FEATURE: 1960 Was the Best Damn Year for Horror Movies

For starters, Psycho.

image courtesy of  Yuku.com

Hitchcock's borderline-unimpeachable masterpiece of suspense and terror.  A friggin' cultural totem, its combination of pulp material and suspense-craft laying the groundwork for a thousand slasher pictures that almost never matched Hitchcock's control of cinema.  The tension builds with careful escalation, laced with pitch-black humor and deadly dramatic irony - Arbogast, you dumbass, get out of there!  You might think the film's best scene is the infamous shower murder, but how about that parlor scene?  Norman and Marion eat sandwiches, commiserate, and see each other in their own solitude.  More on this later...

Given Psycho's cultural impact, this is reason enough to put 1960 on the short list for the best-ever year of horror movies.  But don't forget about a film that's as good as Psycho, but completely different, a supernatural chill factory full of torture and dread...

Yeah.  Black Sunday.

image courtesy of  MoviePoster.com

The first real classic of Italian horror cinema, a delicious ode to the 1930's Universal mode, updated with more sex, more shock, and even more style.  The nominal story about a vengeance-starved witch is an excuse to luxuriate in foggy swamps and shadowed cemeteries and spiderwebbed catacombs.  The gliding camerawork, which roams from sight to sight with sinewy precision, feels like the best of John Carpenter (except, y'know, 20 years earlier).  Above all, one of the great horror movies to simply watch.

At this point, someone out there is probably thinking, "Sure, those two are great, but aren't you ignoring 1978, the year of Dawn of the Dead, Halloween, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers?"

To that person, I say Village of the Damned.

image courtesy of  Front Row Posters

One of the only aliens-among us movies to match the '56 Invasion of the Body Snatchers for eerie suspense.  In terms of creepy monsters, Village outdoes Snatchers by sticking its evil alien invaders in the bodies of beautiful, precocious children.  With their bland Aryan looks and piercing eyes, the little bastards control adults with their powers of telepathy and mind-control.  This leads to a clever-as-hell conclusion where a hero needs to find some way to jam their brain signal.  His solution leads to one of the most surreal and shocking horror climaxes ever.

Psycho.  Peeping Tom.  Village of the Damned.  A trilogy of terror.  But remember that someone from earlier?  Maybe that person jumped onto Wikipedia and realized that 1932 gave us Freaks, The Old Dark House, The Island of Lost Souls, and Vampyr.  To quote Walter Sobchak, not exactly a lightweight.

Problem is, 1960 was also the year of Jigoku.

I've discussed this film before, and I'm still coming to terms with how graphic, horrific, and disquieting the film is.  If you haven't heard of it, watch it.  If you've watched it, watch it again.  The disturbing visions of the Buddhist hell Naraka include decapitation, disembowelment, and a road of spikes, and this was 50 years ago.  Herschell Gordon Lewis, the so-called "Godfather of Gore," wouldn't start godfathering for three years.  And beyond all the bloodletting, there's a creepy story mired in sin and guilt and regret.  Few classic horrors feel so progressive.

1960 was also the year of Roger Corman's House of Usher.

image courtesy of Horror Unlimited

The first of Roger Corman's eight Poe adaptations.  Richard Matheson (author of I Am Legend) writes the screen story that allows for what might be Vincent Price's best performance.  Price's taut delivery often bounced against different levels of comedy (Theater of Blood, Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine), but this is one of the few pulps to treat his menace with utter seriousness.

1960 was also the year of Eyes Without a Face.

image courtesy of  Video City London

The poetic horror-thriller about a surgeon desperate to fix his daughter's ruined face.  Eyes grows in stature year after year, and its recent entry into the Criterion Collection guarantees more will discover its eccentric, dreamlike charms.  I admired Eyes, if distantly, but the film is horror canon at this point, and it's one more feather in 1960's already-plush hat.

Finally, because the best deserves to be mentioned last, 1960 was also the year of Peeping Tom.

image courtesy of  L'imagerie Gallery

A proto-slasher every bit as essential as Psycho... and every bit as good.  Probably a little better, even, since its most effective relationship (between the doomed antihero and his paramour) grows throughout the entire film - Psycho is genius, but killing Janet Leigh so early handicaps the film, as the scenes between Marion and Norman are the dramatic highlight of the picture, and Marion's replacements (Lila and Sam) simply aren't that interesting.  Peeping Tom additionally gives audiences the dignity of slasher victims who are kind and sympathetic, as well as severely interesting (and tragic) undercurrents about voyeurism, homicidal psychology, and the nature of fear.

But... well, look, here's the big reason - the ultimate reason that 1960 was the best year for horror movies.  It's not just that the horror films listed here are so good (and they're so good (seriously, these movies are fucking awesome)).

1960 was the year that horror movies broke out of theme.

Prior to 1960, you can pretty much look at a decade and know the type of horror film you're getting.  If it's a 1920's horror film, you're probably watching a stage-heavy expressionist silent horror with a few camera tricks up its sleeve.  If it's a 1930's horror film, you're probably watching Universal or Universal-derived monster-fests that emphasize creature makeup.  If it's a 1940's horror film, in come the eerie ghost stories and lower-key supernaturalism (Val Lewton, Dead of Night, The Uninvited, The Picture of Dorian Gray).  If it's a 1950's horror film, you're probably watching a creature feature laced with atomic fear, commie paranoia, and a pinch of can-do space race optimism (even Japan essentially reworked The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and called it Godzilla).

Jack Arnold's The Space Children is

a typical example of 1950's horror.

To be fair, there were exceptions to these dominant threads.  The '40s also saw the rise and fall of Universal's monster mash-ups (a holdover from the '30s), and the '50s saw the piecemeal emergence of banal psychopathy (I Bury the Living, The Bad Seed) and the beginnings of Hammer horror.

But 1960?  Look at these movies.  A Japanese gory nightmare-drama, two voyeuristic proto-slashers, an alien invasion thriller, a French creeper that plays like a dark fairy tale, Italian Gothic horror, and a glorious color-soaked Poe adaptation.

If the previous decades of horror were about the genre trying out different recipes, one-by-one, 1960 was the year the horror genre buckled down, bought a lease, and finally opened the damn restaurant.  After 1960, horror fans didn't have to visit the street corner stand and order the same damn hot dog with relish and stale mustard.  For the first time, we could sit down, relax, and check out the menu, and there were so many different flavors, and - at least in 1960 - every platter tasted great.