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PORTSIDE CULTURE

1960: THE YEAR THE MODERN HORROR FILM WAS BORN  
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Eileen Jones
October 31, 2025
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ A combination of the breakdown of the Hollywood studio system, the
decline of censorship, and the rise of wildly — and luridly —
creative filmmakers across the world looking to cash in on sex and
violence made 1960 the year of the modern horror film. _

Still from Peeping Tom. , (Anglo-Amalgamated Film Distributors)

 

For horror film aficionados, the year 1960 will always be associated
with Alfred Hitchcock’s _Psycho_, which is generally argued to be
the first “modern” horror film. The year is even more of a
landmark if you consider that Michael Powell’s _Peeping Tom _—
featuring many of the same traits as _Psycho_, including a sympathetic
portrait of a sexually tormented serial killer who is not a
reassuringly “othered” monster — debuted only five months
before.

The two British directors knew each other, and Hitchcock was paying
close attention to the grim fate of Powell, whose masterpiece so
repulsed British critics and the public that his career never
recovered. In a strategy designed to control the reception in America,
Hitchcock oversaw a famous publicity campaign for _Psycho_ intended to
prepare his vast audience for a transgressive new experience. A major
part of the strategy was defusing audience revulsion, using the
celebrated director’s well-known black humor that had helped make
his television anthology series _Alfred Hitchcock Presents_ such a big
hit. In a preview short film that circulated widely before the
premiere of _Psycho_, Hitchcock himself toured viewers through the
Bates Motel and the gothic Bates residence behind it, reacting with
comically exaggerated distaste at the lurid violence, supposedly too
horrible to fully describe, that would take place within.

Hitchcock also took obviously gleeful pleasure in showing audiences
the first shot of a toilet flushing in an American film — the
commode in Room #1 at the Bates Motel. It was a humorous indication of
the crumbling of the strict Production Code of censorship that had
dominated American movies since it was first enforced in 1934.

There had been a slow erosion of Code enforcement since the mid-1940s,
when the harsh experience of the war gave rise to new energy in
documentary filmmaking and realism in motion pictures. The surge in
documentary filmmaking was powered by technological advances such as
faster film stocks and more portable cameras and sound equipment as
well as increased audience investment in seeing what was really
happening on war fronts across the globe.

Realist film movements followed the war, most famously Italian
neorealism breaking the constraints of fascist censorship, which had
confined popular movie-making to the glossy fantasies generated within
the bounds of studio production. Just the act of neorealist directors
taking their cameras out into the streets was informed by radical
leftist rejection of escapist film forms.

In Hollywood, the rising demand for realism led to the same tendency
to break out of studio sets and back lots in favor of on-location
filmmaking. This inevitably led to more adult content. The crime film
genre that came to be known as “film noir,” noted for its extreme
violence, lurid sexuality, and existentially grim view of the world,
emerged in full force only after the war. The genre had been catalyzed
by the hard-boiled novels that had been popular since the 1920s, but
any film adaptations were suppressed by the Code in the 1930s and
further stifled by the war effort in the early 1940s, which mandated
cheerful and patriotic representations of American life.

The End of Hollywood Censorship

In addition to the new dedication to realism was the breakdown of the
Hollywood studio system, as the desire for new modes of entertainment
emerged after the war along with changing movie-going patterns driven
by a mass exodus of middle-class Americans to the suburbs. While art
cinemas featuring “foreign films” proliferated in startling
numbers in urban areas and university towns across America, the
popularity of television exploded. It quickly took over as America’s
main source of family entertainment, and as such, became the most
highly censored form. In order to hold some portion of the general
public, movies skewed toward widescreen Technicolor spectacles or more
serious, often daringly topical black-and-white adult fare —
extremes beyond what could be shown on early television.

