| Stranger in Our House | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Wes Craven |
| Produced by | Bill Finnegan Patricia Finnegan |
| Written by | Glenn M. Benest (teleplay) Lois Duncan (novel) |
| Starring | Linda Blair Lee Purcell Jeremy Slate |
| Distributed by | Keller Entertainment Group |
| Release date(s) | October 31, 1978 (USA) |
| Running time | 99 min. |
| Language | English |
Stranger in Our House (also known as Summer of Fear) is a 1978 television horror film directed by Wes Craven and starring Linda Blair. It tells the story of a teenage girl who begins to suspect that her cousin may be a practitioner of black magic and witchcraft after she comes to live with their family.
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The story is about a girl, Rachel Bryant (Linda Blair), who lives with her wealthy family in a nice house in the hills of Northern California. After her mother's sister, brother-in-law, and housekeeper die in a horrible car crash, the couple's daughter, Julia (Lee Purcell) comes to live with them. Julia seems a little shy if anything, but as time goes on, she begins to put an alluring spell over everyone she meets, pulling all of Rachel's family and friends away from her. After finding some odd things that belong to Julia (including a human tooth and burnt hair from Rachel's dog Trickle (for the movie the dog was changed to a horse due to Blair's love of horses and the name of the horse was Sundance instead of Trickle), Rachel begins to suspect that her cousin may be a practitioner of witchcraft, and she's hell-bent on turning Rachel's life upside down. Her open disbelieved suspicions caused her to become an outcast in front of her family.
Linda Blair as Rachel Bryant
Lee Purcell as Julia Grant
Jeremy Slate as Tom Bryant
Jeff McCracken as Mike Gallagher
Jeff East as Peter Bryant
Carol Lawrence as Leslie Bryant
Macdonald Carey as Professor Jarvis
James Jarnigan as Bobby Bryant
Fran Drescher as Carolyn Baker
The movie was filmed in Hidden Hills, California in a gated community.
The film marked starlet Linda Blair's third leading role in a horror film, following her Oscar-nominated performance in The Exorcist (1973) and its sequel Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), as well as the horror debut of Fran Drescher.
The film first aired on television on NBC on Halloween night 1978. After having great success on network television, it was then sold to CBS, and ultimately was re-titled Summer of Fear (also the title of the Lois Duncan book it was based on) and given a theatrical release in Europe.
The film was widely unavailable on home video for several decades, until 2003 when it was released in the United States through Artisan Entertainment on VHS and DVD, under the Summer of Fear title.
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