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.
All-TIME 100 Movies
TIME's Richard Corliss updates our All-TIME 100 list of the greatest films made since 1923 — the beginning of TIME — with 20 new entries
Diabolique (Les Diaboliques), 1955, Henri-Georges Clouzot, France
Full List
Behind the List
A - C
- Aguirre: The Wrath of God
- The Apu Trilogy
- The Awful Truth
- Baby Face
- Bande à part
- Barry Lyndon
- Berlin Alexanderplatz
- Blade Runner
- Bonnie and Clyde
- Brazil
- Bride of Frankenstein
- Camille
- Casablanca
- Charade
- Children of Paradise
- Chinatown
- Chungking Express
- Citizen Kane
- City Lights
- City of God
- Closely Watched Trains
- The Crime of Monsieur Lange
- The Crowd
D - F
G - J
K - M
N - P
Q - S
T - Z
Great Performances
Guilty Pleasures
- Gone With the Wind, 1939, Victor Fleming, U.S.
- Tenth Avenue Angel, 1949, Roy Rowland, U.S.
- Sailor Beware, 1951, Hal Walker, U.S.
- Diabolique (Les Diaboliques), 1955, Henri-Georges Clouzot, France
- School Girl, 1971, David Reberg, U.S
- There’s Something About Mary,1998, Bobby and Peter Farrelly, U.S.
- Anatomy of a Murder, 1959, Otto Preminger, U.S.
- Gun Crazy, 1949, Joseph H. Lewis, U.S.
- The Incredible Shrinking Man, 1957, Jack Arnold, U.S.
- Joe Versus the Volcano, 1990, John Patrick Shanley, U.S.
10 Best Soundtracks
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