This wonderfully dark and brooding light-of-day thriller was almost immediately relegated to cult status, despite (or was it because of?) fine performances by Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins. (If ever there was a victim of what Variety called "image backlash" it was Weld.) In a Massachusetts factory town, Perkins is the local paranoiac, convinced of a Communist conspiracy behind the dumping of poisonous waste into the stream he sees from his window. He convinces high-school drum majorette Weld that he is a CIA agent and enlists her in a wild white-knight scheme. She has schemes of her own, however, and "with superior nymphet cool" (Vincent Canby) enlists him in orchestrating the untimely demise of her own mother. Playing spider and fly to one another, both use sex, fantasy, and permutations of the American dream (Thoreau meets John Philip Sousa) as lure and counterweight. In this dream, the local crazy turns out to be prescient, and the girl next door, a horror.