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Still from The Moon Is Blue. (United Artists)

Directors began systematically testing the limits of censorship. Otto
Preminger led the charge by making an innocuous romantic comedy, _The
Moon Is Blue_ (1953), that featured the use of formerly forbidden
words like “virgin” and “pregnant.” He followed it up with a
noirish drama on the taboo subject of drug addiction, _The Man with
the Golden Arm_ (1955).

Both films were released without the Production Code of America seal
of approval, which once upon a time would’ve barred the films from
the major theater chains, dooming them to marginal independent cinemas
and probable financial failure. However, independent theater chains
had expanded in the wake of the Paramount Decision, a landmark ruling
against the major theater-owning studios for their oligopolistic
business practices. The 1938 ruling was finally enforced in 1948 and
became one of several post–World War II blows to the studio system
that ultimately dismantled it.

[[link removed]]Still
from The Man with the Golden Arm. (United Artists)

The two Preminger films, released with “adults only” warnings,
made them notorious as well as very popular. The process of chipping
away at Production Code restrictions gained momentum, though it took
until 1968 for its entire dismantling and replacement by an early
version of the motion picture content ratings system we still have
today.

As formerly censored topics in films became appealing, a whole new
strain of “social problem” films arose starting in the late 1940s.
These films dealt with such subjects as physical and mental war trauma
(_Pride of the Marines_, _The Best Years of Our Lives_), mental
illness (_The Snake Pit_,_ The Three Faces of Eve_, _Home Before
Dark_), alcoholism (_The Lost Weekend_;_ Come Back, Little Sheba_),
antisemitism (_Crossfire_, _Gentleman’s Agreement_), racism
(_Intruder in the Dust_, _Pinky_, _Border Incident_,_ Home of the
Brave_,_ The Defiant Ones_), rape (_Outrage_), and unwanted pregnancy
(_Not Wanted_).

Horror Goes Global in 1960

For horror films in particular, this atmosphere eventually led to a
burst of dark creativity, culminating in the banner year of 1960. But
this surge was a truly international phenomenon that went beyond the
UK’s _Peeping Tom_ (premiering April 7) and America’s _Psycho_
(September 8). _Eyes Without a Face_, a French horror masterpiece
directed by Georges Franju, premiered on March 2 and is regarded among
the first films of the highly influential youth-cinema movement, the
French New Wave, that had riveted the cinephile world with Francois
Truffaut’s _The 400 Blows_ and Jean-Luc Godard’s_ Breathless_ the
year before.

[[link removed]]Still
from Eyes Without a Face. (Lux Compagnie Cinématographique de France)

_Eyes Without a Face_ is a unique film about an arrogant scientist
(Pierre Brasseur) whose daughter’s face has been horribly damaged in
a car accident he himself caused. He preys ruthlessly on young
working-class women who are abducted by his blindly devoted assistant
(Alida Valli) for the purpose of finding a new face to graft onto that
of his suffering daughter, Christiane (Edith Scob). One scene
depicting the surgical removal of a young woman’s face, which would
surely have been censored in earlier years, still holds up today as a
remarkable combination of delicacy and gruesomeness that defines the
entire film. And the most unforgettable scenes involve the eerie,
doll-like quality of the captive Christiane, thin and ethereal in a
white mask and white satin robe, as she drifts through the doctor’s
ghastly laboratory as well as the outbuilding housing the doomed,
yelping stray dogs he also experiments on.

Hitchcock took gleeful pleasure in showing audiences the first shot of
a toilet flushing in an American film — the commode in Room #1 at
the Bates Motel.

The two modes of _Eyes Without a Face _— appalling modern-day
realism in depicting psychological sickness, harrowing cruelty, and
shocking gore, and newly inventive gothic effects that harken back to
the classic horror being left behind — comprise the major
developments in cinema in that reach an inspired peak in 1960.

