A column about curious stories from the worlds of science, technology, and film. Today—a story about The Other (1972): Robert Mulligan’s horror film, which, with a budget of $2.25 million and star potential, quietly flopped at the box office, then became one of the decade’s most influential psychological horror films through late-seventies television reruns. At the center is a triple mirror: a Hollywood heartthrob who fled acting for writing; a legend of theater pedagogy kept offscreen for twenty years by the McCarthyist blacklist; and two twin boys, only one of whom is ever actually present in the frame.
Formally, The Other is a mystery film about twin brothers on a Connecticut farm in 1935. Another mystery trails behind it, a production one: how many actors played brothers Niles and Holland Perry? On a first viewing, the audience is certain there were two—charismatic twin boys Chris and Martin Udvarnoky, judging by the credits and freeze-frames. In fact, the dramaturgy of “two boys” is hidden not in the casting but in the editing: “Mulligan never shows the brothers in frame together. They are always separated by a camera pan or an editing cut,” as the filmography puts it, and a second viewing turns into an editing audit. The brothers are never in the same shot, although in the story they are constantly in the same room.
A caveat here: a modern viewer schooled in twist-driven storytelling from The Sixth Sense to Gone Girl will most likely figure out the main turn in advance. But in 1972, the ending hit like a gunshot: it turns out that one of the twins has long been dead—he fell into a well on his eleventh birthday—while the surviving one uses his grandmother’s method of “entering other beings” to carry his brother inside his head, along with his character and his crimes. In a 2015 review, the Guardian directly counted the film among the progenitors of a cycle of “psychological horror movies about possessed and demented children,” which went on to produce The Exorcist, The Omen, Halloween, and The Shining.
But the real reason this story is worth telling is neither the editing nor the twist. The Other is the only film in which three biographies of pretending came together: an actor whom the studio demanded play himself until he broke; an actress deprived of the stage for her beliefs who became the greatest teacher of the acting craft; and two children whom the director invited to choose for themselves who each of them would be. Taken together, it is a ready-made course on the phenomenon of “playing the other.”
Thomas Lester Tryon was born in 1926 in Hartford, Connecticut, to the owners of an old men’s clothing store; among his ancestors was a colonial governor of New York. He served in the Pacific as a radio operator, graduated from Yale with a fine arts degree, briefly took up painting—and left for Hollywood, where, standing nearly six-foot-three with a razor-ad jawline, he was instantly filed under “new stars.” Behind him: Disney cowboy Texas John Slaughter, roles in The Longest Day and In Harm’s Way alongside John Wayne, marriage and divorce. The peak of his career came in 1963: Otto Preminger chose the little-known actor for the title role in the expensive religious epic The Cardinal.
That epic became the coffin of his career. Preminger, the legendary tyrant, drove the novice through take after take: “Preminger would scream at the nervous Tryon, zoom in on his shaking hands, fire him one minute and rehire him the next,” Michael Duni’s biographical article quotes John McClurg’s work. Tryon finished filming in the hospital—with a rash all over his body and skin peeling from nerves. Then came roles of ever smaller stature in films of ever less prestige, cocaine and alcohol, which he spoke about himself, and the slow realization that the studio machine saw not an actor in him, but packaging. In the late sixties, he did not renew his contracts. He sat down at a typewriter instead—first for the screenplay of some film project that grew into a novel.
The Other came out in May 1971 from Alfred A. Knopf and did what other actors had not managed: a 36-year-old debut author without a single published line to his name landed on the New York Times bestseller list within six months—and stayed there for more than half a year. By 1975, 3 594 693 copies had been sold—a figure from the University of Virginia’s academic bestseller catalog; later roundups put it at “more than 3.5 million.” The humor of the situation was underscored by none other than Anthony Burgess: “Like most professional writers, I resent Tom Tryon's The Other, since Tryon should get on with the job of being a good actor and not write good books as well.” Ira Levin, author of Rosemary’s Baby, wrote to Tryon: “A whirlpool of Oh-My-God horror... Please congratulate Mr. Tryon for me. What a marvelous job he's done.”
