City of the Dead

[commonpeople]

'City of the Dead' (1960) Original British Quad Poster, a photo by JohnHarrier Jr on Flickr.City of the Dead is a little known horror classic from 1960 that is worth checking out, especially if you like Hitchcock's Psycho. Although it was filmed before Psycho, it was only released afterwards. Similarities in plot twists branded it a plagiarism, but it's now obvious that both films were tapping into some zeitgeist that was just round the corner: the 60s' counterculture explosion.

I'd never even heard of City of the Dead before this last Saturday, when I saw it alongside other horror films at naturalbornkaos and moveslikegiallo's awesome Hemel Hellfire Weekender (a back to back horror films marathon plus a quiz, pizza and a raffle of lousy straight-to-DVDs that left everyone a "winner".)

The film revolves around a small village where a witch was burnt in the 1600s - a place now cursed with dry fog and creepy inhabitants. A young university student (a Hitchcock blonde) is encouraged by her university professor to visit the village for two weeks and write her dissertation on the witch persecutions. She arrives and stays at a creepy inn, where all sorts of warnings to run away fail to register in her radar. When she disappears, her uni beau plus her brother decide to investigate.

The film was known in the U.S. as 'Horror Hotel', which lent fire to the critics accusations of plagiarism. Like Hitchcock's Psycho, it has a profusion of stuffed animals hanging on walls, a ballsy blonde that walks straight into danger and a revelation surrounding an old woman's corpse.

I attended a talk at the BFI a week ago on Hitchcock's Women and their magic, delivered by Camille Paglia. It was an amusing talk, in particular because Camille sounded like she'd drunk three cups of coffee beforehand - she was so enthusiastic about her subject. The main thing that stayed with me was her theory that Hitchcock's women were quite independent and unlike the stereotype of the 50s dutiful suburban wife. Impulsive and determined (Rear Window), sexually aggressive (North by Northwest), daredevils (To Catch a Thief), an enigma to men (Vertigo). There were some elements of that in the women of The City of the Dead.

I then started wondering why these two films are so alike. Could it be their writers and directors were somewhat channeling the counterculture movement's birth (on the back of the 50s beat movement?) Psycho with its transsexual killer (upside-down sexual mores) and The City of the Dead with its satanism (overturning of Christianity, the hippies experimentations that led to new cults.) The chills and fears played upon by these films were the anxieties of their audiences? (Including women who are too independent and don't need men.)

Anyway... City of the Dead is worth checking out - perhaps even as a double bill with Psycho.

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Oh look... it's available in its entirety on YouTube!