In Italy, horror director Mario Bava made his 1960 debut with _Black
Sunday_ (August 11), a period horror film about Satanic possession and
a witch’s revenge that made Barbara Steele, in a dual role, a star
and instant horror icon. The first scenes of _Black Sunday_, which
depict the realistic branding of the condemned witch and her grisly
death via an iron mask that impales her face with spikes, play like a
declaration of new levels of sadistic violence and bloodshed. Bava
went on to experiment in giallo and slasher horror films in ways that
inspired the other two masters of Italian horror, Dario Argento and
Lucio Fulci.

[[link removed]]Still
from Black Sunday. (Unidis)

But Bava himself had been inspired by the rise of England’s luridly
violent but elegantly shot Hammer Horror films of the late 1950s.
These movies shocked audiences around the world with their reconceived
versions of gothic classics like _Dracula_,_ Frankenstein_, and _The
Mummy_ that had once been the province of Universal Studios in
Hollywood. Hammer’s _The Curse of Frankenstein_ (1957), directed by
Terence Fisher and starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, was
such a popular smash it was quickly followed by sensational remakes of
_Dracula_ and _The Mummy_ with the same team of director plus lead
actors, all in thrilling color with plenty of charged sexuality and
lurid gore. The 1960_ Dracula_ sequel, Fisher’s _The Brides of
Dracula,_ premiering on July 7, is a less remarkable or historically
significant film on its own, but it continued the recent Hammer string
of influential moneymakers, featuring Cushing reprising his role as
Van Helsing, but doing without Lee as Dracula because the actor feared
typecasting.

In America, the same move toward classic gothic horror reconceived in
terms of color filmmaking and greater explicitness found a home at
American International Pictures (AIP). Taking a chance on a bigger
budget in adapting Edgar Allan Poe’s celebrated short story “The
Fall of the House of Usher,” AIP was rewarded with a 1960 hit film
_House of Usher_, which premiered on June 18. It was directed by Roger
Corman and starred Vincent Price as the morbidly tormented last heir
of an aristocratic family line who may or may not have buried his
beloved sister alive in the family tomb. Its popularity guaranteed a
long series of AIP Poe adaptations, directed by Corman and starring
Price along with a host of aging Hollywood actors all of whom somehow
associated with horror, including Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, Basil
Rathbone, Ray Milland, and Lon Chaney Jr.

[[link removed]]Still
from House of Usher. (American International Pictures)

The countervailing tendency in AIP horror was making cheap
exploitative movies shot in black and white, featuring largely unknown
actors, and ground out fast, including the farcical _Little Shop of
Horrors_. Directed by Corman, it’s still the most famous and
influential of them all, though it was largely overlooked in its
initial release on September 14, 1960.

1960’s _Psycho _and _Peeping Tom_ both feature reclusive young men
whose psychotic homicidal urges emerge out of their childhood homes,
the gothic ‘old dark houses’ where both still live.

It occupied the second half of a double bill featuring Bava’s
well-reviewed hit _Black Sunday_, which was distributed in America by
AIP. Over time, _Little Shop of Horrors_ gained a cult following as
the drunkenly scripted, cheerfully bizarre tale of a man-eating plant
from outer space who’s fed by a hapless and desperate working-class
struggler. It also features a young Jack Nicholson in an early role as
an enthusiastic masochist looking forward to his painful session at
the dentist’s. The film’s lighthearted subversiveness played well
over the years on television and inspired a hit Broadway musical
comedy in 1982 that was followed by a popular 1986 movie adaptation
starring Rick Moranis and Steve Martin.

[[link removed]]Still
from Little Shop of Horrors. (The Filmgroup / American International
Pictures)

In an era of international coproductions bolstering filmmaking budget
costs as the studio systems in many countries were falling apart,
there were a number of US-UK horror films made in the early 1960s.
_Village of the Damned_, premiering in the United States on December
7, had many of the qualities of other highly praised US-UK horror
films at the time, including _The Innocents_ (1961), _The Haunting_
(1963), and _The Nanny_ (1965), as well as the sequel _Children of the
Damned_ (1964).  They combined sleek, elegant shooting styles and the
restrained tone of atmospheric gothic chillers with sensationalistic,
formerly censorable narrative elements at the center of the horror.

