As the film collection House of Psychotic Women: Vol. 2 conveys, the bonkers woman is a vital trope in genre films. She differs from the equally popular bonkers man by her social status. Men are driven nuts by expectations of success in providing for themselves and their families in the battlefields of capitalism and status, not to mention the displacement of these things into or out of sexual desire. Women are driven crazy by the social forces that place limits and expectations on them while requiring them to depend on men. Therefore, horror and crime films frequently depict crazy men and women revolving around each other in figure eights while also spinning in place.
“You know what I think? I think that we’re all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out. We scratch and we claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we never budge an inch.” So says Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) to Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in one of the most thoughtful conversations between a man and woman in all cinema. It occurs in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).
“Sometimes we deliberately step into those traps,” observes Marion, who’s thinking about the consequences of her own impulse to “go a little mad sometimes.”
Most viewers don’t sit and think about this, but they can, if they so choose, because the “Psychotic Women” texts are rich, as critics like to say. Such revelations about gender roles are one of the elements that make these movies fun and educational without having to force us to eat our vegetables.
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This brings us to curator-producer Kier-La Janisse’s second four-disc box of diverse films at Severin Films, marked by women whose sanity is called into question or who otherwise find themselves challenged. Janisse literally wrote the book on the subject. House of Psychotic Women, published by FAB Press in 2012 and expanded in 2022, examines the topic of female madness in horror and exploitation films through a personal lens, inspiring her curation of Severin’s Volume 1 in 2022. Volume 2 contains four equally packed Blu-rays designed to flip the viewer’s lid.
The Savage Eye at the Dawn of 1960s American Indie Cinema
The Savage Eye opens at the airport as passengers disembark on the runway. A male voice says, “Travelers by cloud, uneasy, grateful, swung on a thread of exploding fire, they step down from Heaven to greet the great foot-bound company of us all.” Ah ha, poetry very much of its midcentury moment, the Beats channeling Walt Whitman with a dash of Rod Serling. This voice will be listed in the credits as The Poet, played by Gary Merrill, an actor then married to Bette Davis (not for much longer).
The camera focuses on the only attractive young woman in the crowd, in fact, the only one who resembles an actress, and The Poet asks who she is. “Judith X,” answers her own voiceover, and he asks, “X what?” She says, “Ex-McGuire. I’m divorced.”
Air travel and divorce were two increasingly popular postwar American commodities. Judith (Barbara Baxley) says she caught her husband with another woman and feels hurt, angry, and disgusted at human contact. Due to divorce laws, she has to spend a year in separation from her husband, so it wasn’t a quickie divorce in Reno or Mexico. She’s in a rooming house for such purposes. “Half the women in this house live on bourbon, cottage cheese, and alimony. Even the cat is divorced.”
When The Poets asks about children, she says, “Killed. In the usual way: rubber, miscarriage, misconception, and the knife.” The Poet identifies himself as “Your angel, your double, that vile dreamer, your conscience, your god, your ghost.” In other words, Judith is talking to herself in the form of a nagging superego she internalizes as male, and they spend the duration of The Savage Eye asking each other questions like slightly prickly companions on a binge.
While not literally one of the “psychotic women” in the House of Psychotic Women collection, her social status is questionable, leaving her depressed. She’s suddenly an outsider and a failure.
Judith’s “savage eye” will comment on the people around her, picking out endless flabby or suffering figures on “the immense undiscovered planet of the human face”. She goes on a few dates with a married man she dislikes (Herschel Bernardi) and visits gambling dens, roller derbies, parks, skid row neighborhoods with drunks on the street, a pro wrestling match, and, in the only sequence with direct sound, a faith healing church where people speak in tongues.
Judith and the camera know that the real action is always in the audience. The wrestlers are fake, and we see only a few odd positions of heads gripped vice-like in thighs, reminiscent of an early scene of women at yoga. However, the screaming fans are real and sincere.
