Existential and Phenomenological Horror in Les Diaboliques

Abstract

This article will show how, through an expressionist style that references Gothic and noir cinema, Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955) mediates concepts found in contemporary post-war French existentialism, in particular the phenomenology of horror of Sartre, with whom the director had a personal association. It will examine how the experience of horror is presented as a conscious apprehension of the world as irrational and no longer conforming to deterministic and conventional order. Les Diaboliques asserts that horror results from a distorted perception that has imbued the world with those qualities, and in this case, perception has been manipulated by the sadistic Other. The article will link this portrayal of horror to Les Diaboliques’ well-established influence on the development of the dominant 1960s and 1970s paranoid-psychological horror film and key figures like Alfred Hitchcock and William Castle, suggesting the ontological source of horror in these films as existential phenomenological in nature as opposed to exclusively being the result of psychosexual and familial repression, as is commonly posited by critics.

Keywords

• Existentialism
• phenomenology
• French Cinema
• horror
• Gothic
• Jean-Paul Sartre