial setup implies it will be.

What it is, though, is a masterclass in low-budget filmmaking from everyone involved. Shot over nights in an actual, empty supermarket, members of the crew were forced to stock the shelves themselves with damaged bulk goods to make the place look lived in and passingly familiar. Director Scott Spiegel was plenty familiar with such shoestring operations–a high school compatriot of the Raimi brothers, he appeared in Sam Raimi’s short film Within the Woods, which would be later adapted as The Evil Dead. Spiegel went on to co-write Evil Dead II, and both Raimis (along with Bruce Campbell!) pay him back here with appearances in Intruder, all in relatively small roles–though both Raimi brothers do die on screen, which might make this the only film that can make that specific claim. Spiegel, to his credit, does seem to have picked up some nifty camera tricks from his more famous friends as well, consistently framing shots from kooky angles and playing with elements of distortion, such as filming one of the killings entirely through the green tinted glass of a wine bottle.

And ah, those killings–that Intruder is remembered at all by slasher buffs today is a testament to just how much Spiegel accomplishes in the art of cinematic bloodletting in these 88 minutes. Every death is unusually vicious, from the conventional stabbings–which spurt blood under high pressure, like a sword slash out of Lone Wolf and Cub–to the collection of far more graphic, over-the-top denouements received by a handful of characters. Eyeballs get impaled, hydraulic presses get used in the most lurid of fashions, and a sequence with a bandsaw will be seared into your memory for the rest of your life, thanks to some of the most disturbingly realistic looking body dummy work you’ll ever see in a horror film. Not until 2021’s Fear Street: 1994 killed off a character by forcing her head through a bread slicer (in another supermarket!) did we again get something evocative of this bit in Intruder, but it’s still only a faint echo of the original.

It is perhaps no surprise that Intruder didn’t make much of a splash in its initial, limited release–it was already dated in so many ways by the time it arrived, and the slasher market was rapidly ossifying, preparing to settle into a period of relative dormancy in the 1990s. One wonders if its reputation might be much bigger in the horror community if it actually had been a member of the class of 1981, but that hardly matters when viewing it today, which is something you absolutely should do. A lost gem pulled from the dying embers of one of the horror’s genre’s golden ages, Intruder will warm the cockles of any slasher geek’s heart with a payoff both familiar and effectively brutal.

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.