‘Psychomania’: The anarchic British movie about black magic bikers
Bikers and lawless nihilism have always gone hand-in-hand, with popular culture having demonised the subculture as being sadistic and hotheaded. Such an identity was partly cultivated through cinema, with Marlon Brando leading a rebellious motorcycle gang in 1953’s The Wild One, whilst Peter Fonda and Bruce Dern led the gratuitous violence of 1966’s Wild Angels. Yet, despite their dark leathers and spiked helmets, the motorcycle subculture that originated through the British rockers of the 1950s was actually a pretty friendly bunch.
It is this image of utterly reckless nihilistic behaviour that is satirised in the 1973 Don Sharp movie Psychomania, a bizarre cult flick that follows the psychopathic leader of a violent motorbike gang who is convinced that if he commits suicide, he will return as some kind of undead biking God. His belief is bolstered by his mother, a Satan-worshipping medium, who helps her son before desperately trying to stop him when he takes things too far.
Despite their helmets that bear a skull and crossbones, there isn’t much to fear of the biker gang dubbed ‘The Living Dead’ who annoy the local community, with their leader Tom Latham (Nicky Henson) bearing more similarities to a camp TV psychic than an insidious gang leader. Obsessed with reaching another plane of immortal existence, he urges his mother to help him in his task, in turn gaining the powerful guidance of her Frog God in a gorgeously silly turn of events.
Such makes far more sense when you realise that the film was produced by Benmar Productions, who were better known at the time for their filmography dominated by ‘spaghetti westerns’, themselves often camp and corny recreations of American cinema. Psychomania, therefore, feels like a response to the violent motorcycling moves of the era as well as contemporary horror’s obsession with the occult, following the releases of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and several British folk tales from the 1970s.
The result is a camp horror oddity that feels as though it exists mere streets away from the centre of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks town, exploring its curious story with a focus on colourful atmospheric visuals and moody early electronica. Playing silliness with an entirely straight face, Psychomania makes you believe that its events are as serious as life and death before playfully selling moments with grand, bombastic melodrama.
Speaking about the film, lead star Nicky Henson reflected: “I was a mad motorcyclist…I never had a car. So this script comes through the door, and I open it up, and it says, ‘Eight Chopped Hog Harley Davidsons crest the brow of a hill.’ I rang my agent and said, ‘I’ll do it’… It’s the only show I’ve ever been on where there were eight mechanics working the whole time to keep the bikes fanning because they got ’em in some second-hand shop somewhere, and they were falling to bits.”
Cobbled together on a small budget, Psychomania is a charming expression of independent British filmmaking, with many of the cast members doing their own stunt work despite much of it being genuinely dangerous to perform. As a result, it’s a film that feels lovingly compiled, escaping criticism for its sheer ingenuity and charm that gives a brand new perspective to the niche outlaw biker sub-genre of cinema.
