Horror 101: The Horror Movies Of 1960 Pushed Boundaries And Challenged Censors

John Llewellyn Moxey is the best genre director you may not have ever heard of. He plied his trade mostly in television (including the pilot episode for Charlie’s Angels), and is the man responsible in large part for the effectiveness of The Night Stalker. His films A Taste of Evil with Barbara Stanwyk and the slasher Home for the Holidays are exceptional low-budget exercises in tension and atmosphere. His masterpiece, though, is The City of the Dead – a witch flick in which a professor played by the great Christopher Lee advises his earnest student Nan (Venetia Stevenson) to travel to Whitewood, MA to investigate its history of burning inconvenient women at the stake. Turns out, all the stories were true and an ancient witch, Elizabeth Selwyn (Patricia Jessel), still prowls the streets looking for a sacrifice on Candlemas Eve.

A couple of scenes of genuine terror mixed with a setting thick with a real, oppressive, hopeless-feeling dread, make City of the Dead (also known as Horror Hotel in some quarters) one of the great “found” movies of the genre. With a climax that generates a real sense of peril and a bizarre central performance that actually fuels the strangeness of the piece, it’s a corker that lingers.

Where to stream The City Of The Dead

Created essentially as a means to distribute Roger Corman’s racing film The Fast and the Furious (1955), what came to be known as “American International Pictures” or “AIP”, in 1960, began adapting a series of Edgar Allan Poe stories with the winning team of Corman and Vincent Price. They enlisted screenwriters — including legends Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont and Robert Towne — banking on easily-recognizable titles that had fallen into the public domain, and investing in production design and lush widescreen color to provide audiences something that television couldn’t.

The House of Usher is the first of the AIP Poe films and, arguably, the best. Reeking of decadence, decay, and bad sex, it concerns mad Roderick Usher (Price) who opposed the marriage between his sister Madeline (Myrna Fahey) and heroic Philip (Mark Damon). Complicating things, Madeline has a bad case of catalepsy which results in her premature burial and… that would be telling. Roderick seems a little too interested in what happens in Madeline’s bed; the time in a coffin does not do good things to Madeline’s psyche; and the final shots of the earth essentially swallowing a bloodline that needs by all rights to be terminated proves powerful and sticky. Incredible.

Where to stream House Of Usher

Korean master Kim Ki-young’s most well-known (in the west) film, The Housemaid details the disastrous effect a mad housemaid Myung-sook (Lee Eun-shim) who inculcates herself in the household of a composer and music teacher, Kim Dong-sik (Kim Jin-kyu). his pregnant wife (Ju Jeung-ryu) and their kids (Ahn Sung-Ki, Lee Yoo-ri). As barbed and pointedly-absurd as anything by Luis Bunuel, the picture takes aim at traditional Korean family structures and, more importantly, toxic, and toxically-persistent, sexual attitudes.

Dong-sik seems reasonable at first, even loving, hiring the maid to help his wife when she collapses from the strain of her pregnancy and also providing for her family. Myung-sook represents a wave of unmarried female workers during a modernization period in Korea: a vulnerable, oft-exploited class of worker who found themselves primarily as light factory workers and domestic servants. Not unlike the the femme fatale of American noir who found their origins in the “Rosie the Riveter” factory workers reluctant to return to traditional domestic roles post-war, these domestics were seen as sexually dangerous and The Housemaid focused such prejudices and fears. But by localizing the story as something conjured as a cautionary tale by a man reading a sensationalist newspaper article, what seems a casual demonization of a troubled young woman, becomes a satire of social panic and the ways in which men use the “threat” of female sexuality to bolster their status and power.

Where to stream The Housemaid

The final film for studio Shintoho, Jigoku was conceived as a quick, gory, morality play, but under the twisted hand of Kyoto-born cult filmmaker Nobuo Nakagawa, it’s a masterpiece of nightmarish imagery and a disorienting dream-logic that makes even the act of watching it jarring and unpleasant.

Essentially a roundelay of characters tempted in life and subsequently tormented in the afterlife for succumbing to their temptations, it’s situated chronologically at the very beginning of the Japanese New Wave — one of the most exciting moments in film history that is largely obscured in the west by similar movements in France, Germany, and indeed, the United States. Pulling from Dante, Goethe and Genshin’s Ojoyoshu, an ancient Buddhist text detailing the architecture of hell, its main inspiration is the Leopold & Loeb murder case that also served as inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope and Richard Fleisher’s incredible Compulsion.

It all begins with an accident when college student Tamura (Yoichi Numata), driving peer Shiro (Shigeru Amachi) home one night, murders a Yakuza in a hit-and-run and then fails to stop despite Shiro’s objections. Tamura’s tortured justifications for his act, and Shiro’s weakness in the face of it, result in a series of increasingly absurd moments that culminate in a literal visit to hell with live-flaying, dismemberments galore, the fate of an unborn infant strapped to a wheel of fortune, and of course lots of screaming.

