“Peeping Tom” (1960)
While Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made some unassailable classics of cinema — “A Canterbury Tale,” “A Matter of Life and Death,” “Black Narcissus,” and “The Red Shoes” to name just a few — “Peeping Tom” is a masterwork on par with their best, an uncharacteristic psychological thriller-horror and quasi serial killer film. Directed solely by Powell, “Peeping Tom” is an unsettling, voyeuristic gem akin to Hitchcock’s best works about a disturbed young man who murders women in fetishistic fashion, using his camera to film their dying breaths and expression. These recordings are the most fucked up home videos on earth that he disquietingly watches on repeat. Controversial and widely hailed as one of the first “slasher” pictures, “Peeping Tom” was reviled in England upon its release and sullied Powell’s reputation and career, but retrospectively it’s been rightfully seen as an essential piece in the canon about psychopaths and the dark manners in which their kinks manifest. Shot in glorious technicolor by Otto Heller (the amazingly shot the “Ipcress Files” and “The Lady Killers”), “Peeping Tom” looks amazing both with its eye-popping color and its terrifically composed and controlled mise en scene. Deeply Freudian in nature with it themes of sexual repression and perverse violence, “Peeping Tom,” is a chilling and complex look at sociopathic behavior. Not unlike “Rear Window,” it blurs the line between objective and subjective filmmaking and in doing so makes the audience an unwilling participant in a frame they find abhorrent. Is there any wonder this unease created for such a backlash at the time? – Rodrigo Perez
“Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte” (1964)
Straddling the line between psychological thriller and horror, perhaps the latter term loosely applies to Robert Aldrich’s masterful picture, but it’s at least psychodrama for sure. Crafted in the Grand Guignol — theatrical, melodramatic and over the top — ‘Sweet Charlotte’ was a kind of spiritual sequel Aldrich’s better-known “What Happened To Baby Jane?” another melodramatic portrait of a woman in psychological collapse. Starring the heavyweight cast of Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead and Mary Astor (in her last role), the titular Charlotte is played by Davis and she stars as a wealthy spinster traumatized by a tragic incident in her youth that claimed her husband. Viewed as the crazy old lady living in a dilapidated antebellum mansion on an old plantation, Charlotte runs afoul with the local authorities after months of refusing an eviction notice (the Highway Commission plans to demolish her house and build a highway where her plantation stands). When she enlists a distant relative (de Havilland) to fight the county, old family secrets rise to the fore which causes a full-on descent into madness. Aldrich’s direction is overwrought for many, but the noir-ish mise en scene is fantastic and the histrionics are deliciously entertaining. “Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte” was nominated for seven Academy Awards, with strangely no recognition for Davis’ terrific performance, but eventually walked away empty handed. – RP
“Black Sabbath” (1963)
None other than Boris Karloff hosts a trio of horror stories in this Mario Bava game-changer. There’s the stalked call girl, the father that becomes a vampire, and a nurse that’s mentally and physically haunted by her ring’s original owner. Wisely starting off with “The Telephone,” the most subdued and safe of the three stories, the following two stories “The Wurdulak,” featuring a playful Boris Karloff, and “A Drop of Water,” with Jacqueline Pierreux in the role of a greedy nurse, both represent the shift that Bava would eventually have with his subsequent gothic horror films filled with precisely placed color, lighting, and sound. Make no mistake, “Black Sabbath” is a scary movie, filled with chilling sequences, and the end of “A Drop of Water” must have surely been seen as not just shocking, but filled with controversy back in 1963. This is pure pop-art, filled with opaque colors, foggy exteriors, masterful use of shadows and extravagant richness in its 18th-century European architecture, this was the beginning of the full-fledged Gothic horror that was only hinted at in 1955’s seminal “Night of the Hunter.” – JR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvqT1D7qvrc
“Village Of The Damned” (1960)
A British Village is shaken to its core when all the locals including the animals fall unconscious. The reason for all this? We don’t know. The men wake up unaffected, ditto the animals who go back to business as usual, but not the female villagers. Every woman capable of childbirth awakens to find that they are pregnant. Cut to three years later, the women have given birth and the children have all grown up at an impossible speed, both physically and mentally. Something is very wrong with them, they all walk around at the same zombie-like speed, dress in gothic black attire, have blonde hair and, more importantly, have those, now famous, glowing-lit eyes that can haunt you for days. These children aren’t peaceful either, they can read villagers’ minds and anyone they deem a threat to their existence is killed. Taut, tense and terrific, the impact director Wolf Rilla’s “Village of the Damned” had on the zeitgeist cannot be denied. In its tackling of the fear and power of the unknown, the film resonated deeply with audiences. – JR
“Onibaba” (1964)
Literally translated into “Demon Hag,” Kaneto Shindo’s terrifying historical horror, “Onibaba,” is classic Japanese ghost story built around chilling moral folktales centered on revenge and betrayal. The set-up is dire and desperate: In the mid-fourteenth century during a civil war, a bedraggled mother and daughter living in a dilapidated hut in windswept marshlands kill already-wounded samurai and sell their belongings to make a living. A grubby next door neighbor returns from the fighting and jealousy and treachery ensue. While the younger daughter sets out on a lustful affair with the immoral man, the mother comes across a mysterious samurai—or is it a demon?— wearing a bizarre mask that haunts and torments the trio. A macabre affair, filled with arresting lyrical imagery a frantic score by Hikaru Hayashi, a spooky sound design of wind and breathy silence, and frenzied performances by all, “Onibaba” is alarmingly creepy and an unsettling experience that’s impossible to forget.
Honorable Mention
There’s Nobuo Nakagawa’s “The Sinners From Hell,” Roger Corman‘s “House Of Usher,” “Giorgio Ferroni‘s “Mill of The Stone Woman,” “The Flesh and the Fiends” and “The Brides Of Dracula” both starring the late great Peter Cushing, “The City Of The Dead,” Roger Vadim’s “Blood And Roses,” “The Two Faces Of Dr. Jekyll,” William Castle‘s “13 Ghosts,” “Mr. Sardonicus” and “Homicidal,” Ki-young Kim‘s “The Housemaid” and many, many more. Are we missing your pick? What’s your favorite horror movie from the 1960s? Weigh in below.
