FILM MOI
by Robert Dunbar

You see them everywhere. In every syndicated column. Every blog. On every message board. “The Top Ten Tofu Recipes That Changed My Life.” Or “My Favorite 6,147 Books of All Times.”

It seems we’re all obsessed with lists.

Not long ago, I came across a thread about the “most influential horror movies” or some such, and it got me thinking. For those of us who experience cinema as literature, classics films comprised an introductory education in the genre. What follows is a list—a highly personal one—of films that helped me understand what I needed to write: my version of Most Influential Movies. Be advised, these are examples of vintage cinema, heavy on style and artistry—no splatter porn or CGI creatures—because somehow the old black and white films have always felt more private…as though watching them alone and late at night transmutes the experience into something utterly…intimate.

The careers of the established icons in the field scarcely require annotation, so I’ve focused on what interests me—obscure literary details and odd facts about the writers. The order of these entries remains utterly idiosyncratic. But perhaps you’ll detect a pattern?

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SÉANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON
1964, Rank Organization
Written and Directed by Bryan Forbes (based on the novel by Mark McShane)
[The script earned Forbes an Edgar Award.]
Cast: Kim Stanley, Richard Attenborough
Stanley made few films. (Paddy Chayevsky’s THE GODDESS is the only other I can even recall.) The reason quickly reveals itself: more work would probably have killed her. The perfect method actress, she languishes throughout SÉANCE in a veritable trance of torment…emotionally exhausting just to watch. Rumors that the lady plunged into mental collapse after each project seem altogether plausible, and the thought of her achieving her art at such a cost is humbling. (Perhaps I don’t suffer enough.) This mesmerizing performance—a spiritualist with a homicidal agenda—remains one of the screen’s great horror characterizations. If the script gets a little Edward Albee-ish towards the end, is that really such a bad thing?

THE HAUNTING
1963, MGM
Script: Nelson Giddings (based on Shirley Jackson’s novel “The Haunting of Hill House”)
[Giddings cut his horror eyeteeth with Inner Sanctum episodes. Let’s try not to hold THE MUMMY LIVES against him.]
Directed by Robert Wise
Cast: Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Russ Tamblyn, Richard Johnson, Lois Maxwell
Forget Brando’s torturous bellowing in A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE—there are less bombastic examples of Stanislavski Method. Alongside Kim Stanley in SÉANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON looms Julie Harris in THE HAUNTING. (Bloom has recollected that, reporting to the set each dawn, she’d find Harris already weeping quietly to herself. Poor Eleanor.) Is it possible that anyone doesn’t know this film? It’s the one about a group of psychics who stay at a haunted house to see if they can stir up a phenomenon or two. They can. In spades. The rest of the excellent cast prove compellingly mannered and nuanced, but Harris’ Eleanor seems to inhabit a separate reality, heartrending and disturbing.

THE INNOCENTS
1961, TCF/Achiles
Script: Truman Capote and William Archibald (from “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James)
[The script won an Edgar. Capote didn’t do much else that could be termed horror, unless we count IN COLD BLOOD…and we should. Archibald had previously written the screenplay for Hitchcock’s I CONFESS.]
Directed by Jack Clayton
Cast: Deborah Kerr, Michael Redgrave, Pamela Franklin
Before leaving an indelible mark on the genre with THE HAUNTING, Julie Harris assayed the lead in a play based on perhaps the seminal psychological horror tale of modern literature. But for this film version, Kerr assumed the role, supplying a persuasively neurotic performance, and even before the opening credits have rolled, her anguish hooks the viewer. Some cinematic moments never leave you. This film has one. The casual appearance of a phantom on a rainy afternoon ranks up there with the bending doors of THE HAUNTING. (Beware: a misbegotten prequel—THE NIGHT VISITORS with Marlon Brando—is to be avoided at all costs. Truly. It may even be worse than the remake of THE HAUNTING.)
Note: The little girl is Pamela Franklin who a few years later would be one of the doomed psychics in THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE. Quite a childhood.

SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER
1959, Columbia
Script: Gore Vidal (adapted from the play by Tennessee Williams)
[All of Williams’ plays scare the hell out of me, but as far as I know this is Vidal’s sole venture into the genre…except for an old television version of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”]
Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Cast: Katherine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, Mercedes McCambridge Southern Gothic of an extremely high order—the plot embraces human sacrifice, cannibalism and (shudder) homosexuality, all discretely hinted it in a garden choked with carnivorous plants and presided over by a demented Hepburn. As the psychiatrist, Clift offers up a peculiarly tortured hero (probably due more to his personal demons than to any conscious acting technique), and Taylor seems almost preternaturally distraught, her climactic monologue an exercise in controlled hysteria unlike anything else in the cannon.
Note: Taylor’s despicable mother here is played by McCambridge, who would later provide the voice of the devil for THE EXORCIST. Now that’s something to tell your therapist.

THE SEVENTH VICTIM
1943, RKO (Val Lewton)
Script: DeWitt Bodeen and Charles O’Neal
[This was O’Neal’s first writing assignment, but he went on to create CRY OF THE WEREWOLF and THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE—both in the “Lewton style.” Bodeen of course was a frequent Lewton collaborator.]
Directed by Mark Robson
Cast: Jean Brooks, Kim Hunter, Tom Conway, Isabel Jewell
Adult stuff—this prequel to CAT PEOPLE achieves astonishing romantic morbidity, and though she’s rarely onscreen, Brooks owns the picture. Exuding an exhausted eroticism, her yearning for death makes the Frankenstein monster’s mooning about in graveyards look positively saccharine. (Hitchcock acknowledged this chic, intelligently dark thriller as an influence on PSYCHO. The shower scene. You’ll see.) All about Satanists or something in Greenwich Village, it centers on a missing patient of one Dr. Louis Judd. Remember him? CAT PEOPLE begins with a quote from his The Anatomy of Atavism: “Even as fog continues to lie in the valley, so does ancient sin cling to the low places, the depressions in the world’s consciousness.” Yes, Judd is the same lascivious psychiatrist (Conway) torn to pieces by Irene, and judging from this earlier chapter in his romantic history, his sexual choices were always somewhat ill advised. Not that anyone could blame him. Turning up in a couple of SAINT and FALCON serials, Brooks brought a mournful intensity to every film she graced, and here she assists in delivering some truly nightmarish moments. Don’t miss the corpse on the subway or the tandem suicides. It doesn’t get any darker than this.

THE UNINVITED
1944, Paramount
Script: Dodie Smith (from the novel “Uneasy Freehold” by Dorothy McCardle)
[Interesting lady McCardle. After publishers dismissed her first book—written in prison no less—she invented a male collaborator, thereby launching a career as playwright, author and social historian. Her next book “The Unforeseen” isn’t exactly a sequel, but some of the characters from “Uneasy Freehold” do appear.]
Directed by Lewis Allen
Cast: Ray Milland, Gail Russell, Cornelia Otis Singer, Ruth Hussey, Donald Crisp, Alan Napier
I’ve always more or less assumed I’d wind up at The Mary Meredith Retreat sooner or later. (Of course, I’d rather go to Cascades. You know? The sanatorium Claude Rains runs in NOW, VOYAGER, where the loonies dress fashionably and play tennis? My luck, I’ll end up at Lion’s View from SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER.) Modeled on REBECCA, this is one of those films that divides horror aficionados into enemy camps, the lightness of tone alienating an awful lot of hardcore fans. But don’t let the romantic charm fool you. Real chills abound. Some of the back story is fascinating too—tremulous Gail Russell (just out of high school and not all that far from suicide) developed a strange relationship with Skinner, grand dame of the American stage, and Russell would have her biggest successes playing the young Skinner in a pair of films based on her memoirs. Here, Skinner does the Mrs. Danvers routine to sinister perfection, her obsession with Russell truly chilling. (Smith, the screenwriter, went on to create Cruela DeVille. This may have been practice.) The amazing cast keep the weird plot moving, enhanced by the director’s flawless timing and sense of atmosphere. Yet Allen did very little work in the genre. (SO EVIL MY LOVE— also with Milland—barely qualifies.) However, shortly after THE UNINVITED, he directed THE UNSEEN, again with Russell and again about a strange old house. THE UNSEEN may be one of the most prophetically titled films of all time, and it took me years to track down a copy. Sad to say, it’s not very good—all the unearthly events get explained away at the end—but it’s failings only point up the virtues of this earlier effort, where the ghosts prove gloriously real.

