Alone in the Dark (1982) on Netflix
Dan Potter joins Dr. Leo Bain's psychiatric hospital and moves his wife and daughter to rural New Jersey. Four patients there blame him for their doctor's departure and want him dead.
- Netflix3.2/5
- IMDb6.0/108,012 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes69%
Trailer
Plot summary
At the Haven, an experimental psychiatric hospital in New Jersey, Dr. Leo Bain keeps only the third-floor patients behind an electric security door. The new psychiatrist, Dan Potter, moves his wife Nell and their daughter Lyla into a rural home nearby. The men on the third floor, Frank Hawkes, Byron "Preacher" Sutcliff, Ronald Elster, and John Skaggs, resent the departure of Dan's predecessor, Dr. Henry Merton, and blame Dan for it. Dan's sister Toni, recovering from a nervous breakdown, comes to stay, and Dan and Nell take her to a local rock club while Lyla remains home with a babysitter. A regional power outage then knocks out the hospital's security system.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Alone in the Dark (1982)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director Jack Sholder pitched New Line founder Robert Shaye a story about criminally insane men escaping a mental hospital during a New York City blackout, inspired by a blackout Sholder had lived through. Deemed too expensive, the script was rewritten as a home-invasion thriller without the mafia angle.
- Alone in the Dark was the first film produced by New Line Cinema, which until then had worked only as a film distribution company.
- Director Jack Sholder based the character of Dr. Leo Bain on the real Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing, who held a similar philosophy about treating mentally ill patients.
- The house used as the Potter family's home in the film was an actual psychiatrist's residence in Palisades, New York.
