Original subtitles

Mickey: This week on The Core... What's real?

What's only in your head?

Who's really in charge?

Mary Harron, director of the unique and bold

"American Psycho" is going to teach you

how she manipulates her audience for the maximum effect.

Then we've got a bona fide mentalist

to really scramble my brains.

As Patrick Bateman might say, he's utterly insane.

Today's guest is a master of impending doom.

She keeps her audiences in a constant state of dread.

We know something bad's going to happen,

just like lifting this piano here

is not going to end well for somebody.

You know it, I know it,

but that's the fun of it --

something terrible is coming down the pipe,

or is it?

Can we truly believe what we see on screen?

Let's find out.

Mary Harron is a ruthless manipulator,

and I mean that as a compliment.

Whether it's the social horror of "American Psycho"

or the High school anxieties

and vampire social horror of "The Moth Diaries"...

Sex, blood, and death.

Harron's work feels like real life,

only exaggerated and injected with

surreal unease.

Her characters are lost, unsure of reality

even as they perpetuate unhinged behavior.

Behind the puppet strings of every perfect cut,

angle, voice-over, and possessed ATM, we have Mary Harron.

Marry, thank you so much for being on "The Core."

You have brought a level of prestige to our show,

and I am very thrilled to start talking to you about your work.

Right off the bat, "I Shot Andy Warhol,"

"American Psycho," "The Notorious Bettie Page,"

you seem to have this fascination with outsiders

and people who don't, necessarily, quite fit in

to what society deems normal.

Can you tell me about your fascination

with that subject matter?

A lot of the decisions you make are irrational,

they're just intuitive

and although the subjects of all my films

seem to be very different, they all have that in common.

They're all about outsiders,

partly because maybe I grew up in different countries

with a kind of traveling childhood.

I think that might be at the root of it.

The thing that I adore about your films

is this true insistence on a sense of ambiguity

and a sense of what's possibly real, what's not.

Bateman: There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman,

some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me.

That's a really, kind of, bold choice,

especially with a character like Patrick Bateman

to toy with the audience.

Is it important for you to have the audience

make up their own mind

about what the outcome of everything is?

Yes. And actually Quentin Tarantino

says a great thing about this.

He tells people in question and answer sessions,

"If I tell you what it means,

I take away half of the experience

of the film from you."

And I really believe that, that the audience is contributing

their whole 50 percent, what do you think it means?

That's fine, that's the film. That's your film.

That's your version of Patrick Bateman

or any of my films.

Don't you know who I am?

I'm not Davis, I'm Patrick Bateman.

Definitely in the day of kind of Twitter

and directors engaging with their audiences

and basically explaining their films to them,

do you think that that is detrimental

to the way that we make movies?

You mean by giving them answers?

By giving them answers, sure.

Yes, I think so, but I think that's also

what's in the script, what's in the story.

After I did "American Psycho," I got sent a lot

of serial killer scripts and murderer scripts,

and you would read them, and they're all kind of gripping.

You go, mm, mm, page turning, oh, this is pretty good.

And then you come to the end and it's like,

"Oh, it was his sister-in-law."

"Oh, oh, it was the neighbor."

That's it, it's just a puzzle,

and then once you know the answer to the puzzle,

you're never going to return to it.

It's just a trick, there's nothing more,

but if it's ambiguous,

and it's really about not just the answer,

but about certain emotional issues

or psychological issues

that you'll never quite get to the bottom of,

then you'll return to it.

Right, and I think what's so interesting to me,

especially with a film like "American Psycho,"

every single time I watch it, I get a different sense

of what could possibly be going on.

Was that a sticking point where it's like,

we are not going to know for certain

certain elements of this movie?

The one thing I would say about "American Psycho"

is that there is a point after which

it becomes more surreal, which is after he's at the ATM.

Yes! Yes.

It's kind of a giveaway when the ATM says

"Stick a kitten in me."

It's like, hm, maybe that's not real,

or maybe that's in his head.

But it's important that you not be sure,

because in some ways, it's the mind of a madman.

