Europe Endless - Horror: Les Diaboliques (Dir Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1h47m, 1955)

Henri-Georges Clouzot, the film director, has spent the night reading a book recommended by his wife. It is a thin paperback called Celle qui n'était plus (She Who Was No More) written by Boileau-Narcejac in 1952; depicting a plot by lovers to murder one of their spouses that spirals out of control, it has kept Clouzot reading through the night. He will option the film in the morning, whisking it from under the nose of Alfred Hitchcock by mere hours. The resultant film will be, alongside the tremendous financial and critical success of 1953's The Wages of Fear, the highlight of Clozot's storied career, and be used by directors from Hitchcock himself outward as a template for horror movies across Europe. This is Les Diaboliques, and it will keep generations awake in its noirish mix of horror, suspense and crime.

Les Diaboliques wastes little of its two hour running time: its apparent tone is immediate from its first seconds; this is the noir, French poetical realism heightened by way of expressionism; we are introduced in the first, and most apparent changes to the novel's narrative, to the unhappy love triangle not of She Who Was No More, of murderous husband and mistress conspiring to kill his spouse, but something darker and more unsettling; in simple terms, it inverts the relationships, such that the plot is now hatched by Simone Signoret's Nicole and Véra Clouzot (Henri-George's wife, and already one of the stars of The Wages of Fear) as Christina, the former the mistress and the latter the rich wife of the cruel schoolmaster, Michel (Paul Meurisse), whose school is second-rate and his womanising blatant. The two women, drawn together through their mutual hatred of Michel, plan to murder him. 

Even in the film's opening sections, in which the strong, impulsive Nicole and the religious and ailing Christina, there is a sense of the noirish, the slow reveal of the first plot, Nicole every inch, from blonde hair downwards, the femme fatale. The school itself is seedy, down at heel, the professors dour and often barely in control of their pupils (one of whom is a young Johnny Hallyday, pre musical career) -yet there are touches of the Gothic pile, the corridors that later become a claustrophobic maze already pinning in our three protagonists, even as Nicole and Christina plot. Out to Nicole's flat in Niort, the film's tension racks up, even as bleakly comic relief from Nicole's tenants who bellow at the radio juxtaposes with the two women carrying out their plot. Or so it appears. 

For here, as they make their alibi and dispose of the body in the school's swimming pool, so the cinematic and narrative language undergoes a transformation into that of the thriller, and of the horror movie; both run on slowly fraying the nerves of Nicole and Christina - and those of the audience, even with my viewing in broad daylight -as the figure of a detective, Alfred (Charles Vanel), and something altogether more unsettling, begin to unravel the two women's alibi and make the audience begin to question what has really occurred. Where Les Diaboliques truly becomes frightening is in matching a thriller's pacing, as bodies go missing and the detective's suspicion grows, with a number of ever-more nerve jangling supernatural elements, as the nature of why that body may be missing, mount up.

Les Diaboliques is a film about evil: it is easy to consider the vindictive womanising Michel - a lousy headteacher, a unfaithful husband, and a terrible man, as evil - this is the focus of the plan between its two would-be heroines, and only further brought into focus by what transpires after his supposed death - but the film is far more ambiguous; its devils are not merely the obvious ones, but Nicole and, by her influence, Christina herself, who we see plan, enact and try and cover up their murder, are also a form of evil. This is only made more complex by the thriller-esque aspects, and the film's slow shift, in its final third, into a suspenseful horror movie leading to the the film's shocking finale - and its most frightening sequences - playing out in the very school the film began in, leaving us unsure what is imagined - and what is real - what has transpired at its end?

More than this, it is a film on what it means to be frightened, these final sequences playing on Christina's fears in simple, but effective terms through Clouzot's performance; it is also through Les Diaboliques that horror cinema meets the thriller, in a potent mix that would immediately influence, not least because Hitchcock screened the film for cast and crew, of 1960's Psycho. In its wake would come films as far apart as Suspiria (1977), Misery (1990) and Get Out (2017); it is the point that horror and the thriller become entwined - Les Diaboliques' memorable ending would also leave its mark on horror directors, and its impact has resonated across cinema ever since. Les Diaboliques remains a landmark in horror, and thriller, cinema, a nerve-jangling mix of what frightens us, and a smartly made tangled web of murder and where it leads.


Rating: Must See 

Les Diaboliques can be watched on AppleTV and is available on BluRay from Arrow

Next week, back to Italy for the gallio masterpiece that is Dario Argento's Suspiria