Strait-Jacket

I'm not really a big fan of horror movies, but lately I've become a fan of horror film blogger Final Girl, who does this thing called Final Girl Film Club, which I thought was a cool idea, so much so that I decided to participate, which led to watching the 1964 movie Strait-Jacket, something I never would have done on my own, and writing about in this post.

Strait-Jacket was directed by William Castle and stars Joan Crawford as Lucy, a middle-aged woman who reunites with her daughter Carol after twenty years apart. Why the estrangement? Well, you see, once upon a time, Lucy came home and found her husband in bed with another woman. And cut off both their heads with an axe. And did I mention kindergartener Carol witnessed the whole thing?

So Lucy has spent two decades in an insane asylum, but having apparently been released with a clean bill of health, she rejoins Carol and tries to acclimate to the outside world. Things seem to be going pretty well -- Carol being awfully forgiving of the whole father-murdering thing -- until people start getting decapitated again.

As I watched this movie, I was oddly reminded of Halloween. Think about it: a child witnesses a family member having sex; there's a murder soon afterward; someone goes away to a loony bin but returns years later to relive parts of the fateful night over and over. There's even a psychiatrist who comes looking for the former patient. But this isn't a slasher film. In the end, Strait-Jacket has far more in common with another horror classic: Psycho.

Unsurprisingly, Strait-Jacket was scripted by Robert Bloch, author of the novel on which Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is based. He took split-personality killer Norman Bates, gave him a sex change, kept the mother alive and relocated the action from the motel to a farm and a nearby town. The end result is a film with less suspense (we get way more clues about Carol than we do about Norman) and thus a less dramatic reveal (including a shot that virtually reproduces Norman-as-Mother rushing at Lila with weapon upraised).

In Psycho, it's all explained in the denouement, and the viewer looks back over the events of the film and goes, "Oh, okay, now I get it." In Strait-Jacket, though, I felt the explanation took away from the effect of the preceding however many minutes. The final sequence seems to say that Lucy is in fact 100% cured, that by doing a little art therapy and then sitting around in a padded cell or whatever for 20 years, she completely got over what happened that night. The hallucinations she experienced, the sights and sounds that seemed to haunt her, turn out to be tricks played by Carol to make Lucy think she was still bonkers, to make her act strangely so that others would be more likely to place blame on her.

I can't help thinking that no matter how great a doctor that Anderson guy was, nobody flips their lid to that extreme without some lasting effects. We're supposed to believe Lucy isn't at all haunted by guilt or remorse? Or that after living in seclusion for 20 years, she wouldn't have real trouble fitting back into society? Why does it all have to have been the product of Carol's machinations?

In the same vein, Lucy's final summation of Carol's motives -- she framed her mother for murder in order to get her locked up again -- doesn't quite make sense. It doesn't seem like it was cold logic that drove Carol's actions so much as serious psychiatric problems. It's not a clear case of split personality like Norman Bates's, but Carol definitely has identity issues, having taken on the characteristics of Lucy-the-killer. And let's not forget that Carol witnessed not only a grisly homicide but also her father having sex. No wonder she's cuckoo!

Music and sound were used to good effect in the film, the score veering from pastoral to tense and back again to set the unsettled mood. The loud, irritating noise of the windmill (under which the first of the post-asylum axings takes place) reminds us that everything's cyclical -- history repeats itself. Carol became like Lucy and is headed straight for an institution. And Lucy, for all that she's supposedly healthy now, tells her brother in the final scene that she's going back too, to help her. No matter where you go, you end up right back where you started.

That theme, along with the two female leads, sets Strait-Jacket apart from its more successful predecessor. But in the end, I can't see this as an improvement on the original. It's kind of like a child who can't ever get out from under her parents's shadow and live her own life.

See what I did there?

[ETA: Final Girl's review is here.]