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Robert Bloch and Milton Subotsky may have helped to codify the Giallo in this murder thriller but the results are not up to even the shaky standards of Amicus. That said, horror fans are going to flock to get their hands on a big color & ‘scope release that’s gone missing for decades. It’s a significant ‘save’ by Kino Lorber.

The Psychopath

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1966 / Color / 2:35 widescreen Techniscope / 82 min. / Street Date April 10, 2018 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Patrick Wymark, Margaret Johnston, John Standing, Alexander Knox, Judy Huxtable, Don Borisenko, Thorley Walters, Robert Crewdson, Harold Lang, Gina Gianelli, Greta Farrer, John Harvey.

Cinematography: John Wilcox

Film Editor: Oswald Hafenrichter

Art Direction: Bill Constable

Original Music: Elisabeth Lutyens

Written by Robert Bloch

Produced by Max Rosenberg, Milton Subotsky

Directed by Freddie Francis

A look at the cast and crew of The Psychopath raises one’s hopes. Good actors Patrick...

According to the story he himself tells in the documentary series Hollywood, UK, Canadian filmmaker Sidney J. Furie came to England to take part in the British new wave, whose films he admired. First, he had to pay his dues with nonsense like Dr. Blood's Coffin, The Snake Woman and The Young Ones (starring pop singer Cliff Richard), but eventually, with The Leather Boys in 1964, he was able to make the kind of dynamic working-class social realism he'd been admiring from afar (Rita Tushingham's presence in the cast provides the stamp of authenticity).But During One Night (1961) shows Furie working on a small-scale independent film that has more in common with his mid-sixties work than it does with the cheesy exploitation movies he marked time on, and its date shows how quick off the mark Furie must have been: Look Back in Anger only hit cinemas in 1959, and by '61 Furie was in Britain,...

With the advent and huge success of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), studios were quick to hop aboard the killer train. Out were the outsized monsters of the ’50s, in were mama’s boys and socially maligned women dealing with sins of the past. Dementia 13 (’63) and No Way to Treat a Lady (’67) are just a sample of the ’60s horror films that focused on smaller scale, human dilemmas, regardless of how twisted they may be. One film that seems to have been misplaced in the schizoid shuffle is Freddie Francis’ The Psychopath (1966), a lean little thriller that acts as a gateway for one of the most revered European horror sub-genres: the giallo.

Of course, Psycho plays a major part in this association; the Italian-originated giallo wallowing in mysteries of the mind shot through with a razor-sharp emphasis on the visceral, stemming from a psychological need, a desire, to fix wrongs,...