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In the series Hallowed Grounds, we revisit some of the greatest auteur-driven classics of modern horror history that have influenced the current crop of horror movies terrorizing audiences today.

Long before the director-actor married couple John Krasinski and Emily Blunt warped the framework of horror films with their weird, mostly silent A Quiet Place, John Cassavetes was experimenting with a similarly intimate, defiantly odd vision of terror with his wife Gena Rowlands in their 1977 arthouse darling, Opening Night.

A film like Opening Night is not something you might expect to see included in a typical series about horror movies. The film feels a bit like a campy '70s De Palma horror film snuck inside a Broadway play, wrapped inside an indie psychodrama that people today would probably pigeonhole into the “mumblecore” category. But like John Cassavetes and his rigorous devotion to obliterating the decrepit conveyor belt that sits at the foundations of Hollywood movie-making, this is no typical series about horror movies. Opening Night is exactly the sort challenging film that we should consider when examining the adventurous breadth of a genre that cannot, and should not, be nailed down by any simple definition or formula.

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The film trails behind the feverous Rowlands as Myrtle Gordon, a famous stage actress who struggles to find the “reality” of a troubled woman she’s playing in a Broadway-bound play that’s performing in New Haven. After a preview performance, she is stalked by a young, desperate fan on the rainy streets outside the theater; as her car pulls away, the fan is struck by an oncoming automobile and killed.

It is inherently reductive and unnecessary to try to contain movies into rigid genres, but for all intents and purposes, Opening Night is a horror film.

The events of the play and the events of this young woman’s death seem to mix together like a sour cocktail in Myrtle’s brain, and throughout the duration of the seemingly never-ending rehearsal process (the stage scenes of which Cassavetes, in his famous anti-Hollywood nuance, likes to present as-is, without many camera movements or cuts), Myrtle “loses the reality of [her] reality.”

Similar to how The Babadook employs an actual ghoul to represent the all-encompassing terror of grief and Hereditary uses demonic possession to communicate the genetically transferred trauma of our elders, Opening Night takes the character of the slain young woman (who, not-unintentionally, looks like a younger Gena Rowlands) and plops her into the downward trajectory of Myrtle Gordon’s deteriorating psyche. The ghostly woman materializes in and out of Myrtle’s life in some seriously terrifyingly physical bouts of supernatural boxing.

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It becomes clear that, like Toni Collette's similarly ramshackled character in Hereditary, Gena Rowlands’s Myrtle must overcome the inevitability of time—although in the case of Opening Night, it’s not her heritage, but her younger self that she must vanquish. With the help of some middle-aged woman “spiritualists” (another curious connection to Hereditary), she does, indeed, conquer the existential dread of aging, but not without ruining a marriage, breaking a lot of expensive furniture, and pulverizing her own eyes and face while duking it out with a demon in the process.

It is inherently reductive and unnecessary to try to contain movies into rigid genres, but for all intents and purposes, Opening Night is a horror film. In the way that its title sequence magnifies the mundane cheers of an audience into a violently furious sound, it takes our reality and presents the concurrent darkness within like the truth-driven horror films such as Get Out. In the way that it drapes Gena Rowlands in long, black, specter-like capes and collars—and the primal world around her colored in bright, bloody reds—it turns a funhouse mirror onto the crushing, almost satanic rituals of film acting and movie star culture like in Mulholland Dr. In the way that its haunting and minimalistic score is reminiscent of a John Carpenter theme, it makes a psychological break as foreboding as a masked bogeyman haunting suburban teenagers.

Seen especially through the lens of today’s actress-led, woman-on-the-verge-of-immolation horrors such as Annihilation and the upcoming Suspiria, Opening Night is a mischievously delightful dip into a genre from an art-film guy like Cassavettes—a genre that that no one in his lifetime (or even today) would have expected to interest the auteur. But as is the case of the bulk of the famous iconoclast’s oeuvre, we are still seeing the ripple effects of a film like this today, over 40 years after its release.

Dom Nero Video Editor Dom Nero is a staff video editor at Esquire, where he also writes about film, comedy, and video games.

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