Reviewers immediately noticed that the plot was not the point. Life called Tryon “a first novelist of extraordinary clarity”; the Saturday Review discussed the book alongside Blatty’s The Exorcist—two novels about corrupted children competing in the same top 10 that same year. Cleveland’s Plain Dealer captured the mechanics of its pull in a line fit for the cover of any reissue: “A psychological thriller that you read a second time to see how the author did it.” The novel was a genuine suggestive provocateur: minimal dialogue, interior suspense, the summer of 1935, a farm, Ada, a grandmother who is a Russian émigré and teaches her grandson “the Game”—the art of climbing into another creature’s consciousness and feeling from within. The procedure is described with such methodological precision (“Look hard... feel inside it... into its head... into its heart”) that critics decades later recognized in it... the acting method.
Because that was exactly what it was: an acting method. Ada in the novel is a former stage actress; Uta Hagen, who played her onscreen, was the longtime head of New York’s HB Studio and the author of Respect for Acting. Bright Lights Film Journal laid out the metaphor without mincing words: Ada’s Great Game is acting school itself—the “projection of consciousness” into a character; Tryon simply took his own trauma of years spent “being another” (including decades of concealed homosexuality—he never publicly confirmed it as such) and recast it as the story of a boy playing his dead brother until their personalities fully merge. No surprise that Stephen King, in Danse Macabre, included The Other in his canonical list of the era’s most important horror fiction, and that New York Review Books returned the novel to print in 2012 with an afterword by Dan Chaon.
The casting of Grandmother Ada is an article in itself. Producer Tryon initially wanted Ingrid Bergman; she declined because of theater commitments, and the role went to a woman whom the general public had not seen onscreen at all in two decades. By the time of filming, Uta Hagen was a living classic: her Martha in the Broadway premiere of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) had entered history; behind her lay years of teaching at HB Studio: Broderick, Lahti, Davis, and half the profession. And then there was her name on the blacklists.
Her relationship with McCarthyism is described tersely and sharply. In the fifties, Hagen, the wife of José Ferrer (she herself had played Desdemona in Othello with Robeson in the title role, Ferrer as Iago), fell into the orbit of McCarthyist purges—the association with Robeson landed her on Hollywood’s blacklist, and offers became far scarcer. “That fact kept me pure,” she said later: that fact kept her pure. Deprived of the screen, Hagen turned to teaching and raised the generation that restored psychological authenticity to American acting in the seventies.
According to the AFI and memoir literature, Mulligan offered her Ada as a return—the first significant film role in twenty years. Hagen was 52; the grandmother in the book is described as older, but that did not hinder the actress: playing “another age group” is the same profession. Critics unanimously recognized Hagen’s performance as the film’s revelation; half a century later, the Guardian described it as her “first and only significant movie performance”—not an exhaustive formulation (there was also The Boys from Brazil with Gregory Peck in 1978), but one that conveys the scale: after The Other, she never sought major roles again.
For Robert Mulligan, The Other was his first film after the breakup of his creative partnership with producer Alan J. Pakula, with whom he had made a whole shelf of films from To Kill a Mockingbird to Up the Down Staircase. Pakula moved into paranoid thrillers; after the box-office success of Summer of ’42, Mulligan suddenly made a teenage Gothic horror film instead of another summer hit. The shift in trajectory was no accident: Mulligan always filmed children and adolescents as adults—To Kill a Mockingbird rests on Scout’s gaze, and The Other continues the method, taking it to its clinical limit.
“I want to put the audience into the body of the boy... a totally subjective one,” the director said. The camera almost never rises above a child’s height; adults in the frame are like wardrobes—large, mute, often faceless. Cinematographer Robert Surtees—a veteran of The Last Picture Show and the future The Sting—paints the farm in “chocolate and bloody” tones; Roger Ebert, one of the few enthusiasts during its theatrical run, pushed back against accusations that it was “too beautiful, too nostalgic”: “His colors are rich and deep and dark, chocolatey browns and bloody reds; they aren't beautiful but perverse and menacing. And the farm isn't seen with a warm nostalgia, but with a remembrance that it is haunted.”
