Mental Disorders and Ilnesses Will, Like Murder, Out

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.