French Horror
Diabolique
The Vanishing
As we creep deeper into October, the leaves change color and the temperature theoretically drops, my need for great horror movies grows greater every day. Despite an excellent lineup of campy slashers last week, I am positively STARVED for creepy content. Whenever I feel like I’ve seen every good horror movie, though, I’m reminded that all I have to do is take my search abroad, to foreign territories where, for some, that 1 inch barrier called subtitles is scary enough. This week we’re traveling to France, where the fashion is fiercer, the food is better, and the scares come in mysterious, meticulously wrapped packages. Neither of tonight’s films will just jump out and scare you, but instead they’ll make you feel perfectly safe before completely unsettling you. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s influential 1955 thriller Diabolique was an immensely suspenseful, devilishly delectable film, full of twists and turns and two spellbinding female leads. Unpredictable, unnerving, and completely ahead of its time, Diabolique places its audience in a state of paranoia—relentlessly teasing us with terror and filling us with dread. Clouzot, who apparently acquired the rights to the novel this film is based on just hours before Hitchcock attempted to, set an eerie tone with his creative use of mirrors and red herrings and special effects makeup. This film follows a terrible man, and his wife and mistress’ plot to kill him. I hesitate to mention anything beyond this short but enticing summary because Diabolique and its slow burn of spooks should be experienced first-hand. While Hitchcock didn’t get to adapt Diabolique into a film, it did greatly inspire Psycho, and Thomas Narcejac, the author of the original book (She Was No More) wrote a story just for Hitchcock, one that would later become Vertigo—which pales in comparison, in my opinion. Though the movie was and is a success, there were several dark clouds hanging over this film’s set, as Clouzot, his wife (Véra Clouzot), and her costar (Simone Signoret) all began to resemble the main characters—both women being tortured by Clouzot’s intense methods and thus taking the form of the horrendous male lead. I’d like to think that, despite the novel’s lesbian love story being taken out of the film, these two women bonded over their mutual hatred for Clouzot. And while I hate to spend anytime praising an awful-sounding man, Diabolique is a terrifically twisted tale of revenge and fear worth watching. Keeping with the theme of twisted, paranoid narratives, George Sluizer’s 1988 psychological thriller The Vanishing was absorbing and utterly impossible to predict. Spoken in both Dutch and French, The Vanishing follows Rex and Saskia, tourists from Amsterdam who make a brief but memorable stop at a French gas station. After leaving Rex back at the car, Saskia plans to run inside and grab a Coke, only to vanish entirely. Bewildered by the sudden, unexplained disappearance of his girlfriend, Rex develops a sick obsession with not just finding Saskia, but figuring out exactly how she could’ve disappeared so quickly. Even after three years have passed, and he has an entirely new girlfriend (who he forces to visit the scene of the crime with him??) Rex is controlled by his fixation and unable to move on. At a certain point in this movie, however, the perspective shifts entirely, we’re placed into the point of view of Saskia’s abductor, and things take a turn for the disturbed. I’m afraid to mention any other detail of this film and its horrifying concept, that only becomes more horrifying as it goes along, because you really have to see it to believe it. Its darkness, its tension, it is all at once easy to swallow and too much to bear—especially when you reach the final act, and are presented with, as Stanley Kubrick put it, one of the scariest endings to a movie of all time. Featuring a bevy of dedicated performances and a lead actor who looked like a hotter Michael Shannon, The Vanishing was much like Diabolique, exceeding my expectations and keeping me guessing until the bitter, brutal end. As if this film weren’t shocking enough, its director proved to be full of even more surprises after making an American version of this film in 1993, casting Jeff Bridges as the bad guy, and spending 10 times as much as it cost to make the original. I apologize for the lack of detail in this week’s breakdown, but I do hope you’ll give these French faves a try and decide for yourself if they are worth the hype—or as Diabolique includes at the end credits, a message encouraging you to not spoil the ending to anyone. Au revoir, dear readers, and stay tuned for more scares, surprises, and silly words from your favorite cinematic witch. 😈