It has to be the play between what's real and what's not,

because part of what's going on in "American Psycho" is,

and I would hate to lose this in the theory

that it's all in his head or it's all a dream,

is that this society is so uncaring.

He can be committing murders and no one notices

because no one cares to find out.

Did you get my message?

Jesus, yes! That was hilarious.

That was you, wasn't it?Yeah, naturally.

Bateman killing Allen and the escort girls.

That's fabulous.

Every movie is hard, every movie is kind of traumatizing,

but to stick to your guns and have your voice exist

throughout all of these films,

what was the most challenging one to make?

I think the most difficult film was "The Moth Diaries."

We had a couple of scenes that were very challenging.

One was the huge rain of blood.

Man: We will have 45 gallons of blood.

-45 gallons of blood? -Yes.

Which was done in a practical location

with spinning shower heads in this kind

of architecturally valuable building.

We had tanks and we were trying to put plastic everywhere,

and it worked great, except that the shower heads blocked.

You know we needed time to reset.

Sometimes you just don't have enough time to do it

absolutely the way you want to.

I think that's a really stand-out scene,

and although you needed more time or you wanted

to have another day, I think it's very effective.

And on the subject of kind of ambiguity,

there is that razor blade that's left over,

and how important was it for you to kind of really insist

on leaving it up to their own interpretation

of whether that happened, whether not?

With "The Moth Diaries,"

it's a little bit like "American Psycho."

This is, again, a film where,

"Is this all in this girl's head?"

This is a young girl played wonderfully by Sarah Bolger,

who is having suspicions and paranoid fears

that this other girl is a vampire or a succubus,

and is it all in her head?

And suddenly it turns from a normal scene

into this rain of blood,

and then suddenly all the blood vanishes

and there's just a razor blade on the table.

Now if the razor's there, that suggests that Ernessa,

because there was no razor there before,

that Ernessa has left the razor blade there.

And you can turn the story one way or another.

If you don't have the razor blade there,

then it means it's all in her head.

Right. What it suggests

is that Ernessa has appeared,

has created this rain of blood

to make her crazy basically, kind of gaslighting her.

Do you feel the director's job is to gaslight their audience?

Well, yes.

I think that there is a sadistic element

in all directors, especially people who deal with

thriller or horror or suspense,

and part of it is we're trying to make the audience

agitated and suffer and freak them out.

And one way to do this is, "Where am I?

What's real? What's not?

And we have such primal fears about that insecurity.

What's real? What's not?

Where am I?

Nothing that I trust is solid.

I think what you truly are a master of is the ability

to set up this sense of dread

and also focus on something

that is very kind of mundane and normal,

and very human in real life.

What draws you so much to that technique?

I love having a comic element in almost everything,

and a certain element of black comedy, and like, aah-ha!

Like, you're scared but you're laughing, a little bit of that.

Now, I think in the case of "American Psycho,"

people didn't know whether it was okay to laugh.

So it was the mixture of comedy and horror

that was really confusing,

and it took a long time.

People say, no, it's okay,

these sections that are meant to be funny,

and these sections that are meant to be scary.

I like to dissect girls. Did you know I'm utterly insane?

Great tan Marcus, really impressive.

Where do you tan?A salon.

And you're kind of being lurched back and forth

between a kind of safety zone and a danger zone.

And I think that is very effective,

much more effective than just danger

and scares all of the time.

The other thing that I think is great

is the social comedy of banal conversation.

If the conversation and the information being exchanged

in the conversation was too significant,

then you would forget about the bad stuff

and just think about,

oh, this is a dramatic and interesting conversation.

It has to be about something trivial

so the audience can keep the two tracks going in their minds.

I guess you could say I just want to have a meaningful

relationship with someone special.

I want to go back, and I just want to talk about

what got you into film making in the first place.

I have to say growing up, I did not know of any women directors.

I thought that maybe I would write screenplays,

and I had this idea of maybe coming to Hollywood

and writing screenplays.

As a teenager,

I was growing up in London,

and I got really interested

in going to the National Film Theatre

and going to see old movies.

