Like an Alfred Hitchcock film you'll find elsewhere on
this list, this picture's a horror film with no hint of the supernatural, and
it's also a horror film about our relation to horror, and to film. Protagonist
Mark is a lonely young man who photographs ... more scantily clad lasses for a
fly-by-night soft-core peddler; these finance his experiments in terror, wherein
he hopes to capture the facial expressions of young women and their awareness of
the horror befalling them at the point of their murders. Which means, as you
might infer, that he has to photograph them while he's murdering them.
Ultra-creepy and oddly poignant, this Michael Powell-directed picture was so
scandalously controversial on its British release that it all but put an end to
the great filmmaker's career for a time. Now it's hailed as a groundbreaking
classic, of course.
