Night of the Strangler 1972

In New Orleans, Denise Roberts, [Susan McCullough] tells her brothers, Vance and Dan, that she is pregnant, a revelation that soon spirals into a web of fear and danger. Dan discovers the baby’s father is Black, and his anger spills over into threats against Denise and her fiancé, who is drawn into a tense shadow of coercion and coercive pressure to terminate the pregnancy. Denise heads back to New York, where she informs her fiancé that the child is no longer theirs, a line that coincides with a chilling act of violence: an assassin, Patrick Wright, kills Denise’s fiancé in a brutal, premeditated strike. The tragedy doesn’t end there. Back in New Orleans, an intruder infiltrates Denise’s apartment, drowns her in the bathtub, and slits her wrists in an attempt to stage the murder as a suicide, leaving the community stunned and the police baffled.

Weeks pass, and the parish is startled by the return of the long-absent black priest, Father Jessie, Chuck Patterson, whose appearance unsettles old loyalties and awakens new suspicions. Dan moves forward with his life by marrying Carol, Ann Barrett, who had once been Vance’s girlfriend, a decision that unsettles Denise’s brothers and unsettles the already fragile peace in the family. Soon after, a cascade of murders follows the wedding, each linked by an eerie pattern of misfortune and malice. Carol’s life is claimed by a venomous snake hidden inside a bouquet of roses delivered to their home, a grim and theatrical murder that shocks the community.

The danger widens as Willie, the Roberts family gardener, Warren Kenner, becomes entangled in a confrontation at the marina where Dan is forced to defend himself — he shoots Willie in what appears to be self-defense. The threat intensifies when the assassin resurfaces and lines up another attempt on Dan’s life, only to be shot by a guard at the marina, ending that immediate danger in a tense, gun-and-plooded moment. Vance’s wife, Ann, Katie Tilley, suffers a cruel fate when she is killed by a poisoned arrow launched from a booby-trapped device hidden in a car, a detail that deepens the feud and fuels the brothers’ simmering anger.

Blame and retribution drive the next sequence: Vance, in a fit of rage and grief, stabs Dan in the chest with a throwing knife, but Dan fights back, again killing in self-defense, the violence feeding an already explosive family feud. Into this chaos steps Father Jessie’s truth-twinned revelation: Jessie explains that he is actually Jake, the twin brother of the real Jessie, who had been the man Denise carried. Jake had orchestrated the whole string of murders as revenge for his sister’s death, and he uses this realization to justify further killings. Jake then kills Dan and departs the scene just as the police arrive, closing in on the tangled trail of crimes.

The closing beat lands with a twist of inevitability: the two police officers who have been trying to solve the murders watch as Jake, ready to leave town, suddenly screams and bursts from his car, a moment of doubt and panic that hints at a final trap. The officers’ lingering suspicion grows into a quiet, unresolved question: did the venomous snake, placed earlier, truly end Jake’s run, or did it merely reveal a larger, more insidious design at work? The film leaves audiences with a lingering sense of dread, a tight knot of resentments, and the eerie suggestion that revenge, once unleashed, may circle back to consume the hunter as cruelly as the hunted.