Judith drops in on a strip show and declares, “I don’t have those monstrous, stupid double-features, ugly, full of imaginary milk, too real to be true. These are women invented by men.”
This panorama of postwar America in anomie, desperately entertaining itself and staring at television displays in shop windows before getting into drunken car accidents, might borrow the title of sociologist David Riesman’s 1950 book The Lonely Crowd. At one point, Judith or The Poet, for now it makes no difference, announces, “The world is divided into two classes: those that are alive and those that are afraid.” The Savage Eye would make a good double feature with a later breakout documentary, Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass’ Koyaanisqatsi (1982), which also depicts American cities as “life out of balance”.
Experimental yet always clear and accessible, The Savage Eye conjures its narrative in our minds by assembling black and white, handheld, cinéma vérité documentary footage, dubbing personal and dialectical comments from the dueling voiceovers, and adding a thrilling score by Leonard Rosenman in his modernist, serial, dissonant mode. Baxley and a few other actors are sent into authentic locales surrounded by unpaid extras who serve as the real stars of this anthropology lesson. The idea is so simple that it could inspire anyone to go out on a few afternoons and shoot a movie of what’s around them.
As producer-director Joseph Strick explains in an interview included in House of Psychotic Women, the project took approximately four years to complete, with weekends dedicated to the task. The original idea of The Savage Eye was a modern update of one of William Hogarth’s satirical cartoons on city life. The palimpsest of that notion remains so clear that the New York Times reviewer called it Hogarthian, even though the concept eventually morphed into a divorcee’s thoughts.
Strick’s credited co-directors are blacklisted writer Ben Maddow and editor-director Sidney Meyers. Meyers directed the 1948 documentary “The Quiet One,” about a ten-year-old African American boy with emotional problems; it was also narrated by Merrill.
Many photographers worked on The Savage Eye, and the three who receive primary credit are significant. Haskell Wexler, who would win two Oscars, later made Medium Cool (1969), a famous example of sending actors into real situations, so The Savage Eye is a “cutting his teeth” project for him. Helen Leavitt, a major New York street photographer, had worked on The Quiet One, and I can’t help wondering if she contributes to the Weegee-like eye of skid row derelicts and bleeding accident victims.
Jack Couffer worked on numerous Disney animal movies and received an Oscar nomination for Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973). Strick would produce Couffer’s nature-based dramas Ring of Bright Water (1969) and The Darwin Adventure (1972).
The Savage Eye made a splash at European festivals, although it encountered censorship issues here and there. Highly keyed into its time, this indie feature was addressing all kinds of things disallowed by the studios’ Production Code, such as the imagery of lower-class pastimes and language like “the slime of loveless love, masturbation by proxy”.
Films about women who get divorced and stay divorced, as opposed to remarrying their husbands by story’s end, would become a little more fashionable with John Huston’s The Misfits (1961). Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Federico Fellini were on the cusp of using single or divorced women as our guide through the consumer-era landscape of ennui and unbelief, so The Savage Eye is slightly ahead of schedule.
An excellent commentary track included in House of Psychotic Women links The Savage Eye as a pioneering American indie to other examples of documentaries, “mondo” movies, and films that incorporate found footage into dramas. A fine bonus is Strick’s Oscar-winning short documentary, Interviews with My Lai Veterans (1970), which interviews men who were at the infamous event in Vietnam.
Breaking The Glass Ceiling in General Franco’s Spain
The Glass Ceiling opens quietly, ominously, and claustrophobically. While we hear birds chirping, the camera looks restlessly around a brick courtyard, drifting back and forth and up and down across occasional doors or windows in the high walls. It’s as though we’re in a prison courtyard instead of an apartment building, and two dogs in a cage reinforce the idea. The opening credits are in English, as this is the English-dubbed print of Eloy De La Iglesia‘s El techo de cristal. The optional Spanish track is available with subtitles.
