All-TIME 100 Movies

Diabolique (Les Diaboliques), 1955, Henri-Georges Clouzot, France

At a seedy French boarding school, the unsatisfied wife (Vera Clouzot) and restless mistress (Simone Signoret) of the slimy headmaster (Paul Meurisse) drown the creep in the bathtub and dispose of his body. Brutal, efficient and final—until evidence starts to mount that the dead man is haunting the school. As a kid, I was avid to see Diabolique after reading a Newsweek review that gave the movie’s moral as “You can lead a corpse to water but you can’t make it sink.” I think I found the school’s fetid atmosphere, the long, underlighted hallways, the main characters’ sourness and cynicism nearly as scary as the film’s famous climax, in the bathtub where it all began. The movie asked its audience, “Can you be scared to death?” For one impressionable child, this, one, the answer was almost literally yes. To beg my parents to take me to a French film, and then, coming home, to beg them to leave my bedroom door open and the hall light on, just shows you how pretentious and naive an 11-year-old could be.

Next: School Girl, 1971, David Reberg, U.S

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