Was the stepfather secretly lusting after Stephanie?
In the film, the stepfather was always emphasizing the importance of the family. The “perfect” family he was looking for appeared to be of the patriarchal kind – due probably to his strict upbringing that he reluctantly admitted. However, in the film, there were hints or suggestions from time to time that he actually might have had sexual desire for his stepdaughter. At least Stephanie seemed to think so, and that made the situation even more frightening than it already was. Look especially at the following scenes.
1. When the stepfather gave the puppy to Stephanie as a gift, he put his hand on her shoulder. Stephanie felt uneasy and we see her shrinking away. Stephanie said more than once to other people that Jerry frightened her – and that was before she had any strong suspicions about his past. One might believe that – at least in Stephanie’s mind – she felt threatened by the presence of a strange man living in the house.
2. Jerry got tremendously upset when he saw Paul giving Stephanie a goodnight kiss and accused him of trying to undress and rape the girl! Both the mother and Stephanie knew that was not true, and the girl in her anger told Jerry that he was a "crazy creep hung up about sex". That was really interesting. Obviously, in Stephanie’s mind he had repressed sexual desires – but for whom? Since Jerry had already moved in with Susan, the obvious answer was her young and nubile daughter. It is reasonable to suggest that while Jerry appeared to be acting like an overly-protective father, in fact he was more like a jealous lover who got upset because the young Paul was about to get the girl that he himself could not possess – thanks to his own emphasis on “family values”.
3. At the end, Jerry was about to murder Stephanie when she was naked in the shower. That clearly paid homage to the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho, where Norman Bates stabbed to death the woman he was forbidden to love. He muttered to himself that Stephanie was “a very bad girl” – an expression more often used by a cheated lover than a disappointed father. When Stephanie finally stabbed him, he grasped: “I loved you” just before he died. It was highly doubtful that it was fatherly love that he was talking about.
I believe any of the above could be debated, but to me the sexual undertones were unmistakable, and that made the relationship between the stepfather and Stephanie in the film multilayered and far more complex than it otherwise would have been. Unfortunately, in the remake, the stepdaughter character was changed into a rebellious son who had attended military school, and thus one element that made the original so interesting was lost.