The direct tonal and structural inspiration for Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator, Jingoku (aka Sinners From Hell) is an unusually nihilistic, profoundly-disturbing tale about how all sins are essentially equal and no one here gets out alive. The Japanese, since WWII, have been consistently ahead of the curve in terms of seeing the bleakness of the world as it really is: stripped of belief and any hope for a brighter future unshaded by shame and images of atrocity, Jingoku is as timeless and unshakeable as Pasolini’s Salo and Elem Klimov’s Come and See.

Where to stream Jigoku

Wolf Rilla’s all-time masterpiece of marital politics, sexual unease, and evil children with what The Simpsons would call “eye power” is the still-resonant — and still-frightening — Village of the Damned. One of several adaptations of the great John Wyndham’s apocalyptic fiction, the picture understands the intimate violation of an alien “event” impregnating all the women in the tiny English village of Midwich, particularly for an older schoolteacher George Sanders who may already be a little insecure about his ability to keep a younger wife interested. As the group of alien kids, raised by our heroes as their own, grow in power and creepiness, if falls on our teacher to figure out a way to outwit their telepathy, over-power their telekinesis, and save the world.

A metaphor for fear of atomic annihilation at the hand of foreign agents, it’s also possible to see Village of the Damned as a Cold War picture – one that sees mutually assured destruction as a thing that’s possibly unavoidable despite the best efforts of our brightest people. It would work as a brilliant companion piece to Alberto Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well? (1942) that also sees a small English village infiltrated by hostiles and dependent on the heroic acts of ordinary people to preserve the commonwealth. Village of the Damned is, like all of the films on this list, one of the great pictures.

Where to stream Village Of The Damned

Italian master Mario Bava’s official debut, Black Sunday finds eternal beauty Barbara Steele in the film’s horrifying opening moments, betrayed, sentenced to death for witchcraft, with an “iron maiden” mask with long spikes on the inside hammered on her face. That’s right. 2,000 years later — a conspicuously Christian span — the witch Asa (Steele) is discovered and, as is the habit of well-meaning archaeologists, they accidentally resurrect her. Whoops!

Shot in stark black-and-white when lush Technicolor was the fashion, Bava fashions this loose adaptation of Gogol’s Viy, a favorite bedtime story of Bava’s children, into a gorgeous supernatural melodrama involving past lives, the persecution and objectification of women, and the hope that love is indeed rejuvenating and that the past need not hold sway over the future. Bava’s obvious genius is already on full display here — the fluidity of the camera in swaying from a passenger boarding a carriage to a child hidden in the bushes. Francis Ford Coppola would crib entire passages for his Bram Stoker’s Dracula almost shot-for-shot because when you’ve done something perfectly, after all, you can’t improve on it.

The shadow play is delicious, the melting faces are convincingly-animated, and the dazzling reveal of Asa’s incomplete transformation back to full-flesh hits on a few existential, The Thing-like beats. Fashioned as a response to Hammer Studios’ Dracula films, Black Sunday is gothic done right.

Where to stream Black Sunday

Ingmar Bergman’s medieval adaptation of a 13th century Swedish ballad “Tores Daughters in Vange,” The Virgin Spring was an international sensation, winning the Foreign Language Film Oscar and continuing the director’s arthouse dominance in the United States. Brigitta Pettersson plays virtuous Karin, daughter of Tore (Max von Sydow), who on a mission to take candles to church, ignores the pagan warnings of the land and an enigmatic traveler who may or may not be Odin in his time on Earth, and ends up raped and murdered by three men. Three men who, as fate would have it, seek shelter at Tore’s home where, through an attempted peddling of poor Karin’s clothing to her mother, are discovered as Karin’s murderers. In vengeance and grief, Tore exacts his violent justice and tells God that although he will never understand why this indignity was visited upon Karin and subsequently the horror of it upon her parents, that he will mark the spot of the atrocity with a church.

The “spring” of the title refers probably to the one that begins to flow from the spot where the dead girl’s head lay on the ground, unburied. It could also refer to an idea of rebirth in the Christian myth, revealed here as the product of unimaginable pain and the sacrifice of the innocent. Of course it’s beautiful to look at; naturally, it’s theologically chilly and fraught with Kierkegaardian fear and loathing, and because it was pitched at high-minded audiences, it defeated censors uncomfortable with its rape and its ambiguous “heroism.” It manages to astonish and provoke every single time I see it.