Hitchcock heroines were like a beacon for me,

because they were smart and they were daring,

and they just offered an exciting...

Especially these women in the 1930s and '40s,

they offered a role model to me.

They weren't docile or conformists.

They had character. So I got interested

in old movies at a young age.

So let's check out some of your influences

by watching a couple clips.

Yes, please.

Are you really going away?

Sure, tonight. You can have the place to yourself.

I'll take you there now.

All right, so let's talk about "Frenzy"

and why this is one of those that's

on the list for you.

Well, it's a kind of comedy about Britain,

but it's a truly frightening

and alarming portrait of a serial killer

who seems like just a cheery, nice guy.

There is an extremely graphic rape and murder in it

that is much more graphic than anything else in Hitchcock.

It's very shocking, even now,

and I think it shocked Hitchcock's audience.

What we see here, though, is Hitchcock

as the master of what is not shown.

Sometimes it's worse if you're imagining it,

and what it shows is behind closed doors

this horrible murder is happening

and then the camera's coming down the stairs

into a very innocent world,

past the law office where our hero works,

who's going to get blamed for this murder,

and then we pull out, and suddenly,

we're in a normal street.

And nobody knows what's happening upstairs.

The horrifying scene, the banality of normal life.

We've got two Hitchcock clips back to back.

Why does this scene particularly stand out to you?

It's the use, first, of silence, and then of sound.

What makes this scene so frightening

is that you're in a corn field somewhere,

so what could be frightening is nowhere to hide.

Very often in a Hitchcock film the hero

is left completely betrayed and alone

and no one trusts them.

And you talk about the outsider,

they're left completely exposed.

And also a very extended sequence,

because when somebody's exposed like this

you can really play it out.

It doesn't have to be scare, scare, scare.

-And then... -Aah!

And I think that's the fascinating thing, too,

because you're waiting and you're waiting

and you're waiting and then you do get

this massive explosion of a payoff.

So Rear Window, he does the complete opposite, 180 almost.

Now it's completely contained, almost claustrophobic in a way.

This is one of those movies with the classic set up,

the hero who can't move.Right.

A lot of times in film making, it's really great

to have a necessary limitation so we can only see so far.

He can only see so far through the windows.

So it's kind of like this perfect,

sort of dramatic premise of you only have

so much information, and terrible things

might be happening as soon as someone exits the window,

but you're just sort of waiting. He can't move.

If he calls for help, no one will hear him.

You can only see what the eye can see.

Hitchcock was obsessed with the camera as voyeur,

and he's very open about it.

This like, yes, we are voyeurs,

and the director likes to torture people,

not only to watch, the director likes to torment.

So I think Hitchcock certainly owned the sadistic qualities,

but also the voyeuristic qualities.

The legendary "Peeping Tom."

Let's talk about how powerful this scene is.

Scorsese says this is the best film about cinema ever made.

That it says everything you need to know

about cinema and being a director,

which is kind of critical of directors in some ways,

but the camera as the voyeur, as the eye...

So there we are, camera as hunter.

The audacity of throwing the audience

directly into the point of view of the killer

is something that is so radical.

We haven't even seen his face.

No.

But this film, one of the questions,

why did it kill Michael Powell's career

when "Psycho," which was released

the same year was a big success,

one is that the sort of sexual perversion element

is much more blatant in this,

where as in "Psycho," you could say,

"Well, it was someone who had a terrible mother complex,

or he was an abused child."

I've heard a lot of filmmakers argue

that the biggest mistake of "Psycho"

is that tail end scene where it explains what happened.

Do you agree with that or are you satisfied with that ending?

I think it's kind of ludicrous,

but I have great sympathy for Hitchcock,

and that's why his career wasn't ruined.

And also he learned from Michael Powell,

he didn't let the critics preview it.

So this was previewed by the critics?

And slaughtered.

And eaten alive?

So "The Notorious Bettie Page," I love black and white so much.

What lead you to that?