NIGHT OF THE DEMON
1957, Columbia
Script: Charles Bennett & Hal Chester (based on the story “Casting the Runes” by M. R. James)
[Montague Rhodes James’ “Ghost Stories of an Antiquary” are required reading for any serious aficionado of the genre. This would be the only horror venture for Chester—a former East Side Kid—but Bennett’s genre credentials are impeccable. He wrote several early scripts for Hitchcock as well as a couple of thrillers with supernatural elements, including BLACK WAGER and CLAIRVOYANT.]
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
Cast: Dana Andrews, Niall MacGinnis, Peggy Cummins
The tone of the opening sequence—the night drive through a menacing forest—is what I tried to evoke throughout THE PINES, and I’ve never felt that the insertion of the demon (imposed over the director’s strenuous objections) really hurt this film all that much. After all, it’s such a damn sexy demon. Of course, the same thing happened to Tourneur with CAT PEOPLE—all that subtle ambiguity ruined by a glimpse of an actual panther—so he may have been a tad sensitive on the subject. [Val Lewton of course helmed all those sophisticated horror projects – similar to the sort of thing for which Delirium Books is developing a reputation—at RKO in the 40s, replete with cat women and leopard men. Although others got credit for writing and directing, the producer was well known for making tremendous creative contributions in both arenas, and several young directors who got their start with Lewton went on to create significant tributes to the master like this one and Robert Wise’s THE HAUNTING.] Tourneur needn’t have worried. Literate and subtle, DEMON is a true pleasure for the devout horror fan.
Note: the ruined children’s party inspired a similar sequence in THE BIRDS.

I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE
1943, RKO (Val Lewton)
Script: Curt Siodmak & Ardel Wray
[Siodmak’s contributions to the cycle of horror films at Universal can’t be overestimated—everything from THE WOLF MAN and SON OF DRACULA to the various adaptations of his novel “Donovan’s Brain.” Wray did several extraordinary scripts for RKO…but Inez Wallace often gets a story credit here. An entirely plausible legend holds that her contribution began and ended with this title, taken from one of her lurid magazine articles.]
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
Cast: Francis Dee, Tom Conway
Not so much a conventional horror film as an elegiac tone poem. Moonlight flickers in the surf…and the spiritually dead wander the beach. Just like Key West. As in ISLE OF THE DEAD, the moan of the wind can be both dreadful and sensual. (Inspiration for THE SHORE? Possibly. Very possibly.) Allegations of racism inevitably surface with regards to traditional zombie pictures, probably misjudged in this case. At a time when most African-American actors got stuck playing comic-relief servants in mainstream films, performers like Theresa Harris and Lancelot Pinard portrayed complex and intriguing characters in Lewton productions…sadly another excuse for his work to be marginalized by the Hollywood of the time.

