Movie Review - Diary Of A Madman

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1963 Spoiler alerts Though loosely based on The Horla by Guy de Maupassant (also reviewed by me here on Mylot) this under-rated Vincent Price horror movie has many differences to its source material. For one thing, its diarist is named, Simon Cordier, and dead as the story begins, telling his sad fate in flashback as his diary is read out in keeping with his last will & testament. Cordier is a highly respected French latter 18th century magistrate and in his spare time, a sculptor. He is invited to talk to a condemned murderer a few days before the man goes to the guillotine. The killer claims his crimes were forced on him by a possessing entity he calls The Horla, and he attacks Cordier who kills him in self defence as the Horla takes possession of him instead. The creature messes with Cordier’s mind, moving a portrait of his dead wife (a suicide) and causing general chaos. It talks to him (voiced powerfully by an unseen actor, Joseph Rushkin). Cordier flees to Paris, and for a while the monster leaves him alone. Cordier meets a glamorous artist’s model, Odette (Nancy Kovack) and invites her to pose for him. He falls in love with her though she is married, but she is a gold-digger and prepared to dump her husband for him, as the Horla reappears and begins to warn him. The creature eventually drives him to kill her, (hiding her head in his modelling clay). As his murderous parasitic host seeks more blood, Cordier tries to trap it in his house and set fire to it but he is unable to escape the flames himself and perishes alongside the demon. Quite a variation on the original story, in which no one is murdered, and Cordier’s demon is fearful of church symbols such as the cross while Maupassant indicates that the Horla is extra-terrestrial. The film is flawed in that we see scenes the diarist was not present to witness, and as in the story it is never explained why the demon never stops him writing the diary anyway. What lifts the film above average is that it is largely psychological; the gore is kept low key in favour of Price’s superbly controlled struggle for his sanity and the chilling voice of the unseen demon. We catch a glimpse of it in the fire as it perishes but even then it is but a blaze of light). The colouring of the film is beautiful too; Novack looks like the Impressionist period model she plays in the way she is lit throughout. She looks like she has stepped out of a Renoir canvas. Of the movies I saw at the recent Festival Of Fantastic Films, this was undoubtedly the highlight, and came right after a talk by Victoria Price, the actor’s wonderful daughter. Arthur Chappell