These courtyard credits may remind viewers of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), and that’s one of several Hitchcock nods dropped by De La Iglesia into The Glass Ceiling. A broader no is that, occasionally, shots of the various female characters momentarily freeze to a clicking sound, which suggests that someone is spying and taking pictures.
Is this a human character, or the eye of the film itself? After all, we know a camera is at work, and these meta-moments call our attention to it. One character will suddenly raise the topic of voyeurism and ask, “What do you think is the point of photography and cinema? … It’s a release, an escape valve for this voyeur instinct.”
That’s the type of thing audiences and De La Iglesia have learned from Hitchcock. Even the title refers to a Hitchcock conceit that dates back to his debut thriller, The Lodger (1927). Despite it being a silent film, Hitchcock evoked sound by having a landlady look uneasily up at the ceiling as her lodger paces above.
In a startling effect in Hitchcock’s film, what she hears is visualized through the device, as the ceiling becomes transparent, allowing us to see and “hear” the footsteps. This concept is what De La Iglesia is reaching for as his heroine looks at the ceiling and tries to interpret the steps she hears.
The Glass Ceiling is primarily about desperate housewives who stay home while their husbands work, and how restless sexual desires and deprivations play out in this cage-like building. The atmosphere is literally overheated, thanks to the landlord’s constantly burning furnace. It’s a bonus irony that the phrase “glass ceiling” has a more recent meaning, referring to the conventional limitations placed on upward mobility for women and minorities.
The primary lonely woman is Marta, played by celebrated Spanish superstar Carmen Sevilla. At the beginning of The Glass Ceiling, her nattily-dressed hubby Carlos (Fernando Cebrian) departs for a long business trip after making jokes about how Marta will take advantage to be unfaithful with as many lovers as possible, ha, ha. She replies that she’ll only have one, a female.
“You mean—” he asks, and she explains that she means her white cat, Phaedra (named after a faithless wife). Marta says she’ll talk to Phaedra all day and sleep with her at night.
De La Iglesia’s script is crammed with these suggestive layers. During a brief, vivid dream in which Marta jumbles shots we’ve already seen with others from later in The Glass Ceiling, her husband will magically change into other male characters and finally into Julia (Patty Sheppard), the upstairs neighbor.
The scenes between Marta and the enigmatic Julia sometimes resemble a flirtation or seduction, especially when Julia sunbathes nude. Freeze, click, freeze, click.
We haven’t yet mentioned The Glass Ceiling‘s plot because everything else is so suggestive. Julia’s husband is also absent on business, although Marta doesn’t know what to believe when she thinks she hears the guy walking around up there. Like the photographer with the broken leg in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), she begins putting together clues and letting her imagination run wild, eventually convincing herself that Julia might have killed her husband.
What could she have done with the body? The viewer, too, begins putting together all sorts of ideas that have been placed in our heads by what the camera chooses to look at: refrigerators, dogs, pigs.
The camera spends a lot of time looking at Ricardo or Richard (Dean Selmier), the young, shirtless, sweaty landlord who’s also a sculptor with a furnace in his ground-floor studio. That furnace is both a convenient plot device and a handy symbol. For De La Iglesia, who pioneered homosexual desire in Spanish cinema, having his male protagonists go shirtless is par for the course, and Ricardo gets especially moist.
Aside from collecting rent, he makes busts and nude figures. He reads books and collects paintings. He keeps dogs and hogs. We may speculate on how much this creative figure stands in for his creator.
Ricardo is contrasted with two men: a horny delivery boy who makes crude passes to Marta, and a leering, smirking buddy who envies Ricardo for being surrounded by all these lonely women and says he’d sure know what to do with them. Ricardo is distant about all this, even about Rosa (Emma Cohen), the farmer’s daughter who delivers milk on her bicycle in a mini-skirt, sans brassiere, and broadcasts her interest in Richard. She’s disappointed that when he asks her to undress for a sculpture, he sees her only clinically as a block of wood and pushes away her kisses.
