VOTING CLOSED - WINNER: FANATIC
Thanks to everyone who voted!
Not many films in cinema history, irrespective of genre, had as significant or immediate an impact as Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 horror thriller Psycho. We shall not, at this moment, rehearse all the many things that changed in the wake of Psycho, limiting ourselves to one of the most visible and overt immediate responses: the B-movie producers of the world immediately understood that a new market for movies about crazy killers had just announced itself (it proved to be an especially popular genre in the United Kingdom, for some reason, which must have been a cold comfort to poor Michael Powell, whose similar Peeping Tom only slightly beat Psycho to theaters, and effectively ended his career).
As these were some of the earliest "gawk in delight as violence happens in front of you" pictures ever made, no historical tour of the horror film could ever be complete without stopping over there, so for this week, I've selected three especially superlative examples of the form, right down to their use of a one-word title describing a mentally imbalanced state.
Fanatic AKA Die! Die! My Darling (1965)
From IMDb: "A young woman is terrorized by her fiance's demented mother who blames her for her son's death."
Homicidal (1961)
From IMDb: "The brutal stabbing murder of a justice-of-the-peace sparks an investigation of dark family secrets in a sleepy small town in Southern California."
Paranoiac (1963)
From IMDb: "Simon Ashby is a wealthy psychotic who is is coddled by his aunt in their palatial mansion outside of London."
26 June 2014
6 comments:
Just a few rules so that everybody can have fun: ad hominem attacks on the blogger are fair; ad hominem attacks on other commenters will be deleted. And I will absolutely not stand for anything that is, in my judgment, demeaning, insulting or hateful to any gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. And though I won't insist on keeping politics out, let's think long and hard before we say anything particularly inflammatory.
Also, sorry about the whole "must be a registered user" thing, but I do deeply hate to get spam, and I refuse to take on the totalitarian mantle of moderating comments, and I am much too lazy to try to migrate over to a better comments system than the one that comes pre-loaded with Blogger.
...Just shut your pretty eyes.
ReplyDeleteWhy, yes, I did just vote based on a Misfits songs, why do you ask?
2 exclamation points, 1 vote.
ReplyDeleteIf I thought write-ins had a chance I'd have voted for Peeping Tom... but I can't pass up William Castle! "Homicidal" FTW!
ReplyDeleteI had Peeping Tom in the list at first (ironically, replacing Homicidal, and the theme was "British Psycho Knock-Offs", until I was reminded that it was released before the Hitchcock film and thus ineligible.
ReplyDeleteI've since been trying to come up with a good replacement category that it would fit in along with two other movies, though I've kind of got the whole summer mapped out enough that I don't want to pull at it too much. But hey, there's another Readers' Choice coming along!
Summer of Blood: The World Horror watershed year of 1960. You can have Peeping Tom from Britain, The Housemaid from Korea and Mexico's Curse of the Crying women. Problem solved, wink wink ;)
DeleteI'm not sure if this is exactly what you mean, but we do love a good 'Psycho Right Next to You' film. (50% of which I think has been provided by Michael Douglas.)
ReplyDeleteSingle White Female will always have a special place in my heart with those 90s short haircuts. And Rebecca De Mornay feeding another woman's child always really disturbed me.