Filming took place in the summer of 1971 in the California town of Murphys (Connecticut did not offer the right foliage palette); the Udvarnoky boys—this was the only role in either of their careers—were invited by Mulligan to choose for themselves who would be Niles and who would be Holland. The decision looks like a humane gesture, and on a second viewing—a sadistic irony: they were choosing which one would become “alive” and which one “dead.” Jerry Goldsmith wrote a score that was cut by more than half after test screenings; listeners heard the full 22-minute suite only in 1997, on the reissued album of Mephisto Waltz.
Technologically, The Other is an anomaly on the map of twin movies. The effect of “two twins” was classically solved by technique: clean plates and matte separation in The Parent Trap (1961), glass in front of the lens with half the frame taped over with masking tape—as early as 1937, that was how The Prisoner of Zenda was filmed; then came split screens with rigid camera blocking and the motion control of Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1988), the hundred and thirty twinning shots of Adaptation, the digital doubles of The Matrix. Mulligan and his editors solved the problem for zero dollars: editing. The brothers are never brought together in the frame; a pan, tracking shot, or cut separates them. No split-screen—just compositional discipline.
This is not poverty, but a concept. When it emerges that the “second twin” does not exist, the viewer mechanically searches their memory: but what about the scene where they are together? The scene in the cellar? And then immediately understands: nowhere. There was always only one boy in the frame—“Holland,” whom we see, is Niles, playing by all the rules of the method. The scene where Ada makes the boy say aloud that his brother is dead is an exit from the role, filmed as an exorcism. Uta Hagen is literally playing an acting teacher here: she takes a student out of a role he can no longer stop playing himself.
The alternate ending for the CBS television version is a separate line in the history of censorship: in the seventies, the network replaced the final shot with Niles’s voiceover addressed to the OTHER child (“Holland, the game's over...”), suggesting that the story was not over and that the boy was headed for an institution. In the original theatrical version, Niles simply peers out from the window of the barn as bulldozers demolish it along with the cellar—and there is more horror in that silence than in any voiceover.
With a budget of $2.25 million, The Other earned around $3.5 million in rentals in the United States and Canada—formally a profit, in practice a “quiet run.” Kino Lorber brought the film back to Blu-ray in 2013 in an edition of three thousand numbered copies, and the reissue has since been steadily described as the return of a “lost masterpiece.” Television scheduling decided the film’s fate: regular broadcasts in the late seventies made it a shared memory for a generation, and its influence a fact of the genre’s design documentation. The Other became another self-reproducing object in Hollywood history: the book recorded a style, the film recorded a technique, and the next generation of directors borrowed both layers without reading the footnotes.
Tryon himself was not thrilled by the film. “Oh, no. That broke my heart. Jesus... That picture was ruined in the cutting and the casting. The boys were good; Uta was good... And, God knows, it was badly cut and faultily directed,” he recalled in 1977. Paradoxically, that assessment is the best recommendation for the book: the novel, which sold 3.5+ million copies, was older, quieter, and more frightening than its adaptation. After The Other, Tryon never returned to acting: Harvest Home (1973)—a folk-horror classic later adapted as the miniseries The Dark Secret of Harvest Home (1978, with Bette Davis); Lady (1974); Crowned Heads (1976)—a show-business collection later adapted into the miniseries Hollywood (2020)—a steady publishing schedule through the end of the eighties.
Tryon died of stomach cancer in 1991 at the age of 65. Roddy McDowall and other colleagues attended his Los Angeles memorial; his nephews released multicolored balloons into the sky. The New York Times obituary appeared under a headline that is itself an epitaph for an entire biography: “Thomas Tryon, Who Quit Acting For a Writing Career, Dies at 65”—Thomas Tryon, who gave up acting for writing.
The Other remains in history not because it scared more than anything else, but because it brought together three ways of living someone else’s life: acting as coercion (Tryon), acting as exile (Hagen), and acting as illness (Niles). The novel is more honest about this than the film, the film more honest about it than the box office, and the making-of story more honest than both: an actor who fled other people’s roles wrote a bestseller about a boy who could not leave his brother’s role. A metaphor in which any profession that pays you to be someone else can recognize itself. The second viewing is harsher than the first: now you know that there are two twins only in the credits.