Crime · Gothic · Horror · Melodrama · Photo Essays
Franju demonstrates how beauty hides pain, until pain becomes beautiful. * * * Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage/Eyes Without a Face is a reliably haunting film, a beautiful nightmare[…]
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position. – W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux-Arts” (1940) “It’s also a film I cherish[…]
We can further associate the filmmaker, the man with whom we’ve placed our narrative trust, with the “psycho” of both the title and our typical image of one, the latter[…]
Hitchcock’s one-word titles have never been so instructive. Psycho is the feeling of being preyed on by your self, as by one of Norman’s stuffed birds. It is the primal[…]
“In The Hitch-Hiker, Lupino offers an unusually sustained visual examination of the average male body that is then contrasted against the anarchic body of the Psycho. Myers is often shown[…]
“Caché lays bare a heavy psychological truth about the collective unconscious — without submitting to another perspective, we may not be able to recognize and acknowledge the abject parts of our own selves, even when they are clearly presented to us, hidden in plain sight.”
“Although he at first resisted, Perkins returned to Norman Bates again and again, in one form or other. Norman’s twitchy eccentricity seeped into many of Perkins’ post-Psycho performances that preceded the run of sequels.”
Boredom never looked so good Psycho boring? What blasphemy! Psycho is unusual for many reasons, but in some ways the most important is the mere fact that it is in black-and-white. By[…]
“We do not realize that ‘normal’ behavior needs to be explained at all.” —Laura Cosmides “Monsters today seem to be everywhere, and they cannot be destroyed. ” —Stephen Prince
The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder, by David Thomson. New York: Basic Books, 2009. Hardcover. $22.95. 183pp. ISBN 978-0-465-00339-6. Feeling a little psycho these[…]
The Alices in flight, those beautiful women alone in their cars on the run – Sylvia Kristel in Alice ou la Dernière Fugue, Candace Hilligoss in Carnival of Souls,[…]
We have met the cross-dressing closeted maniac, and he is us
“Nothing evokes the end of the world more than a man running straight ahead on a beach … cocooned in the solitary sacrifice of his energy … In a sense,[…]
Masters of anime riff on The Matrix in this sizzling collection of nine shorts
The year is 1987. Wall Street smoothie Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) is preparing to meet the new day. As he anoints his buff-enough-for-Bay-Watch bod with an endless series of unguents, emollients,[…]
Hitch’s – and by now the whole damn culture’s – seminal Oedipal nightmare revisited Read the companion photo essay “Alfred Hitchcock: A Hank of Hair and a Piece of Bone”[…]
Hitchcock has always been considered a director sui generis. John W. Hall looks at Psycho and Touch of Evil to show that even Hitch couldn’t resist the charms — and stylistic strategies — of Orson Welles.[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors
“‘You can’t control life,’ he tells us in that film. ‘”It doesn’t wind up perfectly. Only art you can control. Art and masturbation.'”
Louise Brooks was born November 14, 1906, which means she would be 117 today. We honor the legend by reposting Dan Callahan’s scintillating profile, first published on Brooks’s centenary on[…]
