Homicidal

A cult favorite - for good reason
Do you remember shrieking with horror and giggling with delight at William Castle's old black and white spook-fests? Well, here's one of his best: Homicidal, a drama that borrows freely from Hitchcock's Psycho.

As the story opens, a strange woman pays a stranger to marry her and promptly kills the man who performed the ceremony. Back in the sleepy town of Solvang, California, we meet a peculiar young man named Warren who has returned to his old home with this mysterious woman. Warren is about to inherit a fortune on his twenty-first birthday, but strange things start happening...and what secrets are hidden in that dark, old house?

This movie is short on actual violence but long on creepy atmosphere and things that go bump in the night. The actors are all good, but the real star is director Castle, who creates a very scary mystery with so much tension you'll be on the edge of your...

Scary as He-Double-Hector!
In 1962, my husband and I, along with many on and off campus college students, went to see the "much touted," Homicidal. Neatly seated in the small theatre, voices were booming until the movie started. Popcorn and cokes were the norm, so we settled down to view the movie we thought would be over rated by the general population of the small town.

Much to our surprise, the black and white thriller lived up to be one of the most horrid things we ever watched. Several minutes into the psycho, popcorn and cokes flew through the air and pelted every head that wasn't under the seat! Screams from men and women echoed as though we were in the Grand Canyon and couldn't get out of the enormous abyss. Taking a few deep breaths to calm our senses, the movie continued while we waited for the next knife to jab into another person's guts. Calm, we were...for awhile.

Refilling the snacks (popcorn and cokes)from the previous episode of the nerve shattering wacko woman's rage, all...

"I don't like your eyes, Helga....they see too much!"
One of the most pre-eminent showmen in Hollywood, William Castle, director of such films as The Tingler (1959) and House on Haunted Hill (1959) released Homicidal in 1961, one year after the release of Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece, Psycho. Some will say it's a blatant rip off of Psycho, and others will say it's more of a homage, but either way, it's a very entertaining film.

The story starts off showing a woman, played by actress Jean Arliss aka Joan Marshall, checking into a hotel and offering a bellboy two grand to marry her. The bellboy is naturally curious, but the lure of the humongous pile of greenbacks keeps his queries to a minimum. They arrive at the Justice of the Peace, late in the evening, and the ceremony proceeds, only to end in a very grisly, visceral murder. Confused? I was too, but all will be revealed as the film progresses. The film's plot is fairly intricate, involving murder, money, and mayhem. The story mainly takes place in a small, southern...

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