He’s more interested in Marta, for they go riding horses and discuss voyeurism as a basic instinct. She begins to tell him her suspicions about Julia’s behavior, and by then, this slow burn is building to its climax.
If other characters focus their attention on Marta and Julia, it’s equally true that everyone focuses on Ricardo. A married friend drops in on Marta, expresses lascivious approval of that hunky landlord, and speculates eagerly that Julia has a lover. By now, fireworks of suggestion are exploding in the viewers’ heads.
Besides Hitchcock, another filmmaker evoked in The Glass Ceiling is Michelangelo Antonioni, that modern deity of absences, negative space, negative actions, and negative emotions expressed in landscape. At a certain point in the narrative, Phaedra will simply vanish and be forgotten, like the initial heroine of L’Avventura (1960), after having scratched one, possibly two, characters. Someone will then act on the evidence of possibilities captured in photographs, as in Blow-Up (1966).
The Glass Ceiling is among the many provocative genre films that flowered in the waning years of Spain’s Franco dictatorship, as discussed in PopMatters‘ The Living Dead’s Problems in Spanish Horror Movies. De La Iglesia presents a vision of enervation and ennui, of pent-up energy with no outlet. This social landscape must naturally lead to crime, infidelity, kinkiness, and going ga-ga.
The Glass Ceiling comes with a commentary track included in the House of Psychotic Women collection by critics Shelagh Rowan-Legg and Alexandra West, a reminiscence of Sheppard by her sister, and Anta Mujer (1976), Agustin Villaronga’s short film of arty postures and Carl Orff music. He would make a brilliant, queasy political thriller with a title similar to De La Iglesia’s film: In a Glass Cage or Tras el cristal (1986).
Morgiana: Two Sisters, a Cat, and a Checkered Past
Something in Prague and the surrounding countryside breeds artists who delve into the surreal, the fantastic, the feverish, and the paranoid, none of which prevents them from being darkly funny. Rather than the air or water, perhaps the source is history’s gothic blend of the cruel and absurd, as in the Defenestration of Prague.
Perhaps it’s the uncertainty of not knowing what country its citizens are living in; for most of the 20th Century, it was called Czechoslovakia. Modern civilization’s most pertinent gift to the landscape seems to be bureaucracy.
A fine example of the area’s artistry is Slovakian filmmaker Juraj Herz, a Jew who survived the Holocaust, studied puppetry with Jan Švankmajer, and lived through the artistic liberalization of the Prague Spring and its 1968 crushing by the invasion of Soviet tanks. His masterpiece, The Cremator (1969), was banned in his country until 1989, but it made his reputation. He specialized in mixtures of horror and fairy tale marked by stylistic extravagance, and that describes the freak-out known as Morgiana (1972).
Morgiana opens with a funeral. Pallbearers in black lug the coffin over the viewers’ heads as we seem to look up from the grave, a visual device that will remind film buffs of the openings of Carl-Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) and Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957). Herz is already aligning himself with morbid manifestations of Euro-cinema’s high art.
Abruptly, we’re at the reading of the late man’s will, and a young male attorney looks into the camera as he announces the division of property between two sisters. The camera cuts to a close-up on one sister and pans to the other, but we can’t truly see either woman as they’re mummified in enormous hats and black veils.
As the title Morgiana and the credits appear over a colorful, surreal painting of vaguely organic shapes, scored lushly by Luboš Fišer, we’re informed that the same actress, Iva Janžurová, plays both Klara and Viktoria, although they aren’t twins. With her wide mouth and extravagantly pasted-on makeup under endlessly piled wigs, the elder Viktoria sometimes resembles a campy drag queen, as Czech and Slovak film historian Cerise Howard mentions in the commentary track. For that matter, the many female characters who flutter and swirl through the narrative as friends, servants, and prostitutes are made up to resemble each other, as though one actor plays all.