Where to stream The Virgin Spring

The film that notoriously derailed the great Michael Powell’s career, Peeping Tom has proven through the lens of history to be one of the most perceptive films connecting the act of watching movies with a certain destructive scopophilia. Tied inextricably in my mind with Hitchcock’s Rear Window, in Peeping Tom our “hero” is photographer Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm), a man who has constructed a camera connected to a knife blade for the purpose of capturing, on film, the exact moment of a model/victim’s death. The film suggests this aspiring filmmaker does this because of trauma he endured as the child of a psychologist who used him in his experiments on fear and its effect on bodily systems. For Mark, fear becomes sexual, and the penetration of the camera/knife becomes associated in him with sexual release. When his rent-paying job as a low grade smut-peddler isn’t enough, he graduates up to the “heavier” stuff.

In the age of the rampant and easy access to porn, we see the same phenomena happening with middle class purveyors today. It’s not unrelieved murder, however; in fact, there’s relatively little violence in Peeping Tom (at least of the physical kind). Powell, ever the master, allows Mark a possible outlet in an appropriate relationship but, alas, the imprinting is too essential and there proves no escape from ones hardwiring in the end.

Michael Mann’s Manhunter and David Cronenberg’s (but not Stephen King’s) The Dead Zone contain more than a few echoes of this film: stories all of lonesome boys miswired at some point in their lives and doomed to a life of suffering, and dealing, pain. It is, contrary to reviews of the time comparing it to sewage, mature and uncomfortably accusatory. Probably the reason it was so despised is because it asks the audience to question why they get so much of a thrill from watching it. It’s so smart, so creepy. It’s so impossibly good.

Where to stream Peeping Tom

Georges Franju’s astonishing film has as its centerpiece a surgery sequence that I still find to be queasy even after decades of teaching the film — and a concluding series of images that I have never been able to entirely shake. The tale revolves around the doomed attempts by a mad doctor to perform a successful face-transplant, with involuntary donors, for his daughter who has been terribly deformed in a car accident. She’s also been scrambled in other ways – floating through an abandoned estate like a ghost haunting her own former life and gradually becoming aware of the lengths to which her father is going to restore her. Complicating him as a character, he wants to “fix” his daughter because he hopes to assuage his guilt of being the cause in some way of the accident.

Screened originally with an extraordinarily-difficult to watch short documentary, also by Franju, about slaughterhouse practices, Eyes Without a Face is an essentially humanist piece that ends with the freeing of experimental animals (including Edith Scob’s damaged heroine) and the death of the scientist at the jaws of the dogs on which he has been testing his theories. Its ultimate message about the disfiguring effects of “progress” and the withering of conscience and the soul lends its more horrific moments a sense of poetic prophecy. There is no movie quite like Eyes Without a Face: sixty-plus years on it retains its ability to shock and then to linger as warning or fairytale about the ogre father who wasn’t always so, and the little girl lost who lives in the woods and is looking for her face in yours.

Where to stream Eyes Without A Face

Arguably the single most influential modern film of all time, Hitchcock’s giant middle-finger to audiences that rejected Vertigo only to reward audience-excoriating North by Northwest instead, Psycho was the movie no one wanted to make with Hitch and so Hitch made it with his “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” crew with a lot of his own money and got so rich, he went on to make what Truffaut called “apocalyptic tone poem” The Birds next. It’s a movie that betrays you, baiting you with good, all-American son Norman (Anthony Perkins) who stays home to take care of his mother and their failing motel business, and then revealing that Norman is a peeping tom, a henpecked “mama’s boy” of a woman driven mad by what we presume are the abuses of lascivious men, and ultimately so dominated by his own deviant experience of sex that he acts out homicidally whenever aroused.

It opens with a young woman, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) who, after suffering some good old fashioned sexual harassment at her work, embezzles a tidy sum of cash on an impulse and runs toward her boyfriend to start a life on the lam. Alas, she, just like Melanie in The Birds, changes her mind and decides she’ll stay the night at Norman’s motel and then return the money in the morning, accepting the consequences of her brief rage against the machine. Her capitulation, and her bad judgment in taking the advice of a motorcycle cop who recommends she find a motel to stay in for the night, results in her death. The money, for what it’s worth, is sunk into a swamp along with her body.

Psycho, like so many of the films on this list, reveals institutions of faith, order, society (an invitation to dinner is as pathetic and sad as the rest of it in providing succor and sustenance) as bankrupt. Even Capitalism, the great American religion, is revealed to be cold comfort in a chaotic universe. Lots of money changes hands. None of it makes a damn lick of difference. Psycho changed how we watched movies (no spoilers! no admission once it starts!), challenged the Catholic rating system (first toilet in an American movie since 1934 – and it even hides a clue), and made an entire generation of people afraid of taking a shower. It is triphammer tense and tight as a drum — and the greatest film in one of the greatest years of film.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2021. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Where to stream Psycho