How to Make the Perfect Psychological Thriller
Creaky doors and long, tenebrous hallways. Dark, murky pools and baths in the middle of the night. The blurry outlines of a man’s face in the background of a photograph which he absolutely shouldn’t be in. Want to know how to make the perfect psychological thriller? Then look no further than Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (1955).
The plot follows two women, Christina Delassalle (Véra Clouzot) and Nicole Horner (Simone Signoret), the wife and mistress of Michel Delassalle (Paul Meurisse). However, both are exhausted by his temperament, malice, and aggression. After he beats Nicole one night, she convinces Christina to help her murder him. Though Christina fears the sinful implications of their plan, she forgoes her Catholic reservations and begrudgingly agrees – they will kill the brute together.
This film has been described as a psychological horror, a characterisation that I believe no longer fits the work. There is not much about the film that is frightening. But why not? The movie excites your emotions nearly seventy years later. And while it’s true that many older horror films have lost their bite when compared against modern terror, there are plenty of classic horrors which still send chills down a viewer’s spine.
So then why doesn’t Les Diaboliques frighten? In my opinion, it is because Les Diaboliques should never have been marketed as a horror film at all – it functions too well as a thriller to terrify. Having only recently watched it for the first time, I was struck by how unwavering Clouzot’s vision was as a director; you can feel that he knew precisely how the film was going to look.
As a result of Clouzot’s visual prowess, along with the brilliantly written script and characters, each moment in the story drips with tension. Every facet of the movie makes it seem as though it was meticulously constructed from a recipe. But what would those instructions have looked like? Let’s have a look at how Les Diaboliques perfectly follows the steps to craft sensational psychological thrills.
1. Reveal the crime early
In any murder mystery, the audience knows that someone is going to be murdered. But that’s not why we buy our ticket. We go and watch these films because we want to watch a crafty, experienced detective go out and catch the killer. The excitement in these stories comes from the search, the intrigue, the quest to discover the who, the why, and the how.
It is for this reason that Gosford Park (2001) functions less well as a murder mystery than it does as a social commentary; the crime happens about half the way through the story, providing little time for our detective to hunt the killer. Around the same time, François Ozon made a superbly entertaining murder mystery in 8 Women (2002). In stark contrast to Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, the murder in 8 Women happens almost immediately, with the rest of the plot exclusively focused on character’s timelines, motives, and opportunities to strike. Getting the obvious out of the way early allows for a maximisation of genre expectations.
Les Diaboliques does this exceptionally well, though at the other end of the spectrum. The film doesn’t start out as a murder mystery, but as a crime film. Instead of anxiously anticipating our detective to dole out justice, we nervously watch to see if our criminals can escape it. We know who commits the murder: Nicole divulges her plan to Christina very early in the movie. By placing the inception of the murder plot at the beginning of the story, Clouzot amplifies the potential to deliver suspense; we don’t have to hang around for the thrills to get underway.
2. Divulge character psychology through action
In placing the murder plot at the beginning of the story, we have little time to see our protagonists outside of the stressful environment in which they place themselves. As a result, we learn about who they are as characters by the way they deal with pressure.
This is both narratively compelling as well as a necessity for the genre. First and foremost, overwrought, protracted monologues tend to bore audiences when utilised to divulge the secrets of a character’s tortured psyche. Sidney Lumet used to call these sequences “rubber duckies” – it is the moment when the villain, killer, or even peripheral antagonist reveals the reasons behind their enmity. Often, it is because someone stole their rubber ducky as a child, with the pain it caused being sublimated into a cruel campaign against the world entire.
In my opinion, such scenes constitute bad writing. A character is simply revealing their subconscious to the audience. Instead, Clouzot reveals the characters of Christina and Nicole through action: the way in which they go ahead with their crime, coupled with their vastly different attitudes towards the plot, communicate more about their pathologies than any monologue ever could.
But perhaps more than that, conveying their personalities through action like this allows for scenes to become incredibly tense. We don’t know what either of them will do at any moment; we see who they really are as the plot continues. This ensures that neither the narrative nor character development ever feels static. Everything moves at a thrilling pace while still feeling suspenseful.
3. Introduce the detective, then suspicion from all sides
Of course, there’s no good crime film without a good detective. You’ve probably heard the axiom that a hero is only as compelling as their antagonist allows them to be. As previously mentioned, there’s a reversal of roles in the crime film – the wily detective is the chief antagonist. He is not only symbolic of our protagonists’ guilty conscience, but also the agent of their downfall. That is, if they’re not up to the challenge, at least.
