The reaction was always the same.
During my high school days, I must have seen “Wait Until Dark” five times during its theatrical release.
Audrey Hepburn was appealing, of course, but the main attraction for me was Alan Arkin’s chilling portrayal of a psycho sadist who, in the course of reclaiming a misdirected heroin shipment, terrorizes a blind woman in her apartment.
Late in the 1967 thriller, the distressed damsel temporarily gets the upper hand by stabbing her tormentor.
But as she walks away, the psycho leaps back into her kitchen and grabs her ankle.And every time he did this, every time I saw “Wait Until Dark,” people in the audience screamed.
Really, really loudly.
Like, louder than the folks around me in a theater seven years later during the first jump-scare in “Jaws.”While reading the online obituaries and social media tributes as the sad news of Arkin’s death spread,…
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