Bruce Davison’s turn as Willard Stiles, the vengeful misfit with an uncanny ability to commune with rodents in the 1971 horror-thriller Willard (Daniel Mann), bears obvious resemblance to Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates. Blonde hair and hammy delivery aside, he possesses the same beakish face and boyish shyness pierced through occasionally by a seething rage. His character is likewise defined by what seems to be an Oedipal maldevelopment and a solitary existence in a decrepit house, except hidden within the home’s cellar-as-subconscious is not the rotted corpse of his overbearing mother but an army of rats he has befriended and trained to do his bidding.
What precisely those rats represent was a question of consternation for some contemporary critics, notably Vincent Canby and Roger Ebert, who both panned the film while only ironically nudging toward a possible social critique. “A major urban problem,” suggests the former in his typically droll, conservative tone. Ebert comes down on a deep-seated need “to see Ernest Borgnine eaten alive by rats.” Given the legacy of Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) however, and Willard’s own peculiar place within the horror canon, it seems just as likely that Willard’s rats have a thing or two to say about sexual pathology.
Willard Stiles (left) and Norman Bates (right)
Based on Stephen Gilbert’s 1968 short novel Ratman’s Notebooks, the film is more of a novelty than a classic, and although it cannot rest on the strength of Daniel Mann’s lackluster direction, its unexpected box office success did help set the stage for a decade of blockbuster adaptations of horror novels. Aside from kicking off a cycle of creature-features that eventually produced Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975), the film more obviously and suggestively spawned the likes of Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976), with its depiction of a much put-upon social outcast who wields a supernatural power to violent ends. Carrie likewise owes an obvious debt to Psycho, both in its slasher cues and its suggestion of monstrous psychosexual forces unleashed. Where Psycho derives terror from male sexual pyschopathology, Carrie finds horror in adolescent female sexuality. But where does Willard, standing between the two, fall within this matrix of monstrosity and sexual repression?
Check out the trailer for Willard here:
Though quite de-sexed in its imagery, the film actually goes out of its way to suggest that in spending all his time with his rat pals, Willard is rejecting heterosexuality. Early in the film, Willard’s ailing, pestering mother (Elsa Lanchester) wants nothing more from her son than for him to get ahead at work and to settle down with a woman. When he absconds each day to play with the rats he has dubbed Socrates and Ben, she even imagines that he is slinking off to see a mistress. After his mother dies, another woman attempts to enter his life. His coworker Joan (Sondra Locke), symbolically hinting at her own romantic interest, gives Willard a pet cat named Cleo, adding that a cat, especially a female one, makes the perfect companion for a young man such as himself. The cat immediately sets about tearing at the leather briefcase he has been using to smuggle Socrates and Ben into the office, and Willard promptly abandons her at a telephone booth.
Willard looks on perturbed at the possibility of feline companionship
But the rats do not only represent Willard’s rejection of female companionship—they also teach him to love himself. In fact, the primary antagonist for most of the film is not killer rats, but Willard’s boorish boss played by Ernest Borgnine. Mr. Martin is said to have stolen the family business from Willard’s father and now keeps Willard employed in a lowly position seemingly just to berate and humiliate him. When Willard decides it’s time for him and his rats to rebel, his first act is to ruin Martin’s anniversary party—yet another jab at heterosexuality. Later, after Martin kills the gentle and wise Socrates, Willard and his rats graduate to homicide. Lording his newfound power over his helpless boss, Willard boldly proclaims, “You made me hate myself…Well, I like myself now,” before ordering the rats to tear his boss apart.
In this light, the film seems to flip the script on horror and sexual repression. Far from the ultimately phobic Psycho, where gender deviance results from sexual neuroses that beget a psychotic rupture of the personality and senseless violence, Willard presents us with militant rats who befriend our protagonist, teach him to reject heterosexuality, accept himself, and take a stand against his oppressors. It is, in fact, a coming-out film. Only when Willard abandons his rats and seeks to assimilate into a normal, heterosexual life by courting Joan do the rats turn against him and lead him to the same brutal fate as Mr. Martin. “Come out,” the final, ominous yet triumphant closeup of Ben seems to say, “…or else.”
Ben sends a warning out to all oppressors
So clearly does this gay liberationist subtext ring through that when I first viewed the film I presumed it was an intentional intervention at a moment when gay politics had achieved mass visibility and Hollywood occasionally deigned to respond. Willard’s queer-coding seems as inescapably obvious as that of Norman Bates, but the film’s staunchly anti-heterosexual bent, it turns out, is as much a result of key elisions in translating the novel to the screen as it is an inversion of horror tropes.
In Stephen Gilbert’s novel, the titular Ratman’s attitude toward women is marked by contempt rather than mere indifference and the story itself is more overtly concerned with class oppression. The unnamed protagonist is trapped in a dead-end job and squeezed for lower and lower wages. The rats here represent his descent into an underclass, and he explicitly declares himself an enemy of capitalist oppressors. He trains his rats to rob petit bourgeois families and shop owners and only when he himself reclaims his father’s business and seeks to settle into a comfortable bourgeois life do the rats take aim at him.
You can find Stephen Gilbert’s Ratman’s Notebooks on Amazon (ad). This edition was published on the novel’s 40th anniversary and features an introduction by Kim Newman:
In Stephen Gilbert’s version of the story, marriage is written off as an appendage of bourgeois life until both that life and marriage are made available to him after he kills his boss and inherits the family business. In his screenplay for Willard, however, Gilbert Ralston conveniently left out any of the obvious class commentary, emphasizing instead Willard’s personal antagonism with his boss and seeming to play up his rejection of female companionship as the primary sign of his social maladjustment. The result is a film that offers revenge thrills while setting up a staunch binary between communing with rats and heterosexual coupling. The rats, led by the militant Ben, maintain their revolutionary edge, but Willard becomes a class traitor not when he ascends to the bourgeoisie as in the novel but simply by getting a girlfriend.
You can stream Willard on Amazon (ad):
Dane Engelhart is a writer and critic whose work focuses on the history of gay cinema and the meaning, limits and contradictions of representation. He has studied the phenomenon of independent gaysploitation films and has written on the historic badness of Love, Simon. You can argue with him on Twitter @gidalism.
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