Diabolique

Henri-Georges Clouzot, already celebrated for The Wages of Fear, made Diabolique in 1955, having beaten Hitchcock to the rights to the source novel by Boileau and Narcejac, the pair who would later write the book behind Vertigo. It won the Louis Delluc Prize, and few thrillers made since have been more influential.

Véra Clouzot and Simone Signoret play the frail wife and the hardened mistress, bound together against Paul Meurisse's sadistic provincial headmaster. Clouzot shoots the dingy boarding school and its murky, leaf-strewn swimming pool in clammy, high-contrast black and white, and he builds the tension out of atmosphere and withheld information, with little incident and no score to speak of. The film's reputation rests on how carefully it is engineered: audiences were asked, in a title card, not to give away its secrets to anyone who had yet to see it.

Its influence on the genre is hard to overstate. Hitchcock's Psycho owes it a clear debt, and the slow-burn thriller built on what the audience is not told largely descends from it. Decades later, and after an unnecessary Hollywood remake, the original is still supremely unsettling, wringing an astonishing amount of dread out of a bathtub, a typewriter and the simple fear of what cannot quite be seen. Few films have sent audiences home so thoroughly rattled.