Viktoria’s huge black wig and black dresses mark her as the bad sister. She rushes to the insipid, blonde-wigged Klara, the good sister, and says she doesn’t like her face. That’s ironic, as it’s basically her own face. The source of contention seems to be that all the boys, including lawyer Glenar (Petr Cepek) and soldier Marek (Josef Abrhám), dote on Klara while Viktoria eats her bitter heart out.
Viktoria acquires a magic poison from a shady tarot reader, and most of the plot concerns whether Klara will waste away or Viktoria will change her mind about getting the antidote. Morgiana is Viktoria’s story, as we spend more time with her vacillating neurosis, her panic, and her violent impulses when cornered.
Who is Morgiana? That’s the blue-eyed Siamese cat watching all. The camera sometimes mimics her POV, adopting a wide-angle (“fish-eye”) lens to dash across the floor and leap into chairs. Mind you, Herz doesn’t need the cat for the fish-eye, as he’s perfectly happy to distort the image at other times, sometimes getting quite psychedelic for Klara’s hallucinations. Certain rapidly edited shots have a blue-red haze as though we forgot to put on 3D glasses.
Eastern European cinema is known for dynamic, even delirious camera moves, including handheld and subjective shots. This device appears to have been a staple in film schools throughout the Iron Curtain, making period films more vital and intense.
Morgiana takes place in a 19th-century bourgeois, pre-revolutionary world of gentility and servants, exaggerated to a campy parody. In this world, based on Alexander Grin’s novel Jessie and Morgiana (Джесси и Моргиана, 1929), Herz allows himself to comment on human cruelty and cupidity without officially implying that life under Soviet domination has anything crazy about it. Herz allows his story to emerge organically through his playful, colorful, elliptical, disorienting style, as we’re continually teased by devices that place the sisters in the same scene or shot.
Janžurová recalls her dual performance in a bonus segment included in the House of Psychotic Women collection, and an animated piece discusses the filming location in Bulgaria’s Stone Forest. Cerise Howard and Tasmanian director Briony Kidd contribute a commentary track. A ghostly black and white silent short with music, Rachel Amodeo’s Rest in Peace (1998), is tossed in for the heck of it.
The most wonderful extra is Nightmares (Nocni Mury, 1970), a TV special featuring music videos (hudební horror, or “musical horror movie”) starring singer Nada Urbánková and vampires. Her songs include translations of Andy Williams’ “Happy Heart”, Tom Jones’ “I (Who Have Nothing)”, and, we kid you not, George Gershwin’s “Swanee”.
Butterfly Kiss and the Comedy of Murderous Despair
Michael Winterbottom’s Butterfly Kiss (1995) opens with Helen Shapiro’s brassy 1961 UK hit “Walkin’ Back to Happiness”, played over black and white close-ups of a young woman leaning against a bland institutional wall. The credits are bright pink.
Then we find a different dodgy young woman tramping along the overgrown side of the M6, England’s huge motorway. The rapid editing keeps flipping from her right side to left, as though she’s walking in both directions, and we hear her repeating variants of “Look at us. It’s me. Here I am.” We’ll later grasp that she’s addressing God.
She enters a gas station by the highway and goes into her routine, asking the clerk if they carry records of a certain love song. The routine builds to our scruffy traveler asking the clerk if she’s Judith. She isn’t. An abrupt jump cut ends the first encounter as our unnerving gal has hitched a ride with a motorist, and we glimpse the clerk lying dead with her head busted open.
Okay, we’ve been warned. Our anti-heroine will repeat this routine several times, and the various women clerks will respond with identical replies, as if in a ritual.
American actress Amanda Plummer plays Eunice, who qualifies as the most psychotic woman in the House of Psychotic Women box. Beneath her flimsy garment, she wears chains that pierce her flesh as punishment. She’s ready to kill or have sex with anyone. She announces that she’s evil, and she rails against God for ignoring her, even though she kills people. Why doesn’t He smite her?
She’s begging for attention. She’s the anti-Joan of Arc. The only voice she hears is her own.
