Diary of a Madman (1963)

 "Considering your endless studies of the criminal mind..."

You know when you start watching a film expecting a B movie, despite the literary basis of the script, and end up with a phiolosophical, literate and genuinely creepy little horror film? This is one of those nights. I don't care that the critics don't care for this film: they're wrong.

Obviously, Vincent Price, with that voice, is charismatic, extraordinary, and carries the film through sheer presence. But that's a given. Plus, the film and, indeed, the director, are fairly obscure. Perhaps what I'm truly blown away by is the original story (or two stories) by Guy de Maupassant- I've never read his short stories and, unlike other French authors, he isn't widely read in the English-speaking world. Yet I read that considerable liberties were taken with the source material beyond just conflating the two stories.

Nancy Kovack is excellent, of course, as a woman we are made to see as evil for her love of money and pleasure, but what options did a woman have in the France of 1886 beyond gold-digging? There's quite a feminist critique to be made of this fim, methinks.

Neverthleless, it's a thoughtful and deeply psychological approach to horroe which not only focuses on well-rounded characters but roots the horror in those very character traits. The nature of the "Horla" (why that name?) may be vague, but its effects are not.

All this, and we get a milieu of the (very) Hollywood version of the Paris of the artistic era of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and so forth. I recommend this film really rather highly indeed.