_The Haunting, _for example, is set in a classically haunted
gothic-style old house in a film designed by director Robert Wise to
pay tribute to his forward-thinking mentor Val Lewton, who made
quietly ambiguous 1940s horror films such as _Cat People_,_ I Walked
with a Zombie_, and _The Leopard Man_. Lewton’s films were described
as achieving psychologically ambiguous “fear-by-suggestion” among
mostly modern-day characters rather than classic “monster movie”
shocks and thrills. _The Haunting_ also features a modern
scientist’s evidence-based approach to studying paranormal
phenomenon, and a chic lesbian character — among the first in
mainstream cinema — offering an attractive alternative to the
protagonist, a lonely, psychologically troubled single woman who’s
losing herself to either mental illness or ghostly possession or both.

The Family and Modern Horror

Central to the narratives of _The Innocents, Village of the Damned_,
and _Children of the Damned_ are the idea of children represented as
the monstrous beings within tormented households. These characters
once would’ve been censored under vague terms in the Production Code
involving reverence for the family and the investment in ideals of
youthful innocence and wholesomeness.

The waspish actor George Sanders, complete with ascot, plays the lead
in _Village of the Damned,_ as scientist Gordon Zellaby, living in
rural Midwich, England, a village that experiences an alarming event
when everyone simultaneously loses consciousness for a full day. This
event is treated by the government and military as a Cold War
phenomenon, possibly involving an attack by the Soviets, until it’s
discovered that towns around the globe, including two in Russia,
suffered a similar fate. The local government representative puts
Zellaby in charge of monitoring the mysterious phenomenon that
follows: shockingly, every single fertile woman in Midwich is
pregnant, including Gordon’s wife, Anthea.

[[link removed]]Still
from Village of the Damned. (Loew’s)

Six months after the attack, all the babies develop at superhuman
rates of growth — identical white-blonde hair, strange pale eyes,
and hyperintelligence that includes ESP. Soon it’s impossible to
avoid the realization that the children must be alien spawn preparing
themselves to control the world, and their violent laser-eyed killings
of those who think about impeding them in any way becomes the problem
for a terrorized village, and more specifically for Zellaby. How to
destroy their own half-alien children without the children knowing
what the villagers are planning?

That might sound to you like the famous _Twilight Zone_ episode
“It’s a Good Life,” about a town held captive by a malevolent,
supernaturally gifted boy who can read minds and, with a single
murderous thought, send people who offend him “to the cornfield.”
Television horror series of the 1950s and ’60s, such as _Alfred
Hitchcock Presents_, _Twilight Zone_, and _Outer Limits_ were also in
a remarkably inventive era. “It’s a Good Life” ran on November
3, 1961, but was based on a 1953 short story of the same name. It’s
illustrative of one aspect of the cultural fallout of World War II,
which included a notable preoccupation with “bad children” and
juvenile delinquency. The films _Youth Runs Wild_ (1944), _Bad Boy_
(1949), _So Young, So Bad_ (1950), _The Wild One_ (1953), _Rebel
Without a Cause_ (1955), _Blackboard Jungle_ (1955), _The Bad Seed_
(1956), _Reform School Girl_ (1957), _High School Confidential_
(1958), _This Rebel Breed_ (1960),  and _The Young Savages_ (1961)
are examples of the trend.

Gothic Spooky Old Houses Meets Modern Horror’s Savage Killers

The tension of reconceived gothic horror and realistic modern horror
combined became explicit in _Psycho _and _Peeping Tom_, both featuring
plaintively shy, lonely, reclusive young men whose psychotic homicidal
urges emerge out of their childhood homes, the gothic “old dark
houses” where both still live.