It made the movie very hard to finance,

shooting in black and what, because people said

if people switch to it on television

they're going to think it's an old movie and not watch.

But I just saw the movie in black and white.

I couldn't explain why, but I was adamant

that it had to be black and white

except for a few scenes in Miami

that would be shot in very beautiful Technicolor.

I realized afterward that if you had shot this in color,

in a sort of modern way,

it would have seen more, just, like porn or something

or titillating, whereas the black and white

gave it a distance and it said if you

shoot black and white film, it will look like the 1950s,

because the film stock hasn't changed.

-Right. -One of the things

that we were riffing on was that in some of these

photo clubs, sometimes they wouldn't even

have film in their cameras,

because they were so excited and it was so amazing

to see a girl in her underwear in the 1950s.

Right. You know, people would travel

out to the suburbs just to look,

not even get the pictures.

Bateman: You like Huey Lewis and the News?

Tell me everything about how this thing was made.

Well, my brilliant DP wanted to shoot it in this very moody,

beautifully lit Polish film school way,

and I had to put my foot down and say no,

I want it to be as brightly lit as a bathroom.

Yeah.

I want all the lights on.

When we were doing rehearsals, or before we rehearsed it,

Christian said to me, I think I'm going to moonwalk.

And when he did it in rehearsal,

I literally fell off of my chair.

I thought it was so funny.

I love how the furniture's covered.

I do love what the art department did.

What they got was Patrick's

sort of obsessive compulsive neatness,

which is a sort of hilarious aspect of him,

but then it's so messy and gory, and he's so out of control.

We didn't have a lot of time to shoot,

and I remember this wonderful moment

that the blood had hit one side of his face

so that when he sits down, he looks almost clean,

almost like normal.

Mickey: Some critics, wrongly, I feel, called it misogynistic

which I think is very strange considering it was adapted

by a woman, directed by a woman,

and I just wanted to ask your thoughts on that.

A lot of what was great in "American Psycho"

was that it's an exploration of misogyny,

and very critical of this macho male culture.

And we saw it very much as a satire

on this ridiculous competitiveness

and posturing of these Wall Street guys.

So as a woman, as an audience member,

I want to know the truth

about the dark recesses of men's minds.

Men should learn the truth about the dark recesses

of women's minds.

This is art. It's not real life.

We're allowed to play and explore ideas.

Is it very important for you

to just tell interesting stories about interesting characters,

and let the audience choose whether they like

the protagonist or not?

Yes. When Ed Pressman, the producer and I,

were pitching "American Psycho," everybody brought this up,

"How can you make a film about such a terrible person?"

And someone said, "Are people going to leave the theater

feeling the world is a better place

for having seen that movie?"

And it's like, no.

I didn't want redemption,

because that screws up a lot of movies,

having to put in a redemptive moment when it's not earned.

If someone has earned redemption, great,

but if you're Patrick Bateman and you're a serial killer,

there is no good end.

He's not going to get better.

It's a monster movie in a way.

It's about a deformed human being in a world

that should have found him out, but doesn't care to.

So what do you do?

Well, murders and executions mostly.

Well, most guys I know who work in mergers

and acquisitions really don't like it.

How can you make anything so full of terror?

Well, it's all about controlling the point of view.

So here we are.

Here we are.

So we're shooting a dinner scene right now

with three different cameras,

from your perspective,

assuming you are the protagonist of this episode,

do you think that the way that you select camera angles

is priority to convey the protagonist,

or do you think it has more to do with editing

and where you hold and where you pause?

Well first it starts with a script,

like what is the script saying about

who the protagonist is?

But then I mean, who's holding the camera,

and who's looking at who?

So am I a potential victim?

In which case, you can move the camera

so that suddenly you're very big in the frame

and I'm kind of small and cowering here.

And then when you do the flip and reverse

and find out that I'm the victim...

It could be your point of view of me looking at you,

and I might say something to you like, "You nervous?"

Why, do I look nervous?

No, no, I just wondered.

You seem nervous.

It's funny.

What are you nervous about?

