The example of what a horror movie should be: "The Devils" that inspired "Psycho"

By: Adam Scovell / BBC
Translation: Telegrafi.com

On the 70th anniversary of its premiere, Henri-Georges Clouzot's film about two women who plotted a murder offers a true mastery in creating the macabre fear that inspired many cinema classics, such as Hitchcock.

Known for the novel Psycho [Psycho, 1959], which served as the basis for Alfred Hitchcock's highly influential 1960 film of the same title, writer Robert Bloch understood the horror genre better than most. So when you read that he called [Clouzot's] film "his favorite horror of all time" - as he declared in an interview with the French magazine The Fantastic Screen - you have to take this assessment seriously. The film in question was not an adaptation of his work, nor a Hollywood classic, but a French work of silent influence, which this year turns 70 and carries as much macabre weight as Bloch's morbid masterpiece itself: the film shayaateen [Devilish, 1955] of Henri-Georges Clouzot.

Adapted from the novel What was no longer there [The one who was no longer, 1952] by the renowned French crime fiction duo Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (known as Boileau-Narcejac), Clouzot's film was a revolution in horror cinema. It successfully blended the techniques of dark [Black] and horror, creating a mixture with an atmosphere of tension that will have a great impact in the future.

shayaateen takes place at a private boarding school outside Paris, where the strained relationships between several teachers take a dark turn. The fragile heart of Christine – played by Clouzot’s own wife, Véra – is constantly worn down by the abusive behavior of her husband Michel (Paul Meurisse), who was the school’s principal. Things get even worse when her colleague, Nicolas (Simone Signoret), becomes Michel’s lover. But now, Michel’s violent behavior is taking a toll on both women, so they decide to take action. Although initially reluctant, Christine is convinced by Nicolas to help kill Michel, making the act look like an accident. They lure him to Nicolas’s apartment outside the city, drown him in the bathtub, and then dump his body in the school swimming pool, with the idea that he will be found as the result of a drunken accident. But when the body disappears the next day, both women are overcome with horror. Has Michel survived? Or is his spirit wandering the school seeking revenge?

Clouzot's works were often tinged with cynicism and pessimism. As Susan Hayward suggests in her 2005 book on the film, "the thriller is the genre he is most associated with. But not just any thriller. His approach to this genre is dark, merciless, suffocating, cruel." Clouzot began his career as a screenwriter, before turning to directing in the 40s. He was a divisive figure in France. His work for the studio Continental Films – controlled by the Nazis and directed by Goebbels-appointed member Alfred Greven – during the German occupation, meant that for two years after the war [World War II] he was banned from directing. During that period, his drama korbi [The crow, 1943], about a small town shaken by anonymous slanderous letters, was interpreted as anti-French and collaborationist – somewhat ironic, given that the Vichy government itself had previously banned the film due to its negative reading. Clouzot’s pessimism made him prone to making enemies.

Full movie Devilish, with English subtitles

Surviving this scandal, Clouzot went on to make some of France's most acclaimed films, often influenced by Hitchcock's work, but still in a uniquely French manner. Unlike Hitchcock, however, French critics of the time—many of whom would form the New Wave [Nouvelle Vague], a radical and innovative movement of French filmmakers who sought new forms of filmmaking while possessing a deep knowledge of the history of cinema—were not fond of Clouzot or his work, due to the somewhat traditional nature of his directing. He was seen as a representative of what was called tradition of quality [the tradition of quality], the precursory style of French New Wave cinema that prioritized narrative over formal innovation. As Susan Hayward writes, “The New Wave led him to the ranks of the purgatory of old people's cinema [Pope's cinema] and Clouzot was no longer considered a creator [author] genuine”.

However, in retrospect, films like The Goldsmiths' Castle [Wharf Goldsmiths, 1947], The wages of fear [The Wages of Fear, 1953] and of course shayaateen, were ahead of their time, representing a new type of pessimistic thriller that became much more common from the 60s onward – both in France and around the world. Most thrillers, up until then, had strict divisions between good and evil and rarely dared to end on a sad note. But Clouzot was the forerunner of a current of thrillers that rejected simplistic concepts of morality and resisted happy, comforting endings. The stories were no longer about heroes riding off into the sunset, but about who could escape dark situations with the fewest consequences.

