Les Diaboliques (French: [le djabɔlik], 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. 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, 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, the author of the novel Psycho, stated in an interview that his all-time favorite horror film was Les Diaboliques.
Plot[]
A second-rate boarding school in Saint-Cloud, Hauts-de-Seine, in the Paris metropolitan area, is run by the tyrannical and cruel Michel Delassalle. The school is owned, though, by Delassalle's teacher wife, the frail Christina, an emigrée from Venezuela. Michel also has a relationship with Nicole Horner, another teacher at the school. Rather than antagonism, the two women have a somewhat close relationship, primarily based on their apparent mutual hatred of Michel. He is cruel to the students, beats Nicole, and mocks Christina about her heart condition.
Unable to stand his mistreatment any longer, Nicole devises a plan to get rid of Michel forever. Though hesitant at first, Christina ultimately consents to help Nicole. Using a threatened divorce to lure Michel to Nicole's apartment building in Niort, a town several hundred kilometers away, Christina sedates him. The two women then drown him in a bathtub and, driving back to the school, dump his body in the neglected swimming pool. When his corpse floats to the top, they think it will appear to have been an accident. Almost everything goes according to their plans until the body fails to surface. Michel's corpse is nowhere to be found when the pool is drained. Then, the suit that Michel had been wearing when they drowned him is returned from the dry cleaners. When the proprietor of the dry cleaners also returns a key to a room in nearby hotel that was with the clothes, Christina goes to the room. There the cleaning man tells her that Michel had kept the room for awhile but was rarely if ever seen and stored nothing there.
Nicole sees in the paper that the police have found the corpse. However, when Christina goes to the morgue, she finds it is not actually Michel's body. There, she meets Alfred Fichet, a retired senior policeman now working as a private detective. He becomes involved in the case, much to Nicole's chagrin.
Christina, Nicole and other teachers find a student who claims that Michel has ordered him to rake leaves as punishment for breaking a window. After hearing this, Christina's heart condition grows worse, and her doctors fear she may die soon unless she maintains strict bed rest. When the school photograph is taken, the result seems to show Michel's spectral figure in the window behind the students. Unnerved, Nicole leaves the school; she asks Christina to come too, but she is too ill and afraid.
Christina, overcome by fear, tells Alfred everything. He does not believe her, but he investigates the pool. That night, Christina hears noises and wanders around the school. When she realizes that someone is following her, she runs back to her room. There she finds Michel's corpse submerged in the bathtub, which is full of water. Michel rises from the tub, and Christina has a heart attack and dies. Michel and Nicole have set up Christina from the beginning, with Michel acting as a vengeful ghost to scare Christina to death. However, Alfred hears their celebration and figures out everything, telling them they will get 15 to 20 years, depending on the judge.
The school is closed in the wake of the scandal. As the children and teachers leave, the same boy who had earlier broken a window breaks another. When asked how he got his slingshot back, the boy says that Christina gave it to him.