In this feature, Psychobabble creeps through more than 90 years of horror cinema to assemble a highly personal list of the genre’s 150 most monstrous works, decade by decade.
51.
Eyes Without a Face (1960- dir. Georges Franju)
Hammer may have upped the level of horror movie gore in the previous decade, but nothing the studio produced reached the graphic heights of
Blood of the Beasts, Georges Franju’s 1949 documentary about a slaughterhouse outside Paris. While Franju’s
Eyes Without a Face (
Les Yeux Sans Visage) does not repeat that short’s realism it does display the same icy, graphic violence in ways Hammer would never dare try. The film stars Pierre Brasseur as a doctor suffering terrible guilt after causing the car accident that monstrously scarred his daughter, Christiane. Convinced he can restore her beauty and prove his own godly powers as a physician, Docteur Génessier makes numerous attempts at the world’s first face transplant with skin from young women procured by his assistant, Edna. Franju executes this potentially schlocky plot with hardcore explicitness
and mesmerizing poetry. The operation scenes still have the power to disturb, particularly since contemporary audiences would never expect such graphic material in a black and white, French film from 1960. Those sequences are potent, but it is Edith Scob’s ethereal portrayal of Christiane and Alida Valli’s Edna that are most impressive. Like the classic monsters, both are frightening and sympathetic, though not in equal measure. The climax of the film in which Christiane commits some unexpected acts of vengeance, as well as real heroism, is only topped by the haunting final image of her floating into a dark forest and an uncertain future with a white dove perched on her finger. The beautiful, horrible, and artistically rich
Eyes Without a Face received notoriously shabby treatment in the U.S., where it was dubbed into English, given the idiotic title
The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, and run as a double-feature with a cheapie called
The Manster. In the ensuing years it achieved cult classic status, but
Eyes Without a Face deserves to be regarded on the same level as any of its contemporary art films by Fellini or Bergman. Regardless of its reputation,
Eyes Without a Face got one of horror’s most fruitful decades—and one of its most spectacular years—off to a striking start.
52.
Peeping Tom (1960- dir. Michael Powell)
At the same time Alfred Hitchcock was making the film that would
revolutionize the horror film in the ‘60s—and earn four Oscar
nominations— Michael Powell was making the film that would nearly ruin
one of the most prestigious careers in cinema. The maker of such British
institutions as
The Red Shoes and
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
was now treading through murky waters, indeed, choosing to tell the
tale of Mark Lewis (Karl Böhm), a serial killer who photographs his
victims at the moment of their deaths using a dagger concealed in his
camera’s tripod. By emphasizing the link between sex and violence even
more explicitly than Hitchcock (among Mark’s victims are a prostitute
and a model who performs a frenzied, impromptu dance), Powell took his
content several ticks beyond even Hammer’s controversial pictures. The
film was ravaged by U.K. critics (Derek Hill of the
Tribune
wrote that it should be “shovel[ed] up and flush[ed]… down the nearest
sewer”) and butchered in the U.S. where it was dumped in the grind
houses. That’s rough treatment for perhaps the first film to examine the
filmmaker’s responsibility in presenting violent material to audiences,
as well as the audience’s own dicey desire to look at the sick and the
horrible. Mark is not a peeping tom at all. Like Norman Bates, he is a
voyeur who derives the pleasure of looking with debilitating guilt. The
sexual feelings his gaze stirs moves him to murder. Unlike Norman Bates,
Mark is given a richer and more convincing back story, one we see
played out in one of the disturbing films he owns rather than hear from
the mouth of a longwinded psychoanalyst. Critics also missed the sly
humor that offsets the horror and despair, Moira Shearer giving a
particularly delightful performance as dancer Vivian before Mark cuts
her down. When she dies, we feel far greater remorse than we do after
the deaths of Marion Crane and Arbogast in
Psycho. Hitchcock is a cynic who wants us to feel complicit in Norman Bates’s crimes. Powell wants us to
feel
for his killer. Böhm helps accomplish this with a tortured performance,
but we also sympathize with Mark because he is loved by a kind woman
named Helen, played with charisma and vulnerability by Anna Massey. When
Mark is outed as a murderer and meets his inevitable end, we feel
reluctantly sorry for him and downright crushed for Helen.
Peeping Tom
has its flaws. Like so many of Powell’s films, it is slow. There is no
explanation for why Mark speaks with a thick German accent even though
he lived his entire life in London and we hear his father speak with a
British accent in one of his films. And as always, the explicit
correlation between sexual women and extreme violence is off-putting. In
this way,
Peeping Tom may be a clearer progenitor of the slasher film than
Psycho. Depending on your opinion of that subgenre, this is either a distinction to be celebrated or shamed.
53.
Psycho (1960- dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
The past five years had seen numerous innovations in horror, and none of them arose from the major Hollywood studios that had ruled the genre since the early ‘30s. It took a British director to give Universal another shot at the thorny crown it once wore. Actually, Alfred Hitchcock made
Psycho at Universal Studios but produced it under his own Shamley Productions, which was responsible for his popular macabre series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” (Paramount distributed the film). One certainly could not mistake Hitch’s follow up to the ultra-glossy
North by Northwest for a big Universal or Paramount production. Inspired by the low-budget intimacy and gimmickry of William Castle’s recent schlocker shockers, Hitchcock used his TV crew to shoot
Psycho in simple black and white with a small cast, small sets, and on a miniscule budget. He even employed a Castle-esque shuck to promote the picture (“No one... but no one will be admitted to the theater after the start of each performance…”). Hitchcock may have scaled way back on the frills and felt it necessary to use a bit of corny hucksterism to sell tickets, but
he’d never made a picture more suspenseful, disturbing, or brilliantly plotted than
Psycho. Of course, Joseph Stefano deserves a lot more credit for the picture’s greatness than he usually receives. The screenwriter exaggerated the pacing of Robert Bloch’s novel to build the film’s ingenious structure: get the viewers so involved in the story conflicted thief Marion Crane (Janet Leigh, the film’s one big star) for the first half hour that they forget they are even watching a movie called
Psycho, then…
SLICE!... carve up their expectations by having Norman Bates carve up Marion in cinema’s most famous shower scene. The twisting and throttling of audience expectations doesn’t end there. Hitchcock cast the boyish, sympathetic Anthony Perkins to play maniac Norman Bates, and we uncomfortably empathize with him even when he is committing the most heinous deeds. The most striking example of this is when the director manipulates us into rooting for Bates as he rolls Marion’s car, which contains her dead body, into a bog. It wasn’t enough for Hitchcock to show us a murder; he wanted us to feel complicit in it. That was also his sense of humor, even though this is one of his least mirthful films (the exception being the very funny early sequence in Marion’s office featuring Hitchcock’s daughter Pat as a self-obsessed chatterbox). What
Psycho may lack in laughs, it more than makes up for in incredible performances, fascinating characters, and genius direction. The influence of
Psycho would stretch far. Roger Corman, Castle, and Hammer studios all produced self-conscious responses to it. The slasher films born in the late ‘70s owe a direct debt to it, too, though none of them came within a mile of
Psycho in terms of quality, style, or smarts.
54.
The Brides of Dracula (1960- dir. Terence Fisher)