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.”