Since the age of 6, I've lived in the village where the school scenes were shot (that castle was at the time abandoned and Clouzot wanted to buy it to get his studios inside, but it was too expensive, now it's the Town Hall since 1968). Each time I went to school (not the movie's one), I kept thinking of that horrific movie and when I saw it at 15, I was quite impressed, discovering Clouzot's Noir filmography.Like the townspeople watching at the shooting and how the beautiful castle had become sinister, full of mud all around. During the shooting since three weeks, all the team was completely sad and sinister, shooting night and day. They got more joyful when eating in the local restaurants. A lot of villagers came at the gate to watch with excitement all the famous team shooting one of the most well known classic thrillers. Clouzot never shot again in that village, and no other movie was shot there.

LES DIABOLIQUES is a spooky and intense classic from France, a psychological thriller in which a pair of women decide to kill a bullying and controlling school headmaster. One of them is his wife, the other his mistress, and both hate him for good reason. Their plot goes to plan but the psychological toll of what they have done weighs heavy on them, compounded by further mystery when the body goes missing.There's very little to dislike about this classic movie which has a sheen of quality to it. The expert direction draws out the suspense of the situation without resorting to jump scares or sinister music; the camera-work is very fine and the slow-moving nature of the narrative allows you to become fully immersed in the realism of the piece. The actors are exemplary, as you would imagine, and the film features some quite wonderful ghastly set-pieces involving corpses rising from baths and the like. That it is still frightening when seen today says plenty.LES DIABOLIQUES is also an influential movie; try watching Hitchcock's PSYCHO and in particular Kubrick's THE SHINING afterwards, you can see this film's fingerprints all over them. The Shaw Brothers studio even went ahead to make their own, even more involved spin on the story, the quite wonderful HEX which turns out to be very nearly every bit as entertaining as this film, albeit in a quite different genre. Horror and thriller fans will be in their element with this outstanding lesson in movie-making.

If there is a better psychological thriller, I'd like to see it. Michel is a nasty master at a school where two young women work. They despise him. He is cruel to them. He is cruel to the students. When the have had enough they decide to kill him. They invite him to their place and drug him, later drowning him in a bathtub. The body is easily gotten rid of. I won't say any more because it would ruin everything. This will keep you on the edge of your seat. This has incredible pacing and atmosphere. There is that plotting where one wonders when the next shoe will fall. This is so Hitchcock-like. Amazing.

The twist ending to Les Diaboliques has been imitated and ripped off so many times that by now modern audiences can pinpoint its existence fairly easily, but back in 1955 it was ripe and fresh in the imagination. If great movies stand the test of time, then Les Diaboliques may not fit that particular criteria. Henri-Georges Clouzot, dismissed by his New Wave compatriots, dealt predominantly in thrillers and is most known for his previous feature before this one, The Wages of Fear. In Wages he allots nearly half of the film in setting up his protagonists and their dead-end setting of Las Piedras, connected to the rest of the world not by plane or road but jungle pathways, tar pits and precarious wooden supports atop rocky cliffs. The film in its full, uncut version (the censors correctly guessed his intent) however is less a character study and more an allegorical jab at the capitalist system that forces the workers into their corners. Clouzot spends the first hour defining them, but the next holding them at arm's length because of the broader message - William Friedkin's remake, Sorcerer, allocates each strand of the story its own separate introduction but falls to the same error. The ending, a deeply ironic sequence juxtaposing the merry waltz of the naive lover and the askew existentialism of Mario is a cheap parting shot at the low hanging fruit of Hollywood. But the scenarios beforehand show Clouzot to be a master of constructing tension, even for characters with fuzzy and undefined pasts. His scenes rightfully are not scored, leaving only the natural sounds of the environment to be magnified and exaggerated in the minds of those who traverse them. Each chilling incident in Les Diaboliques relies on the paranoia of Christina to elevate curiosity into fear; elsewhere the tone is casually cheery as the rest of the school's inhabitants discuss the events in passing. Clouzot's objectiveness, then, is justified. He doesn't dip into the sub-conscious like Hitchcock might; everything is shot matter-of-fact, with no POVs, and the selective closeups merely show what is there to be seen. Though a few moments reveal noir and expressionist imagery, it scarcely reaches the heights of puzzles such as Vertigo (the intensity of associative colour and the dizziness of the dolly zoom) or Rebecca (the overwrought set design and the camera tracing ghostly movement). All its elements are able to be rationalised by Fichet, who enters jarringly as the pipe-wielding Holmes figure, also possessing similar levels of superhuman deduction. If the retired police chief carries himself with amusement and seems to relish watching them squirm, it is a symptom of Christina's guilt closing in on her own conscience. The building of the mystery follows this same line of thought: we don't see the splotchy clue in the picture that might be a resurrected Michel, but merely her horrified reaction. When she sits up in bed in her white nightgown like a tucked-in child, a slimy hand reaches out from the shrouds of darkness to grab at her - it's merely Fichet, who has more questions and queries for her. Everything is inferred through her mind, and so gloves left at a typewriter, jostling sounds from the bathroom and a sliver of white light snaking through a crack in the doors all become terrifying, in her eyes and so too in ours. Véra Clouzot is the best of the actors. She has the bodily posture of a wooden board, like the stiff, frigid, battered woman she has become in the subjugation of her marriage. The conversations with her husband are not equal duels; each of his sneering insults must be fended off, and at times she seems to be bracing knowingly for impact before she even is slapped. While some might question the logic of a mistress banding together with the wife, here is a character who does not question such things because she has been bruised long enough that any relief is an opportunity immediately seized. She never stops to consider that Nicole, her masculine opposite, might have an ulterior motive every bit as filthy as the opening credits shot of the muddy pool. Clouzot assigns an anti-spoiler warning to maintain this logical twist ending (a move first utilised by Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, and later in the same vein with Hitchcock's Psycho). But he also throws a final spanner in the works. Having revealed all the answers he slips one last puzzle in: perhaps Christina did not die of a heart attack after all, and is still lurking the halls of the boarding school. Having pulled off the bait and switch, Clouzot can't bear to waste all the buildup of the supernatural and fantastical. It's like having your cake and eating it too.