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He Knows You're Alone
Warner Bros. // R // October 5, 2004
List Price: $19.97 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
Halloween was, for quite a number of years, the most successful independent film ever made. Lensed for just $300,000 and grossing untold tens of millions of dollars at the box office, numerous other slashers quickly followed in Halloween's wake. 1980 saw the release of the original Friday the 13th, Maniac, Prom Night, Terror Train, and, depending on how loosely you want to use the term 'slasher', Motel Hell. The Staten Island slasher He Knows You're Alone is frequently overlooked compared to the titles rattled off above, memorable mostly for an opening sequence that was mimicked in Scream 2 and marking the first screen appearance of Tom Hanks. Convention demands that the killer in every slasher flick has to have suffered some kind of trauma that pushed them towards psychosis, and in He Knows You're Alone, Ray Carlton has been spurned by his former fiancee. After an offscreen stabbin' on her wedding day, Ray decides to stick with that M.O., slaughtering women who are about to get married. One of his victims was to wed Detective Len Gamble, who's obsessively thirsted for a hunt for her killer ever since. Ray slipped away for a while, but now he's back in town as college student Amy Jensen (Caitlin O'Heaney) is preparing to tie the knot. Her husband-to-be is off making the bachelor party rounds, and she can almost instantly start to feel her flesh crawl as a pair of eyes leer at her from afar. But that's just her ex-boyfriend Marvin (Squirm's Don Scardino), a wacky college student slumming it in the morgue, determined to win back the heart of his one true. Marvey's not the only one stalking Amy, though -- Ray's following her every move, knocking off her friends one by one and slowly closing in for the kill.
He Knows You're Alone is a decent slasher, although it's too average to stand out among the glut of similar movies that flooded theaters in 1980 and 1981. The influence of Halloween is fairly obvious. Some of the musical cues are virtually identical (although others sound like interstitial music from The Electric Company), and there are some strikingly similar shots. The most blatant has Amy peeking out her window and spotting Ray in the yard, and when she goes back for a second look, he's gone. The driven detective is also a carbon copy of Halloween's Dr. Loomis, and there's another pair of lovers who are picked off individually after a tryst. Breaking away from the traditional slasher formula, the killer in He Knows You're Alone isn't masked. There's no mystery about who the murderer is, and there's no relationship or association between Ray and Amy aside from the fact that he really, really wants to stab her. (Why he's determined to kill Amy's friends, none of whom are getting married, goes unexplained.) Ray probably would've been better off with a mask -- despite his occasional Michael Myers posturing, he's not a particularly threatening presence, and his excessive Fuad Ramses-ish facial contortions don't help much. The kills themselves are fairly tame, lacking the inventiveness seen in other slashers from the same time period. They're just straightforward stabbings, and the filmmakers note in the DVD's audio commentary that the lack of gore and blood was intentional. Accordingly, the deaths either occur offscreen or are in some way obscured. He Knows You're Alone has a few effectively suspenseful sequences, but unlike Halloween, it's unable to maintain an unrelentingly tense atmosphere throughout. The story unfolds in a very predictable way, and viewers who have endured any number of slasher flicks should be able to effortlessly guess which scares are genuine and which ones will turn out to be fake. In fairness, He Knows You're Alone is an early enough slasher entry that a lot of these hadn't become firmly established as clichés as the movie was being filmed, but it hasn't aged particularly well. The opening sequence is still a standout, kicking off with a nod to an old urban legend before the camera pans back, and the slasher-in-the-theater concept is memorable enough for Wes Craven to pay homage to it in the first Scream sequel. Tom Hanks made his feature film debut with He Knows You're Alone, but he doesn't make any more of an impression with his small role as a psych student obsessed with the concept of fear than the rest of the unremarkable cast. The movie's characters have more personality than the fodder in most slashers, but the heavy emphasis on the relationship between Marvin and Amy saps away a lot of the energy of the movie, which winds up feeling sluggishly paced. He Knows You're Alone is a competent Halloween knockoff, but it's so average and unremarkable that it's difficult to recommend. 
Video: He Knows You're Alone was shot on a shoestring, and this 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen DVD looks the part. The movie is very grainy, more evident in some scenes than others. Many of the particularly dimly-lit sequences feature anemic black levels, are abuzz with film grain, and appear incredibly soft. The worst of those really only encompass a few scenes, and the remainder looks alright, not considerably different than the rest of the class of 1980. The grain, the drab palette, the unexceptional clarity, the intermittent softness, and the jittery camerawork aren't particularly unexpected for an early-'80s indie-slasher. Tiny white flecks are pervasive throughout but aren't terribly intrusive. The presentation on He Knows You're Alone won't impress anyone, but it's pretty much what I went in expecting. Audio: The Dolby Digital mono track sounds fine. Some light hiss lurks in the background, but the score has a reasonably full quality, and all of the dialogue is intelligible. Pretty standard stuff. The DVD also includes a French dub, closed captions, and subtitles in English, French, and Spanish.
Supplements: He Knows You're Alone features a commentary track with director Armand Mastroianni and writer Scott Parker,
and unlike the other Warner horror titles I've taken a look at this weekend, both of them were recorded together. They talk about how the project came together with some impromptu storytelling for the producers, the movie's aborted bigger budget origins with AIP and the eventual landing of a deal with MGM, the casting of Tom Hanks, bumping into an enthusiastic Richard Pryor at one screening, rebuilding part of a bedroom in a bustling restaurant, and alternate thoughts for the film's ending. The commentary gives a sense of what it must have been like to shoot a low-budget horror movie with your friends in Staten Island, and I'd recommend giving it a listen. One of the topics that's tackled in the commentary is the additional footage that was shot especially for the movie's trailer, and since sets were built and the cast had to be flown out and shuttled around, the costs wound up being not too far from the movie's entire budget. That trailer is provided here as well, in anamorphic widescreen, and it includes footage like Amy sitting in front of an exploding mirror. The DVD sports a set of static widescreen menus and twenty-six chapter stops. The disc comes cradled in a keepcase, and no insert has been provided. Conclusion: He Knows You're Alone is a routine early '80s slasher, failing to offer much to set it apart from innumerable other stalk-and-slash flicks and having aged somewhat poorly. Not good enough to recommend but not bad enough to avoid, the watchable but mediocre He Knows You're Alone is probably best off as a rental or bargain bin purchase for slasher completists. Rent It.
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