Robert Bloch did not limit his praise to shayaateen in an empty hyperbole. In The Fantastic Screen, he highlighted the fact that "there's very little bloodshed" as a reason for the film's success. Although it contains some disturbing moments of violence, shayaateen avoids explicit scenes of blood or slaughtered bodies. What it offers, instead, is an ominous feeling that gradually builds towards an unforgettable climax.

Professor Claire Gorrara from Cardiff University, a researcher who specialises in French cultural memory, attributes the film's success to "the extraordinary atmosphere of growing paranoia and tension surrounding the protagonist, Christine," she tells BBC Culture. “Also, the surprising twist at the end, which, in the original film reel, viewers were asked not to discover outside the cinema so as not to spoil the surprise for others.” Although Clouzot had predecessors in such directing in Hollywood – such as directors Jacques Tourneur and Robert Wise – when it comes to European cinema, no director had achieved such levels of tension.

Clouzot uses a kind of push-pull psychology throughout the film. shayaateen, suggesting a possible solution to the mystery at the moment, only to completely overturn it in the next, while taking the characters through a whirlwind of emotions and taking the audience with him. In particular, he introduces suggestions of a supernatural nature, to keep both the characters and the viewer in constant suspense. A young boy swears that he has been punished by Michel, who was supposed to be already dead. The suit in which he was killed suddenly reappears ironed in a dry cleaner in Paris. And, most shockingly: his ghostly face appears in the window in a school photo.

It would be remiss not to mention the film’s famous finale and its aforementioned twist. This scene brings Christine face to face with Michel, submerged in a bathtub, when he suddenly rises as if resurrected from the dead, and, at that very moment, Christine’s heart finally gives out – a tragic ending that was strangely mirrored five years later, when Véra herself died of a heart attack, aged just 46, sending Clouzot into a spiral of depression that would haunt him for the rest of his life. As it turns out, Nicolas and Michel had been in cahoots all along – the real plan was to eliminate Christine so they could sell the school and live happily ever after.

Gorrara believes that this twist “is so well constructed with a cinematic mastery that I would challenge any unprepared viewer to discover it before the end.” This mastery stems from Clouzot’s ability to skillfully mix genres—he shoots the finale precisely as a supernatural ghost story, right up until Christine’s death. Even then, the film has a final twist, this time with a genuine supernatural hint, when a boy claims to have seen Christine, now dead, just as he had earlier seen Michel when he was supposed to be dead.

In an interview for the magazine Team, even Stephen King himself – the most famous author of modern horror – declared the bathtub scene to be “the scariest moment I’ve ever experienced in a work of fiction.” King is also an admirer of British horror writer Ramsey Campbell, who is also a fan of To the devilsWhen asked whether he agreed with Bloch's initial assessment of shayaateen, as the pinnacle of psychological horror, Campbell told the BBC: "It's very likely that it was at the time, especially for its commitment to a pure, intense horror that had not been seen before in cinema (as it was in the 1960s). Psycho would raise the bar a few years later) … and I have seen how shayaateen "They disturb today's public as much as, I imagine, on its first day."

In a review with positive and negative reviews, for The Observer, written in 1955, critic CA Lejeune described a trend in cinema of the time that the film well illustrated: “Since there is a fashion for the terrible in entertainment,” she wrote, “the film shayaateen Henri-Georges Clouzot will most likely succeed”. No doubt, this trend was partly thanks to Hitchcock and his skill at creating sophisticated and popular thrillers that increasingly played with dark elements, as in Shadow of doubt [Shadow of a Doubt, 1943], rope [Rope, 1948] and Strangers on the train [Strangers on a Train, 1951]. But Clouzot's contribution was equally powerful—not only to the development of thrillers that would come after him, but also to Hitchcock himself, creating a sense of rivalry between them throughout the 50s. As Stephen King suggested in a 2007 interview with British Film Institute, on his favorite films, Clouzot "hitchcocked Hitchcock." Without a doubt, shayaateen raised the bar for Hitchcock.

