Psychomania

Year releasted: 1971

by Nathan Rabin
February 13th, 2002

The social turmoil of the late '60s and early '70s was largely defined by the widening schisms between young and old, between square and hip, and between a brash young counterculture and the establishment it opposed. All those conflicts come into play in 1971's Psychomania, along with a much more fundamental one: the surprisingly fluid divide between the living and the dead. Released just a year before co-star George Sanders committed suicide, Psychomania casts the Academy Award-winner as a servant who specializes in light housecleaning, conjuring up dark forces, and cheating death. Nicky Henson co-stars as the outlaw biker son of Beryl Reid, Sanders' employer and fellow dabbler in the black arts. The leader of a presciently named motorcycle gang called The Living Dead, Henson devotes his life to tormenting squares and creating mischief. But, like many of his generation, Henson also has probing questions and a big dream. The questions, however, revolve around the secrets of the living dead, and the dream is to join their ranks. Eager for answers, Henson receives permission from Reid and Sanders to enter the locked room in which his father died, where he discovers such horrific, inexpensive imagery as a pair of nerdy bifocals, a mirror depicting his birth, and a floating, spectral frog. Subsequently, Henson asks his girlfriend to join him in a romantic double suicide, but once she rejects the invitation, he leads his gang on a high-spirited chase, after which he gingerly kills himself by riding off a bridge shouting, "See you around!" An unconventional funeral follows, highlighted by an interminable folk song documenting Henson's life and death, but soon he comes roaring out of the grave on his trusty motorcycle. Wasting no time in making his posthumous presence felt, he brutally murders a fellow who makes the mistake of calling him a "long-haired git," then begins proselytizing his receptive gang about the wonders of suicide. Soon, the whole gang has embraced Henson's suicide solution, with the exception of his skittish girlfriend. Though Sanders and Reid are initially delighted by Henson's return, as the body count rises, they begin to see a downside to his reign of posthumous terror, and they vow to put an end to it. Sacrificing her own life to save humanity, Reid undergoes a bizarre ritual that turns her, her son, and his gang of post-mortem easy riders first into frogs and then into some sort of shrubbery, a seemingly permanent fate not even Henson can escape.