The second clerk along these stations of the highway turns out to be Miriam (Saskia Reeves), a very inward, awkward, clumped-in young woman who lives with her invalid “Mum”, actually her grandmother. Mum tells Eunice she never leaves her radius. “If you don’t go out, you’ll do no evil,” says Mum, and Eunice answers, “Evil is in your heart. If you don’t go out, you’ll never get away from it.” There’s a flaw in there, but it’s something to think about.
Winterbottom’s very low-budget debut feature, which has a grimly comic tone difficult to convey second-hand, is a North England road trip in the tradition of lovers on the lam, for Miriam has fallen head over heels for unpredictable live-wire Eunice and decides to accept all her flaws, including a tendency to seduce and kill strangers for their vehicles.
The Judith that Eunice claims to be seeking is either a pen-pal or the biblical Judith who had sex with Holofernes to decapitate him, and much of the death imagery reflects famous paintings of that topic. Religious references are a consistent element worn lightly in Butterfly Kill, like those chains. At least one other character believes in deserving punishment.
Miriam seems so naïve and good-hearted that we begin to think something’s wrong with her in her quieter way, and we’re right. Eunice may be chained, but she’s unlocking something in Miriam. “Mi” and “Eu” add up to “us”, as Miriam reveals in a game of I Spy. The biblical Miriam was a seeress, but Miriam doesn’t seem to see clearly. She lives in her projections.
Butterfly Kiss structures its anecdotal, incidental, episodic plot along the wasteland of concrete and petrol stations by suspense (who will get killed?) and by the black and white moments of Miriam speaking to the camera at a later time, reminiscing about Eunice and offering rationalizations. We hear female voices dropped into the soundtrack, often Dolores O’Riordan of Ireland’s the Cranberries, and also Patsy Cline, Bjork, Gloria Gaynor, PJ Harvey, Shakespeare’s Sister, and the New Seekers.
When Butterfly Kiss was making the festival and art house circuit, critics couldn’t help comparing it to the only prominent female-outlaw road movie of the time, Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise (1991). Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (1994) was one year in the past, while the Wachowski’s Bound (1996) was one year in the future, but all these films are significantly different from Winterbottom’s. Farther in the future was Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi’s Baise-moi (2000), though that was based on Despentes’ 1993 novel, so the early 1990s had these ideas floating in the zeitgeist.
That said, killers on the run belong to a time-honored trope in cinema, and Butterfly Kiss resonates with such items as Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973), which is narrated by a naïvely romantic teen girl; the deadly young women in Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy (1950) and Noel Black’s Pretty Poison (1968); and more genial items like Lamont Johnson’s Cattle Annie and Little Britches (1981).
In her commentary (the best in the House of Psychotic Women collection), critic Kat Ellinger draws a connection between Eunice and David Thewlis’ aggressively unpleasant anti-hero in Mike Leigh’s Naked, which caused a bit of a sensation one year before Butterfly Kiss. Another insightful connection to abject and dependent women is found in Jane Campion’s Sweetie (1989), which provides further evidence that it’s not necessary to draw lines only between Butterfly Kiss and outlaw buddies.
Like the other films in House of Psychotic Women: Rarities Volume 2, Butterfly Kiss features an optional introduction by Kier-La Janisse, which explains the film’s historical background. Winterbottom and his frequent co-writer Frank Cottrell-Boyce have bonus segments, as do Plummer, Reeves, and producer Julie Baines. Ruth Lingford’s Pleasures of War (1998) is an animated short about Judith and Holofernes.
It’s worth quoting the PR blurb from FAB Press’ latest edition of Janisse’s book: “Cinema is full of neurotic personalities, but few things are more transfixing than a woman losing her mind onscreen. Horror as a genre provides the most welcoming platform for these histrionics: crippling paranoia, desperate loneliness, masochistic death-wishes, dangerous obsessiveness, apocalyptic hysteria.” All the things that make life worth living and films worth watching, and it’s especially satisfying when they’re curated with care, scanned in 4K from original negatives, and presented from female perspectives.