Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman
Throughout the 1960s, a
trend in horror movies is the human “monster.” Often the victim
of a significant mental disorder or a mental illness of some kind,
the “monster” frequently preys upon his or her peers: he or she
is “one of us” without being one of us. Therefore, the monster
seems even more terrifying, since victims have no sense of the
monster's monstrosity: he or she seems just like everyone else.
Examples abound, including
Psycho (1960), Peeping
Tom (1960), Nightmare (1963),
The Sadist (1963), and
Straight-Jacket
(1964).
Survivors
include a sister and her boyfriend (Psycho)
and a neighbor (Peeping Tom).
In this subgenre of the horror film, survivors tend to be few and far
between, as do heroes. A woman searching for her sister, who has
disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and her boyfriend and a
naive, but sincere, young woman who has befriended a psychotic
neighbor have the right stuff: courage, loyalty, and love, in the
sister's case; friendliness and compassion, in the neighbor's case.
Do they survive because of these qualities, or are they simply lucky?
By leaving such a question in viewers' minds, these films are
unsettling: perhaps our fates do not depend on our behavior, but on
pure, dumb luck.
Alfred
Hitchcock's Psycho is
so familiar it need not be summarized. Anthony Perkins, as the mad
transvestite killer Norman Bates, who, half the time believes he's
his dead mother, provides a stand-out performance, as does his first
victim, Janet Leigh, as Marion Crane. Hitchcock gives his audience
some hints about Bates's state of mind: Bates's nervousness and
evasiveness, the birds he's stuffed and mounted as an amateur
taxidermist, his statement that “sometimes, we all go a little
mad,” and his admission that he is under his mother's control. Such
clues, however, don't seem to register with Crane, as they do with
Detective Milton Arbogast (Martin Balsam). (Nevertheless, both Crane and Abogast are killed.)
Peeping Tom
features a camera operator's assistant, Mark Lewis, whose sideline is
photographing scantily clad or nude women for a his local porn dealer
and whose pastime is filming the young women he kills to
capture their expressions as they are faced with their own imminent
murders for a documentary work-in-progress.
Between
sessions with his camera, he enjoys replaying his victims' screams as
he watches their terror in the comfort of his home. The movie's back
story suggests that Lewis was himself victimized by his father, a
psychiatrist who subjected his son to bizarre experiments during the
boy's childhood. In the last moments of the film, he becomes his own
final victim.
Nightmare
keeps audiences guessing. Janet sees her mother kill her father. Her
mother is institutionalized. At the finishing school at which she
stays, Janet has nightmares about a woman in white (her mother). A
teacher takes her home, but her guardian, Henry Baxter, is not there,
so the teacher leaves Janet in the care of Grace, a nurse-companion
whom Henry has hired.
Janet's
nightmares continue, and she is sedated when Henry returns home. When
Henry's wife comes home, Janet mistakes her for the woman in her
nightmare and stabs her to death, after which she is
institutionalized.
Grace,
who has been masquerading as the woman in white in Janet's
“nightmares,” marries Henry, with whom she has conspired to
deceive Janet into believing she was experiencing nightmares.
Suspecting that Henry seeks to drive her mad, Grace stabs him to
death, thinking the police will suspect Janet, who, Grace believes,
has escaped from the institution. However, Janet has not escaped, so
Grace is arrested and charged with Henry's murder.
Besides
Janet's mother, who else is mad? Janet? Grace? Both?
An
everyday incident turns into a nightmare of pain and suffering when a
trio's car breaks down near a combination gas station-junkyard and a
pair of sadistic serial killers on the run from the police turn up.
The Sadist is horrific
not only because of the acts of sadism the killers commit against
their victims, but also because it shows how an ordinary
inconvenience can be transformed, without reason or justification,
into an orgy of violence and misery, just like (snap)
that.
As
in Nightmare,
Straight-Jacket pits a
daughter against one of her parents. This time, however, it's the
youngster, Lucy, who's the villain. Her mother, Carol, hoping to
marry a wealthy married man whose parents Lucy has alienated
following her return home from the mental institution to which she'd
been confined after murdering her husband and his mistress, commits
murders, hoping Lucy will be blamed, going so far as to disguise
herself as her daughter as she does so. However, despite the dead
bodies, things don't go exactly as either Carol or Lucy hoped.
Although
a bit far-fetched, each of these films generates suspense and fright
by showing what troubles troubled characters can cause, for themselves as
well as for others. Except for the murderous couple in The Sadist,
the villains are everyday
people—mothers, daughters, a camera operator's assistant, a motel
proprietor—who happen to suffer from significant mental disorders
or illnesses.
Because they are relatives or neighbors or business owners, they catch their victims with their guards down, as any of us might be caught off guard by similar human monsters disguised as fellow citizens. That is their greatest source of terror in a time in which society seemed, for many, turned upside-down and parents and children were caught not only in a generation gap, but also in a cultural war in which, for parents, society might seem to be coming apart at the seams and, for their children, tradition was a thing of the past in more ways than one.
These films frighten as much for their subtexts as they do for their violence. It may be, as Bates observes, that, “sometimes, we all go a little mad.” We just don't want to be the person who does, nor do we want to be the victim of the one who does.
Because they are relatives or neighbors or business owners, they catch their victims with their guards down, as any of us might be caught off guard by similar human monsters disguised as fellow citizens. That is their greatest source of terror in a time in which society seemed, for many, turned upside-down and parents and children were caught not only in a generation gap, but also in a cultural war in which, for parents, society might seem to be coming apart at the seams and, for their children, tradition was a thing of the past in more ways than one.
These films frighten as much for their subtexts as they do for their violence. It may be, as Bates observes, that, “sometimes, we all go a little mad.” We just don't want to be the person who does, nor do we want to be the victim of the one who does.