CAT PEOPLE
1942, RKO (Val Lewton)
Script: DeWitt Bodeen
[Originally intending to adapt Algernon Blackwood’s “Ancient Sorceries,” Lewton and Bodeen took a vastly more sophisticated turn, and Irena seems to have immigrated from the evil village in Blackwood’s story.]
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
Cast: Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Tom Conway, Jane Randolph
Ignore the claims about DRACULA. Erotic horror was invented right here. Any adolescent who ever felt a twinge of desire-induced terror understands exactly what poor Irena endures. She loves this dolt but doesn’t dare let herself respond: there’s no knowing what might happen. (Is that why the film still resonates with erotic minorities?) And the filmmakers’ sympathies unquestionably lie with her—a radical perspective. Simone, who scored big in LA BETE HUMAINE, represents inspired casting. What other actress of the period could have brought such seductive fragility to the role? Unquestionably dangerous, Irena remains vulnerable and lonely, her tears like acid, her yearning a palpable thing, while the “normal” folk around her seem odiously healthy specimens, stolid and dull. And notice the astonishing wealth of effects Lewton achieves on a tiny budget. The shadows, the sounds—true creative imagination at work. Missing no opportunity to enhance the mood, however subtly, he even had Simon dub the dialogue for Elizabeth Russell, the actress who calls her “sister,” with creepy and subliminal results. (Russell also incarnates the ghost of Mary Meredith in THE UNINVITED.) I believe cinema revolutionized the subconscious mind. Films became projected dreams, collectively experienced, and these images merged with the private symbols of our psyches. Throughout my formative years, this movie flickered endlessly across my inner screen. MARTYRS & MONSTERS should reveal how well I absorbed its lessons.

THE BIRDS
1963, Universal
Script: Evan Hunter (from the story by Daphne du Maurier)
[The brilliant du Maurier provided the source for many important films, including Hitchcock’s JAMAICA INN and the Nicolas Roeg shocker DON’T LOOK NOW. Hunter wrote under a dozen pseudonyms, including that of Ed McBain. His books, many of which also became films, boasted deliciously lurid titles like “The Gutter and the Grave” and “See Them Die” and—my personal favorite—“Ax.”]
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Cast: Tippi Hedren, Jessica Tandy, Rod Tayor, Suzanne Pleshette
A rare thing—perfect distillation of art film and monster movie. Though never more finely honed, the horror aspect of this template has worked ever since, whether with frogs, dinosaurs, aliens or zombies. Here it reached its zenith. For Hitchcock, birds always served as mythic emblems of chaos: furies of sexual violence. (An overview of Hitchcock’s oeuvre provides vivid glimpses of consistent symbology, beginning with the jump cut from strangled woman to shrieking gull in 1937’s YOUNG AND INNOCENT. And don’t overlook the raptor prints on the motel walls in PSYCHO. Or that the heroine of that film is a Miss Crane. Or that it begins in Phoenix. Don’t get me started.) Freud would have loved this movie. The merest suggestion of sexual tension provokes instantaneous mayhem. And it’s all about the women. Hedren perfects the final evolution of the Hitchcock blonde, performed through the decades by actresses like Nova Pilbeam, Marlene Dietrich, Kim Novak, Grace Kelly, Janet Leigh, even Doris Day. At first icy and brittle, by the climax she’s reduced to barely twitching catatonia. Raven-tressed Pleshette personifies the other woman in the Hitchcock lexicon, the warm, nurturing female (like Barbara Bel Geddes or Diane Baker or Anna Massey) who generally fails to save the hero from himself…and frequently winds up pecked to death, one way or another.

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Here are a few others titles, all floating prominently in the murk of my psyche. Perhaps you’ll spot some of your favorites as well?

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OLD DARK HOUSE
1932, Universal
Script: Benn Levy (based on the J. B. Priestly novel “Benighted”)
Directed by James Whale
Cast: Boris Karloff, Ernest Thesiger, Charles Laughton, Melvyn Douglas, Gloria Stuart
Title tells all. The bracingly bitter script only goes sappy at the end when the hero, clearly dead a moment before, inexplicably recovers…which does not occur in the book.

THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME
1939, RKO
Script: Sonya Levien & Bruno Frank (from the Victor Hugo classic)
Directed by William Dieterle
Cast: Charles Laughton, Cedric Hardwicke, Maureen O’Hara, Edmond O’Brien, George Zucco
Doesn’t matter how many times I’ve seen it—I always weep when he swings down to rescue her. (The Fritz Leiber whose name appears in the credits is the actor father of the famous fantasy/horror writer, but young Fritz Jr. is said to appear in the film somewhere as well.)