Unfortunately, there is often no honour amongst thieves – or murderers. The prisoner’s dilemma becomes an evergreen means of conveying a distrustful group dynamic, mostly because it expertly reveals failings in human nature. When does suspicion prevail over logic? How much can one person trust another when only a crime binds them together?
As the detective encroaches closer and closer upon the truth, the unity of the group begins to break down. Then, to augment the mounting tension, suspicious glares are directed towards our criminals from even the most peripheral of characters. Any gaze becomes accusatory as the burden of their crime becomes increasingly heavy for their nerves to endure.
4. Thrills (obviously)
A few suspicious stares aren’t enough to build lasting tension, though. For that, you need pulse-pounding sequences where the potential for exposure is always within reach. Now, obviously, Hitchcock was the best at doing this. More than his capacity as a director to stretch moments of suspense for as long as is humanly possible, he had a natural ability to detect a story that was rife with tension. He’s famously quoted as having said: “To make a great film you need three things – the script, the script and the script.”
It is probably for this reason that he wanted to adapt the story that would become Les Diaboliques. Fortunately for Clouzot, he narrowly beat the Master of Suspense to it, optioning the source material – which was Boileau-Narcejac’s novel She Who Was No More (1952) – before old Alfie could get his hands on it, reportedly only by a matter of hours.
Needless to say, the story was in safe hands. Many safe hands, in fact. Henri-Georges Clouzot turned the novel into a nerve-wracking script with screenwriters Jérôme Géronimi, René Masson, and Frédéric Grendel, crafting a plot that’s brimming with tension. A heavy basket carrying a corpse almost bursts open at the wrong moment. A drunken soldier almost stumbles across their plot in his inebriated belligerence. And there’s a poisoned bottle on the table instead of Hitchcock’s bomb underneath it.
Thrills don’t necessarily have to be inventive when they’re done as well as this. In a crime story, the majority of tension comes from our protagonist’s narrow evasion of the truth being uncovered. With this in mind, it’s not so often what is at stake (as it is always the risk of being discovered), but more how you convey this struggle. Quentin Tarantino has spoken about how he writes tense sequences as how you would stretch a rubber-band: you slowly and steadily stretch until the band snaps into drama.
5. Connect character psychology and theme
Just now, we looked at suspense and how it’s integral to the formation of a successful thriller. However, so far we’ve neglected the first part of this genre: the psychological aspect. Tying a character’s mental state to the various thrills on display can create an immensely visceral work. Few directors did this better than Roman Polanski, with both Repulsion (1965) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968) being prime examples of how our protagonist’s deteriorating mental states increases moments of tension drastically.
But additionally, developing a theme around your principal character’s psychology creates an invaluable sense of weight to your story. Things feel more grounded as it provides you with the opportunity to comment on things at a larger level. In the aforementioned Gosford Park, Altman comments on the elitism and class system inherent in British society.
Similarly, as Benoit Blanc directs his magnifying glass to specks of dried mud on a carpet, Rian Johnson focuses his magnifying glass on xenophobia and class warfare that has begun to characterise America. Marta Cabrera’s (Ana de Armas) kindness and benevolent pathology act as a foil to the greed and opportunism that exists around her, the Thrombey household serving as a microcosm for the acquisitiveness that defines the American Dream and upward social mobility.
Clouzot both develops Christina’s psychology while also connecting it to the theme of Catholicism and guilt. In Les Diaboliques, Christina’s heart condition is emblematic of a soul burdened by a fervent belief in a punitive deity. Her Catholicism serving as an omnipresent backdrop to the plot, connecting her psychology to the narrative thrills in a seamless, masterful way.
Conclusion: Who’s Watching?
Les Diaboliques is a pure psychological thriller. Of course, I’m sure there are other components that can amplify a good psychological thriller. However, director Henri-Georges Clouzot incorporates these aspects so adeptly that he turns what could have been an ordinary film into an absolute masterclass of tension and suspense. By creating doubt, suspicion, and mystery where there shouldn’t be, we are left questioning: who is it that’s watching them? Is it Michel? Is it God? Well, in a psychological thriller as compelling as this, the audience is certainly watching – right on the edge of their seat.
