Episode 25: Year in Horror: 1960, feat. Patrick Ripoll of Tracks of the Damned (part 1 of 2)

PSYCHOPATHS! PEEPING TOMS! CRUMBLING HOUSES! EYELESS FACES! CITIES OF THE DEAD! LITERAL HELL!

Happy Halloween! It’s time to settle some schoolyard arguments and decide once and for all the most incredible year in horror cinema history. Our world’s greatest scientists, historians, and statisticians have compiled all the pertinent data and come to the following conclusion: 1960 was the best year for horror movies. Gabe and returning guest Patrick Ripoll of Tracks of the Damned parsed 32 of the year’s genre releases and chose six to discuss at length – Georges Franju’s Eyes without a Face, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, Roger Corman’s (Fall of the) House of Usher, Nobuo Nakagawa’s Jigoku, Mario Bava’s Black Sunday, and John Llewellyn Moxey’s City of the Dead. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho also comes up constantly, but not at length, because it’s one of the most popular movies ever made.

This didn’t end up being as long as some of Gabe & Patrick’s other list episodes, but the discussion still went long, so the three-hour episode has been split into two Fun-Sized treats (instead of three or four, so don’t worry).

00:00 – Intro: Why 1960? and a brief history of horror movie booms

17:40 – Eyes without a Face

44:46 – Peeping Tom

1:05:57 – (Fall of the) House of Usher

Here is the complete Letterboxd list that we were originally working from

Check out Patrick's podcast commentary track for The Devil Commands (1941)