The horror movie that “shocked and fooled” Brian De Palma
When it comes to masters of suspense and thrills, they don’t get more significant than Brian De Palma. With his overt, stylish direction, gritty narratives and a sense of bringing the works of Alfred Hitchcock into the New Hollywood era, De Palma has consistently kept audiences on the edge of their seats and had them always coming back for more.
Whether it was the spine-tingling intensity of Carrie, the cocaine-fuelled menace of Scarface, or the unique exploration of the voyeur in Blow Out, De Palma’s movies always seem to have embodied what makes the crime, thriller and horror genres so special, whilst always making the audience think deeply rather than giving them themes and meanings on a plate.
Like many filmmakers, De Palma is no stranger to the more underground and quirky sides of the cinematic medium, and he once told Film Comment of his favourite guilty pleasure movies. After naming the works of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roman Polanski, De Palma turned his attention to a William Castle film that shocked him to his core.
“Homicidal was also great,” the filmmaker explained. “I was totally fooled by the transvestite the first time I saw it. I was very shocked by the stabbing at the end. He gets married, and he/she stabs the minister. Jean Arless, the ‘girl’, looked fine, but as the ‘guy’ looked a little strange, as I remember.”
“In one scene, she’s coming down the staircase, taking her wig off and pulling her teeth out,” De Palma added. “There’s no question that it’s an imitation Hitchcock, but it had a very good trick to it and was very creepy. I saw Homicidal on 42nd Street in the fourth row of the theater. The audience went crazy.”
Released in 1961, William Castle’s Homicidal is another of the director’s works that showcases his penchant for thrilling and suspenseful narratives with a theatrical flair surrounding movie gimmicks. Starring Glenn Corbett, Patricia Breslin, and Jean Arless, the horror thriller focuses on a mysterious female serial killer in a small Californian town.
The film also served as the point at which Castle first introduced his ‘Fright Break’, a special intermission in which audience members were allowed a moment to leave the screening if the horror and tension of the narrative had become too much to bear. This gimmick eventually became one of the director’s trademarks, but it was in Homicidal that he first put it to use.
Check out the trailer for William Castle’s Homicidal below.
