What makes the 1960s such an interesting decade for horror films is that—without any build-up or warning from the previous decade—the genre started off so shocking in 1960 that it was too much for most audiences. Like pulling off an adhesive band-aide very fast—only to cause more pain and needing to bandage it up again—1960 released a cluster of classic shockers that ratings boards and audiences didn’t know how to react to many of them other than banning and hoping to not see such horrors again.
The American Production Code (with strict rules on blood, garments, language, beds and even toilets) first started to erode withPsycho, and audiences saw things they hadn’t ever seen before. Not just a bloody shower scene, but also an unmarried woman lounging in a bra, and the same woman flushing a toilet.Psychocertainly was successful in the States, but studios thought only Hitchcock could nudge people along that quickly and audiences would revolt if anyone else indulged in such debauchery (some revolted anyway). Abroad, Hitchcock had to edit out most scenes with visible blood on hands, visible shadows of a breast, etc. And in the same year,Eyes Without a Facewas a movie without a release date in many countries for its facial incisions;Peeping Tomwas a movie that ruined the career of one of the world’s most beloved filmmakers; andBlack Sundaywas banned.
Those films all focused on ritualistic killers. After 1960, the major studios reverted back to safer horrors involving ghosts. And the prestigious directors made psychological horrors.
It was the Italians and the low-budget exploitation American films that carried the bloody blades the films of 1960 had handed them. Foreign directors took it further and created what we now call slashers (in Italy, they were giallos). By 1968, the American Production Code had ended. And the bloody gates were open.
This list of the best horror films of the 1960s shows the scattershot genre jumping of acceptability at the time. From the shocking year of 1960 to ghost stories to giallos to psychological terror and parables of distrust, I rounded up to 18, just like many of the ratings boards of the world would create by the end of this decade to signify the proper age (17 in some territories, 18 in others) to watch the horrors of the 1970s.
‘Black Sunday’ (1960)
BeforeMario Bavawould direct the earliest identifiable slasher films in Italy, which genre-lovers loving know as giallos, he made this gothic throwback that could easily stand astride the best of Hammer Films’ output of the previous decade.Black Sundaybegins with a stunning and horrific opening sequence that would get the film banned in the UK for years, although it is nowhere near as violent as Bava’s films would become less than half a decade later.
In the opening, Princess Asa (Barbara Steele) is convicted of being a witch and has a bulky and spiky satanic mask nailed onto her face by a massive mallet. She’s buried alongside her lover in a crypt. 200 years later, two doctors discover the tomb, are attacked by a bat and blood is spilled on her casket. They curiously pry the mask off of the Satanic Princess’ face and a curse is unleashed, as Asa takes possession of a virginal woman in town (Steele again) and sets out too unleash her revenge.
Black Sundaywas Bava’s first great horror and it’s appropriate to see him hone his craft within the confines of a classical horror (pushed a little too far for some) before creating a new cinematic language all his own.
‘Eyes Without a Face’ (1960)
Georges Franjuwas one of the creators of the famous French Cinematheque that housed long lost classics and introduced the filmmakers of the French New Wave. He’d worked tirelessly during World War II to find, protect, and move around various film cans from being destroyed. Franju was obviously a lover of the moving image. And in his most beloved film that he himself directed,Eyes Without aFace,the image creates the entire mood.
Franju’s eerie film follows a plastic surgeon that specializes in transplanting living skin tissue from one person to another. When he causes a car accident that disfigures his daughter (Edith Scob), he begins to abduct women and flay their skin, attempting to give his daughter a new face; when it doesn’t work, he has his assistant drop their bodies in the river. Meanwhile, his daughter awaits a new face behind a white mask, eerily ghost-like. When she learns what his father is doing for her, Scob and Franju are shockingly able to show sadness not for herself, but for the victims who her father is trying to graft her, with only eye movement behind an emotionless façade.
‘Peeping Tom’ (1960)
Audiences were so horrified byPeeping Tomthat it was actually pulled from theaters. They felt violated and betrayed because one of the most revered and hopeful of Britain’s directors,Michael Powell(The Red Shoes), had made something perverse and psychotic. He made viewers confront the level of thrill-seeking they hope to get from a moving image by following a smutty photographer/amateur filmmaker (Karl Boehm) who photographs nudie pics for side money, but gets his real thrills from filming women while he stabs them to death with a blade on his tripod.