In fact, Hitchcock himself had wanted to adapt Boileau-Narcejac’s original novel. According to Hayward, it was Véra who introduced the book to Clouzot, and he secured the film rights just before Hitchcock. “He … blocked the rights for a year,” she wrote, “effectively preventing Alfred Hitchcock from getting his hands on the story.” Cinematic legend suggests that Clouzot’s insomnia caused him to wake up early enough to secure the rights, just hours before Hitchcock—though there is little evidence to support that it was such a close race.

After securing the rights, Clouzot began to play around with the original work. In particular, he moved the setting to a closed school, a change that Gorrara considers one of his main improvements. “From my perspective,” she says, “the main improvement is setting the film in a boys’ boarding school, which creates a ‘hermetically sealed’ community, fond of ‘who-did-it’ mysteries [whodunit] or of the locked room, but it also provides an interesting socio-cultural context for the passion, corruption and terror of the trio.”

Clouzot also reorganized the relationships between the characters, changing the story from one in which a man and his lover team up to kill the woman—whose body disappears—to one in which the two women appear as conspirators, and the man as the supposed victim. “Making the man a ‘victim’ and a sadist allowed Clouzot to draw us into a sense of complicity in the crime, which adds to the sense of horror when everything takes a Gothic turn,” suggests Ramsey Campbell of this change. In the novel, the final twist is that the two women are co-conspirators, as they are lovers; with the change in structure, Clouzot removes the novel’s overt lesbian overtones but retains a subtext of intimacy between the women, which seems to help create Christine’s misguided trust in Nicolas.

Hitchcock would react more quickly in securing the third novel written by Boileau-Narcejac, The dead and the living [From among the dead, 1954] – although perhaps he wouldn’t have been so determined if Clouzot hadn’t first hijacked another of their novels and made such a successful film. Hitchcock’s adaptation of that novel would be the film Dizziness [Vertigo, 1957], which is consistently considered one of cinema's greatest achievements. Although Dizziness feels thematically connected to shayaateen, because of the same authors, many other films took elements from Clouzot's film – without having any direct connection to it.

France wasn't particularly known for horror films during the post-war period, but it's hard to imagine that the country's next great horror film, The eye without a face [Eyes without face, 1960] by Georges Franju (1960), would exist without shayaateen – even if only because French cinema, as a whole, still shunned deep cinematic darkness at the time. In fact, Clouzot paved the way for French cinema's return to horror and all things macabre, while the explosion of gothic thrillers with psychological tension, in Western cinema, generally seems to have been driven as much by shayaateen as well as by Hitchcock. Without shayaateen, it's hard to imagine the film landscape that would later be dominated by psychological hybrids of thriller and horror, like The innocent [The Innocents, 1960] by Jack Clayton, The devil's conquest [The Haunting, 1963] by Robert Wise (1963) and They don't believe by Roman Polanski (1965), to name just a few here. In particular, in Italy, the influence of To the devils feels in the genre xalo [yellow], with films by directors like Mario Bava and Dario Argento, who borrowed the atmosphere and domestic tension of Clouzot's film and often added more gory violence – as well as images that were clearly inspired by Psycho.

This brings us back to Robert Bloch, the great admirer of To the devilsClouzot's film undoubtedly had a profound influence on both the writing and Psychos, as in Hitchcock's later film – as evidenced by the common mix of the psychological and the supernatural, the gloomy atmosphere, and a key moment of terror that takes place in the most mundane possible space: the bathroom. As Ramsey Campbell notes, although Hitchcock failed to secure the rights to What was no longer there, he admired Clouzot's version and, according to reports, "showed it to members of the film crew during the filming of Psychos – very possibly imitating Clouzot’s plea to the audience not to reveal the ending.” In Hitchcock’s case, this was accomplished through an entire advertising campaign, one of the slogans of which was: “If you can’t keep a secret, please stay away from people after you see it.” Psycho".

Considering the extraordinary impact it had Psycho in cinematography, the macabre DNA of To the devils is undoubtedly widespread. "I think this is the epitome of what a horror movie should be," Bloch concluded in his interview with The Fantastic ScreenWith its abundance of terrifying moments, its cold precision, and the undeniable influence it has had on Bloch and others, shayaateen remains without a doubt an essential point of reference towards which the horror genre should aspire. /Telegraph/