REBECCA
1940, Selznick
Script: Robert E. Sherwood & Joan Harrison (from Daphne du Maurier’s novel)
[Numerous writers labored over this adaptation, including Hitchcock himself, though Sherwood and Harrison authored the actual script. Best known for her production work on Hitchcock’s television programs, Harrison also scripted a little known gem called DARK WATERS, and Sherwood wrote THE GHOST GOES WEST, which is delicious.]
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Cast: Joan Fontaine, Laurence Olivier, Judith Anderson, Nigel Bruce, George Sanders
An eloquent and sophisticated exploration of what it truly means to be haunted, even if it barely delves into the iconic complexities of the novel.

THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER
1941, RKO
Script: Dan Totheroh (from the story by Stephen Vincent Benét)
[Benét won an O. Henry Award for the story and a few years later would receive a posthumous Pulitzer. Life is short: literature lasts. Totheroh also wrote a moody and tragic suspense novel called “Deep Valley.”]
Directed by William Dieterle
Cast: Walter Huston, Simone Simon, Edward Arnold
An expressionist curiosity but significant—with Huston as a homegrown Satan and Simon (yet again) as a sort of cat demon.

THE UNDYING MONSTER
1942, TCF
Script: Lillie Hayward (based on a novel by Jessie Kerruish)
[This was Hayward’s only out and out horror project, but her jungle pictures often boasted a horrific edge, with people forever being devoured by crocodiles or trampled by elephants … the sort of thing dear to the heart of any bookish but secretly bloodthirsty child. She also wrote the noir Western BLOOD ON THE MOON for Robert Wise.]
Directed by John Brahm
Cast: John Howard, James Ellison, Heather Angel
Atmospheric if decidedly minor. The first (and only) entry in what was intended as a series about a pair of psychic investigators. The delight here lies in the way it subverts the HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES convention, the scientific detectives uncovering truly supernatural issues (in this case lycanthropy) instead of disproving them. How sad the studio abandoned the concept after this initial effort.

JANE EYRE
1943, TCF
Script: Aldous Huxley & John Houseman (from the Charlotte Brontë novel)
[How could it not be a classic?]
Directed by Robert Stevenson
Cast: Joan Fontaine, Orson Welles, Henry Danielle, Agnes Moorehead, Elizabeth Taylor
Visually, it’s an alliance of formal composition and expressionistic lighting, and still the ultimate Gothic. Mysterious passageways echo with hellish shrieks. Factor in the fog-shrouded moors, the glorious rumble of Welles’ voice…and Fontaine’s luminous presence.

THE LEOPARD MAN
1943, RKO (Val Lewton)
Script: Ardel Wray (based upon “Black Alibi” by Cornell Woolrich)
[Woolrich’s life remains an object lesson in what can happen to a writer. He struggled, starved and drank his way through such miserable isolation that he was reduced to dedicating one of his numerous novels to his only friend: his typewriter. No one attended his funeral. I so need to get out more.]
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
Cast: Jean Brooks, Dennis O’Keefe, Margo, Isobel Jewell, James Bell
In its best moments, claustrophobic, sad and visionary. (I mean, Brooks and a panther: what’s not to love?) Bell may have invented the sort of sad, twitchy menace that Tony Perkins perfected in PSYCHO, and Abner Biberman needs to be experienced—a sort of male Maria Ouspenskaya.

CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE
1944, RKO (Val Lewton)
Script: DeWitt Bodeen
Directed by Robert Wise
Cast: Simone Simon, Jane Randolph, Kent Smith, Elizabeth Russell, Julia Dean
Final episode of Lewton’s trilogy: slight but haunting and poignant.

ISLE OF THE DEAD
1945, RKO (Val Lewton)
Script: Ardel Wray
Directed by Mark Robson
Cast: Boris Karloff, Katherine Emery, Ellen Drew, Alan Napier, Marc Cramer
The original working title was CAMILLA, and you’ll immediately see the connection to the Sheridan LeFanu story “Carmilla.” The apparent paucity of the budget mars this project from the first, but it scarcely matters: Karloff is brilliant, Emery disturbing, and the atmosphere of dread persuasive. Can you even think of another film that appears to be taking place inside a painting? Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead appears behind the credits, and obviously provided a model for the sets. (The painting can also be spotted in Lewton’s I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE.)

THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE
1945, RKO
Script: Mel Dinelli (from “Some Must Watch” by Ethel Lina White)
[White’s novel “The Wheel Spins” became an instant classic when Hitchcock turned it into THE LADY VANISHES, and her novel HER HEART IN HER THROAT became the Lewis Allen film THE UNSEEN. Dinelli later did the screenplay for Shirley Jackson’s novel “The Bird’s Nest”—filmed as LIZZIE—as well as for several important thrillers like BEWARE, MY LOVELY and THE WINDOW.]
Directed by Robert Siodmak
Cast: Dorothy McGuire, Ethel Barrymore, Elsa Lanchester, Kent Smith, George Brent, James Bell, Rhonda Fleming
Mute girl trapped in an old dark house with a serial killer. Did I mention the apocalyptic thunderstorm? Or the sexiest strangling ever? Or that the housekeeper is the BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN?

THE LOST MOMENT
1947, Wanger
Script: Leonardo Bercovici (based on the Henry James novella THE ASPERN PAPERS)
[Though venerated as a novelist, James’ ghost stories still don’t receive the attention they deserve: “Sir Edmund Orme” and “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” should be mandatory for any serious education in the genre. The following year Bercovici did a lovely adaptation of the supernatural romance PORTRAIT OF JENNIE.]
Directed by Martin Gabel
Cast: Susan Hayward, Robert Cummings, Agnes Moorehead
Ghostly possession in old Venice…or possibly something to do with multiple personalities. Hard to tell really. But somehow delicious. Would make a great double bill with THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS—you can practically smell the canals.

THE WOMAN IN WHITE
1948, Warner
Script: Stephen Avery (from Wilkie Collins’ novel)
[Any resemblance to the book pretty much begins and ends with the dress…not necessarily a bad thing. Avery later wrote the script for a film version of Dan Totheroh’s novel DEEP VALLEY.]
Directed by Peter Godfrey
Cast: Agnes Moorehead, Sidney Greenstreet, Gig Young, Eleanor Parker, Alexis Smith
Cruel Victorian misogyny—the women are destroyed (or saved) pretty much at the whim of the males. Features some very creepy doppelganger themes. And one always suspected that Moorehead couldn’t be trusted around knives.

THE THING (FROM ANOTHER WORLD)
1951, RKO
Script: Charles Lederer (adapted from J. W. Campbell’s story “Who Goes There?”)
[Campbell is a legend. Lederer scripted several noir classics and directed a little-known gem about hypnosis and ax murders called FINGERS AT THE WINDOW.]
Direct by Christian Nyby
Cast: James Arness, Kenneth Tobey, Margaret Sheridan
Snow would never be the same. (Ask Greg Gifune.) A Howard Hawks film—discount the directing credit. This sort of thing happened at RKO.

THE MAZE
1953, Allied Artists
Script: Daniel Ullman (from the novel by Maurice Sandoz)
[Sandoz wrote the infamous play “Spring-Heeled Jack.”]
Directed by William Cameron Menzies
Cast: Katherine Emery, Richard Carlson
Yes, that William Cameron Menzies—innovator of all those silent classics, here again on the technical cutting edge…with 3D. Difficult to justify including this one here because it’s such a clunker really, but it tries so terribly hard to generate atmosphere and—as a kid—I found the combination of pity, disgust and derision engendered by the monster particularly unsettling.

LES DIABOLIQUES
1954, Film Sonor
Written & Directed by Georges Clouzot (based on the novel “The Woman Who Was” by Pierre Boileau)
[Clouzot may have been Hitchcock’s only real competition for the title Master of Suspense, a rivalry Hitch felt intensely. Boileau co-wrote “…d’Entre les Morts,” the novel source for VERTIGO, and helped adapt John Redon’s novel LES YEUX SANS VISAGE.]
Cast: Simone Signoret, Vera Clouzot
Possibly the most nerve-wracking film ever. Period. There’s something obscenely terrible about a swimming pool full of black water.

THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER
1955, United Artists
Script: James Agee (from the novel by Davis Grubb)
[Agee is still a name to conjure with. The film may have been a commercial failure, but Grubb went on to write for The Hitchcock Hour and Night Gallery.]
Directed by Charles Laughton
Cast: Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish, James Gleason, Peter Graves
Strange and powerful—Laughton’s only directorial assignment. At the time, audiences didn’t know what to make of it. They still don’t. I’ve known theaters full of serious film buffs to burst out laughing at incongruous moments. Its sincerity still makes people that uncomfortable—the mark of a true (if curious) work of art.

PEEPING TOM
1959, Anglo Amalgamated
Script: Leo Marks
[Marks also wrote an the unpleasant PSYCHO retread TWISTED NERVE.]
Directed by Michael Powell
Cast: Carl Boehm, Anna Massey, Moira Shearer, Shirley Ann Field
Quiet, kept to himself. (Today, a film this disturbing would launch a career. It killed Powell’s.)

LES YEUX SANS VISAGE
1959, Champs Elysees/LUX
Script: John Redon (from his novel)
Directed by Georges Franju
Cast: Alida Valli, Pierre Brasseur
A surreal recipe: stew a hint of surgical horror (popular in European films of the period) with a dash of sinister lesbianism; stir in a relentlessly depressive plot and some truly dreamlike imagery. The result is unforgettable…even if it does leave a bad taste.

BURN, WITCH, BURN
1961, Independent Artists
Script: Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, George Baxt (from the novel “Conjure Wife” by Fritz Leiber)
[Check out the literary royalty involved. Baxt, least famous of the lot, is one of my favorite mystery writers. The British title—NIGHT OF THE EAGLE—makes sense, while the American title appears to have been lifted from a novel by Abraham Merrit, itself filmed as THE DEVIL DOLL. Confused yet?]
Directed by Sidney Hagers
Cast: Margaret Johnston, Janet Blair, Peter Wyngarde
Effectively intelligent adaptation of possibly my absolute favorite horror novel.

CARNIVAL OF SOULS
1962, Harcourt
Script: Herk Harvey and John Clifford
[Most of Harvey’s oeuvre consists of shorts like “What About School Spirit?” and “Pork: the Meal with a Squeal.” But here he seems to have been touched by genius.]
Directed by Herk Harvey
Cast: Candace Hilligoss
The POV feels marginalized to the point of schizophrenia. As in so many horror films, the main character is an outsider—here even more isolated than Catherine Deneuve in REPULSION—utterly shut out from the world of the living.

ONIBABA
1964, Tokyo-Eiga
Written & Directed by Kanito Shoudo
Cast: Nobuko Otowa, Jitsuko Yoshianura
Hell on earth (or somewhere) and frankly sexual. The blighted landscape inspired the wasteland tales at the heart of MARTYRS & MONSTERS.

EYE OF THE DEVIL
1967, MGM
Script: Robin Estridge (from Philip Loraine’s novel “Day of the Arrow”)
[Turns out Estridge and Loraine were the same person. Go figure.]
Directed by J. Lee-Thompson
Cast: Deborah Kerr, Donald Pleasance, David Niven, Sharon Tate, David Hemmings, Flora Robson, Emlyn Williams
An effective little nightmare, but the presence of the flawlessly beautiful Tate (who replaced Kim Novak as the witch) in a film about ritual slaughter renders it almost unbearably bitter.

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Did you miss a title you expected to see? Let me hear from you. I left off any number of favorites on the grounds that they weren’t Horror enough, films like THE BODY SNATCHERS and THE SEA WOLF, BETWEEN TWO WORLDS and THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR, NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES and GHOST BREAKERS.

After all, one has to stop somewhere.