When the photographer begins to form a friendship with his downstair’s neighbor, he attempts to reform, but his psychosis goes much deeper than thrills and reveals a nefarious experimentation in fear, with his father as the controller and he as the subject. Powell, who always possessed one of the most impressive visual eyes, uses the grainy mouth-open screams of women to communicate to the audience that the act of filmmaking is providing something to voyeurs. There are different levels, sure, like the fellow that Boehm observes shopping for nude photos in says store but says no to purchasing a nudie film. With a picture you retain control of your fantasy. With a motion picture, someone else has control of the imagination and you just watch.
‘Psycho’ (1960)
Alfred Hitchcock’sPsychois the big kahuna of this list. The shower murder of our beautiful heroine (Janet Leigh) features 77 camera angles and almost as many cuts (and string shrieks from composerBernard Herrmann). It’s one of the most perfect moments in all of cinema. And there’s so much to unpack from those three minutes alone; everything in this scene is so close and jarring it gives the affect of visual processing itself, as the eye funnels the violence down the drain of our own mind.
But as standalone amazing that sequence is, the rest of the film is equally terrific. One of Hitchock’s most amazing feats that he pulls of withPsychois creating fully formed characters whom he knew he was going to dispatch halfway through or introduce halfway through. It’s something that most horror films don’t have the gall to attempt: to humanize the victim that won’t make it and simultaneously their relationship with the killer. Our heroes and heroines and villains don’t need to be with us every step of the way.
Psychois a pure flex of the film muscle. Like Powell, Hitchcock understands that the very act of filmmaking is presenting something to voyeurs and he begins by putting his actress in a bra but then later shows the disturbed hotel manager (Anthony Perkins) looking through a hole at her; Hitchcock knows that the audience will recoil, even though he’s repeating the same anti-Production Code act that the very audience did at the start of the movie, which many in the audience likely enjoyed.
‘The Innocents’ (1961)
The Innocentsis one of the most evocatively shot horror films of all time. Both narratively and visually, this ghost tale is about what we do in the shadows. The black and white cinematography makes candle flickers unpredictable, the space under a doorway extra creepy, butJack Claytonalso uses it to highlight the black-and-white approach of right and wrong adherence in religion that makes people go mad. InThe Innocents, we’re never sure if the ghosts are real or are a manifestation of a mind that’s shaming itself for losing innocence.
Deborah Kerrplays a governess who believes that the grounds of the house—where she cares for two orphaned children—are haunted, perhaps even working to possess the children. Her first inkling of a haunting comes after she hears the children’s uncle (a lasciviousMichael Redgrave) boast of a sexual encounter. There’s further evidence that the previous governess and her brutish lover might have introduced sexuality to the children at a young age. There’s an inkling that Kerr’s governess is so sexually repressed that her desire to take care of children is a substitution for feelings of attraction to their experienced uncle. She sees ghostly spirits, whether they’re there or not, and Clayton and cinematographerFreddie Francisfind shadowy dread in every corner. But an undervalued feat is done by screenwriterTruman Capote, who turns a screw on theHenry Jamesnovella,The Turning of the Screw, and introduces a locket and photograph at a much earlier point than James’ novella in order to turn the screw on the audience and call everything into question.
‘The Birds’ (1963)
The Birdswas the most difficult film (wrangling all those birds and using very primitive technology) to make forAlfred Hitchcock. It doesn’t stand up as well now in comparison to many of his other classics, simply because the technological advancements years later makes us aware that in most attack scenes the birds diving are overlaid over the actors reacting in a different shot. It also doesn’t have a satisfying ending or an emotional through line to pull us through all the attacks.The Birdsmight not have aged as flawlessly as many of the Master’s films, but he still stages many masterful moments.
WhatThe Birdsdoes have is an amazing home invasion section that greatly influenced every zombie or home invasion film that would come later. The birds, which have begun attacking humans for no reason and seem to have a particular bone to peck with a socialite (Tippi Hedren) who was recently in court for her racy behavior, swarm the house that holds her inside. They peck through the walls, their beaks poking through like a Whack-a-Mole game. Her love interest (Robert Taylor) has to board the doors and nail furniture in front of weak spots.
The Birdsshows all the survival tactics that we now know from zombie films and it also features the fatalist moment where the heroine goes upstairs. Always stay downstairs.