The gothic Bates residence, reflecting the holdover of repressive,
controlling Victorian values held by the late mother of Norman Bates
(Anthony Perkins), is still the most famous building on the Universal
Studios tour. It looms dark and grim behind the flat, modern
utilitarianism of the one-story Bates Motel where Norman’s
voyeuristic spying on women ignites murderous frenzies from the
“mother side” of his split personality.

[[link removed]]Still
from Psycho. (Paramount Pictures)

_Peeping Tom_ features a different configuration within the home of
photographer/cameraman/lethal voyeur Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm), whose
late father (played by director Michael Powell himself) was a
domineering scientist studying “fear reactions in children” by
training a camera on his own child through a lifetime of sadistic
experiments. Instead of a motel allowing some slight public access,
Mark rents out most of the rooms of his father’s house, keeping only
a small living space for himself that contains his father’s books
— case studies based, in part, on his traumatic childhood. There’s
a sinister darkroom and screening room curtained off behind it devoted
to photography and film. There Mark screens snuff films of his own
creation, the footage he shot of women being murdered with his own
camera fixed upon a tripod with a knife attached to one of its legs.

[[link removed]]Still
from Peeping Tom. (Anglo-Amalgamated Film Distributors)

By 1968, the way realistic modern horror had been paired with and
begun to replace gothic horror was so obvious it went from subtext to
text and becomes the plot of the film _Targets_, Peter Bogdanovich’s
feature film debut produced by Corman. In it, Boris Karloff plays a
character based on himself, an elderly horror movie icon named Byron
Orlok, who knows his brand of gothic horror has become quaint,
outmoded, and ineffective in a world where real-life horrors overwhelm
it.

The groundwork for contemporary subgenres such as serial killer movies
and TV series, slasher horror, and torture porn can all be traced back
to the shifts that occurred in 1960.

Representing contemporary horror is a serial killer named Bobby
Thompson (Tim O’Kelly), a seemingly well-adjusted all-American guy,
who snaps, kills his family, and goes on a deadly, apparently
unmotivated shooting spree. He winds up at the drive-in where the last
Byron Orlok film is playing, shooting through the screen — with its
gothic imagery flickering — at the audience in their cars outside.
The Bobby Thompson character was based on the real-life mass shooter
Charles Whitman, a clean-cut ex-Marine who suddenly murdered his wife
and mother and then shot seventeen strangers on the campus of
University of Texas at Austin, some from the clocktower, which made
him notorious as the “Texas Tower Sniper.”

 
Whitman famously left a note pondering his own psychopathology, which
he professed not to understand. He asked for any money left over from
paying his debts to be donated to a mental health foundation that
might do research on the source of his “unusual and irrational
thoughts,” discovering their cause and treatment, which might
“prevent further tragedies of this type.” His plaintive seeking of
self-understanding is hauntingly similar to that of the lead
characters of both _Psycho_ and _Peeping Tom_. Norman Bates speaks
guardedly but yearningly with Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) about his own
psychologically driven state of entrapment in the scene before he
kills her — and _Peeping Tom_, as Mark Lewis seeks the advice of a
psychiatrist about how “a friend” suffering from psychotic
compulsions might be analyzed and cured.

[[link removed]]Still
from Psycho. (Paramount Pictures)

The groundwork for contemporary subgenres such as serial killer movies
and TV series, slasher horror, and torture porn can all be traced back
to the shifts that occurred in 1960. But beyond tracing the path of
influential films, it’s worth attending to these extraordinarily
propulsive years of creativity in film, like 1960. Taking such a
focused look at one surging genre in one landmark year allows you to
interrogate the cultural tendencies producing both a rapid breakdown
of older forms and systems, and the exhilarating growth of new ones,
all of which are informing a sudden effusion of creativity.

And it makes you wish to be able to interrogate the present year with
anything like the same clarity. In sixty-five more years, if we’re
still here, will critics look back and perceive 2025 as a landmark
year in terms of film and media in any way beyond charting systems in
messy decline? I hope so.

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Contributors

Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of the Filmsuck
podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.

 

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