Roger Corman Blogathon: The Intruder - 1962

What is it that makes a film truly horrifying?

Is it the cheap shocks, over dramatic sound effects and over abundance of gore that plague the majority of recent horror films? I don't think so; I believe it is either achieved through complete mastery of the films atmosphere, thus making it perfectly unsettling as is the case with the masterful The Shining.

Or is it achieved when a film takes a look at the ugly side of human nature, the darker side, but the side we all know exists.

The Intruder is a film that shows the darker side of human nature, the mob mentality, the ignorance fuelled prejudice, the fear which eventually leads to violence.

There are few characters that can be called "good", some are just less racist than others, and the film does not have a particularly "happy" conclusion, but more on that later.

It is a slightly depressing film, but a powerful one that is brutally honest in it's depiction of the prevalent attitudes towards racial integration in the South at the time.

La Jetée (The Jetty) - 1962

La Jetée is a French short directed by Chris Marker in 1962, Marker was a prominent member of the Rive Gauche (Left Bank) movement which itself was part of the much more influential French New Wave.

I am not sure whether to call this work a "film" or not, as it is instead composed entirely of still photos, except for one scene for which Marker had managed to rent a camera for an afternoon.
So many things are peculiar about this work. The fact that there is no dialogue, the story is told entirely through voice-over, the aforementioned fact that it is almost entirely composed of stills and of course the strange yet compelling Science Fiction story.