‘The Haunting’ (1963)
Many of the great ghost stories embrace our skepticism of whether our protagonists are actually haunted by ghosts or just losing their minds to unexplained sounds, forgotten placements of objects, and their mind fills in the blanks in ways that then present spooky visages.Robert Wise’sThe Hauntingpresents this as a dare. There’s a spooky mansion with handed down tales of hauntings, death and insanity. Someone’s about to inherit the house, though, so they pay to send researchers of the paranormal to stay in the house and provide him explanations for the haunting.
Is the house on the hill actually haunted? Or does being told that it’s haunted play tricks on everyone inside? Some retain skepticism. Others go mad. It seems that if the house wants anything, it’s both of these responses, because both skepticism and belief will continue to send people there for answers.
‘Blood and Black Lace’ (1964)
Mario Bavachanged horror forever withBlood and Black Lace.Already a horror maestro, Bava kicked off the giallo genre (Italian bloodletters) with highly stylized and gruesome kills, interesting point of view shots that withheld the killer’s identity while also gave up close vantage points for slicing and strangling, and set colors that were as bright as the fake red blood that gushed from wounds.
Blood and Black Lace’s setting is a fashion house where models are being murdered. In what will become a giallo staple, the killer wears black gloves, a black hat and a black trench coat with a switchblade and wires in their pockets. In a devilish visage, Bava stages one of the hunts in a room full of mannequins, with the model dispatched as quickly as the industry itself gets rid of those bodies itself; with witnesses as mute and faceless to the industry’s practices as the mannequins are to the murders.
‘Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte’ (1964)
Robert Aldrichmade diva camp before that was even a known thing.Sunset Boulevardwas the first film to truly make use of a faded Hollywood star, but there it presented the older Hollywood star as having a diseased wish for continued applause. In 1962, Aldrich’sWhat Ever Happened to Baby Jane?allowedBette DavisandJoan Crawfordto go full on deranged as two sisters—who used to be stars—torture each other inside an unassuming apartment building.
Although,Baby Janedoes have horror elements (Crawford is both roped to a bed and starved when she’s not being served rats for dinner), Aldrich’sHush… Hush, Sweet Charlottegets the nod here. Structurally, the stories are very similar. They both begin with a violent act. And they both revolve around a dysfunctional and brash Bette Davis and a family secret kept by another relative (here,Olivia de Havillandsubs for Crawford, who was originally cast, but dropped out, probably aware that Davis once again had the juicier role; although de Havilland perhaps knows better how to step back from Davis and not try and match her, but be more secretive in her performance). But whileBaby Janehad shrilly-laudable camp moments,Charlottemakes everything more refined and gothic. The meat cleaver murder ofBruce Dernis certainly one of the most graphic moments in film of that time period. He loses a limb before another blow is delivered. The blood is on Charlotte’s dress, but because she’s a teenager to a respected family, she’s basically just sentenced to live in her southern mansion and not bother anyone. When we met Charlotte as an adult (Davis) she’s aiming a shotgun at the developers who are trying to run a highway through her land, and she’s having night visits from the ghosts of men who’ve been murdered in the house, and fresh blood begins appearing on her dresses again.
Baby Janewas a hoot.Sweet Charlotteis more Grand Guignol, with magnolia tree shadows, ghosts, and severed limbs. One is camp, the other is high camp. Appropriately enough, the term “camp” first came into fruition in 1964, in an essay bySusan Sontag.
‘Repulsion’ (1965)
Roman Polanski’s first English-language film follows a fractured woman who fears penetration from every man she encounters. It’s also a film that breaks into new fractures due to the grotesque and crooked turns in Polanski’s personal life that came later (the brainwashed cult murder of his wife and child, and his drugged rape of a teenager). There’s a sense inRepulsionthat no one has control of his or her mind. Certainly Carole (Catherine Deneuve) has no control over her fear of sex (with small hints of previous abuse). She has nightmares of hands breaking through the wall and groping her and thinks of men cornering her and raping her. She’s paralyzed and near mute by these visions.
There’s also a sense that the men can’t help it either, not necessarily that all men could potentially rape, but they don’t know how to not be turned on by someone as beautiful as Deneuve. Polanski films most of her psychological breakdowns while she wears a near sheer nightie. I don’t think it’s meant to be gratuitous, but perhaps Polanski feels that he should provide evidence that she should indeed be afraid. Even when she’s had a complete meltdown and requires help off the floor, the manor in which she’s cradled by the man who helps her is filmed like a successful conquest of carrying a virgin into the bedroom for the first time.Repulsionis a fantastic psychological study that’s perhaps even more psychological and, at times, repulsive—now that we know of Polanski’s fractured existence.
