I have been searching for a ...
Question: I have been searching for a movie from the '70s for ages and I'm stumped, as are my husband and sister-in-law. A woman and her husband move into a house and she hears whispering from behind a wall; she ends up opening this hole and little creatures come out — they reminded me of mean little cabbages with feet. Nobody believes her, and they think she is going a little crazy. In the end they end up dragging her down the hole with them and you hear them whispering and her talking to them. What is this movie??!!!??? I really need to know because it is driving me crazy!!!
Answer: I can tell by the punctuation that you really are being tormented. It's called Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, a made-for-TV thriller that first aired on ABC in 1973 and burned itself into a lot of brains, mine included. Insecure young wife Sally (Kim Darby) inherits her grandmother's ramshackle house and moves in with her workaholic husband; while redecorating, she discovers a small room she thinks would make a nice study and, ignoring the warnings of an elderly handyman who used to work for her grandmother, has the bricked-up fireplace reopened, unleashing a herd of little creatures that set about tormenting her. The scene in which a malevolent munchkin turns off the light while she's in the shower and drags a straight razor out of the medicine cabinet scared the bejesus out of me. Talk of a big-budget, state-of-the-art, special effects-heavy remake directed by X-Files alumnus James Wong seems to have come to naught, which I think is just as well.
