Les Diaboliques movie storyline. Christina Delasalle (Véra Clouzot) suffers greatly at the hands of her brutish husband Michel (Paul Meurisse). She inherited the boys boarding school they run but it’s clearly Michel who is in charge. With Nicole Horner (Simone Signoret) – one of the teachers and Michel’s former lover – they decide to kill him. They lure him to Nicole’s house where he is drugged and drowned in the bath.
They then dispose of his body in the school murky and algae-filled swimming pool. After several days, his body fails to float up to the surface and when the pool is drained, his body is nowhere to be found. Christina, who has a serious condition, is terrified especially after one of the students says he saw him. By chance, she meets a retired police inspector who decides to look into the case.
Les diaboliques, released as Diabolique in the United States and variously translated as The Devils or The Fiends) is a 1955 French psychological horror thriller film directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, starring Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot, Paul Meurisse and Charles Vanel. It is based on the novel She Who Was No More (Celle qui n’était plus) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.
The story blends elements of thriller and horror, with the plot focusing on a woman and her husband’s mistress who conspire to murder the man; after the crime is committed, however, his body disappears, and a number of strange occurrences ensue. The film was the 10th-highest grossing film of the year in France, with a total of 3,674,380 admissions. The film also received the 1954 Louis Delluc Prize.
Clouzot, right after finishing The Wages of Fear, optioned the screenplay rights, preventing Alfred Hitchcock from making the film. This movie helped inspire Hitchcock’s Psycho. Robert Bloch himself, the author of the novel Psycho, has stated in an interview that his all-time favorite horror film is Les Diaboliques.
The filming began on August 18, 1954 and finished on November 30 the same year. Clouzot asked his assistant Michel Romanoff to find a suitable filming location for the boarding school. The latter discovered a decrepit chateau in L’Etang-la-Ville between Saint-Cloud and the Bois-du-Boulogne. The building and its surroundings matched the director’s vision perfectly since they projected the desired mood of decay and neglect. The adjacent swimming pool was dirty and full of slime. Clouzot spent five weeks shooting at this location.
The screenplay placed Nicole’s house in Niort, but the actual house used for the filming was in Montfort-l’Amaury, just opposite the building that previously appeared in Clouzot’s Le Corbeau. The morgue scenes were shot in the Institut Médico-légal in Paris. The rest was filmed at Saint-Maurice Studios southeast of Paris which took additional nine weeks.
The cinematographer Armand Thirard used two camera crews to speed up the shooting that was falling behind the schedule. Despite his efforts, the filming took twice longer than the projected 48 days. Originally the film was to be called Les Veuves (‘The widows’) but this was deemed unmarketable. Eleven weeks into filming it was changed to Les Démoniaques.
Eventually it was renamed Les Diaboliques but this title was already used for a collection of short stories by the 19th century writer Barbey d’Aurevilly. Clouzot was permitted to use this title but only on the condition if he gave the author a proper mention. He did it by opening the film with a quote from the preface to d’Aurevilly’s work: “A portrait is always moral when it is tragic and shows the horror of the things it represents.”
Les Diaboliques (1955)
Directed by: Henri-Georges Clouzot
Starring: Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot, Paul Meurisse, Charles Vanel, Jean Brochard, Pierre Larquey, Michel Serrault, Thérèse Dorny, Noël Roquevert, Georges Poujouly, Aminda Montserrat, Madeleine Suffel, Jean Témerson, Jacques Hilling
Screenplay by: Henri-Georges Clouzot, Jérôme Géronimi
Production Design by: Louis de Masure, Georges Testard
Cinematography by: Armand Thirard
Film Editing by: Madeleine Gug
Costume Design by: Carven
Art Direction by: Léon Barsacq
Music by: Georges Van Parys
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Cinédis (France), UMPO (US), Gala Film Dists. (UK)
Release Date: January 29, 1955 (France), November 21, 1955 (US)
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