And it could be asked very innocently,

but once you bring in doubt,

like, why are you nervous,

then suddenly you've changed

the power dynamic.

Is anyone in danger in this scene?

I'm not sure.

Good steak.

And that's the moment when I find out these are poisoned.

Yes.

One thing that's interesting

is if you compare shooting normal,

sort of presentational, which is dead on, medium level,

and then do something that Hitchcock would do,

or certainly Orson Welles always did and just lower the camera.

Things often seem more interesting

in a lower angle anyway, just as a way of shooting them,

but suddenly looking up at someone,

if you want to make them seem intimidating

or in some way threatening, it's a perfect way to do it.

You can also put the camera outside of the window,

and that creates this kind of feeling of surveillance,

which automatically produces a certain anxiety in the audience.

Who's watching them?

Why are they standing outside the window?

That feeling of someone spying on them,

physically, the camera is like somebody watching,

but standing apart and just watching the two people,

and you don't know who it is.

Or you can try a tracking shot,

and the great thing about that

is the camera is traveling

which creates a sort of unease

and a gradual build up of tension

because it's moving towards someone,

but you don't know why.

The cheapest way to create tension

is not through special effects or fancy equipment.

it's just by using different camera angles,

sizes, close or far, low or high.

In the arsenal, you can do it with an iPhone.

Absolutely. Mary, thank you so much for being here today

and sharing with me all your amazing knowledge.

Unfortunately all good things must come to an end, so...

Fuck!

While Mary uses film technique and the magic of cinema

to control the emotions and reactions of her audience,

my next guest uses mathematics and psychology to control his.

He's also strikingly handsome.

Thank you.

Did you make me say that?

Yes!

World renowned mentalist Kevin Viner.

Sir, how are you?

Doing really well. How are you?

Good. Good. Let's get right to it.

What the hell is a mentalist?

What is a mentalist?

I like your shoes by the way.

I have the same pair at home.

Really? Well, you've got good taste,

because I like your shoes and your socks.

Thank you very much.

Are you making me compliment you right now?

Well what's interesting, and this will tie

into what a mentalist does.

A magician detracts people with sleight of hand, right?

Sure.

A mentalist,

we use some facets of magic,

but we're really more concerned with how people think.

So for instance, issuing a compliment to somebody,

it's about creating a familiarity there.

So when I tell you I have the same shoes,

it makes you feel like, okay, this guy has taste,

and then you compliment me back, you reciprocate that.

We start creating a rapport and a bond,

and that's a lot of what a mentalist's job is to do.

I have to make you comfortable with me,

or I won't be able to get in there

and manipulate what you're thinking.

It sounds almost like what it takes to direct a movie,

like making the actors very comfortable

and making the crew do what you say.

There are a lot of parallels.

A director, they want people

to follow their instructions, but they also want trust, right?

And so another thing you might be noticing I'm doing

is if you look at our body language right now,

I'm mirroring your body language exactly,

and you may not have even noticed that.

I did not.

Most people don't realize that,

they don't see small nuances,

but it's kind of like a game of poker.

I noticed that you brought a whole lot of things.

Walk me through it. What are we doing today?

Let's try something.

You okay with trying a little experiment?

Well, you've already made me compliment your style

and your appearance, so yes, I am.

Let's look back and think about somebody from the past,

and this may have been somebody you

already have locked in your mind,

somebody who passed away too soon,

and you can get a name in your mind, correct?

Yes.

And you didn't share this with anybody.

Grab any one of those colored pencils

if you don't mind.

Jot down the initials of that person,

show it to the camera, don't let me see it.

I'll look away.

And when you're done, fold that slip

a few times so you lock

those initials inside, okay, Mickey?

Cool, yes, for sure.

Good, and then go ahead and crumple it up

pretty small for me.All right.

Give me your hand.

I want you to just stare at it

and focus on that person's initials,

think about that okay?

Ohh.

Do you see the initials? Maybe in the ash somewhere?

No, not really.

Let's try this then.

Just think about their initials.

Okay.

If you look on my arm...

Stop it!

You can actually see there's a "J"

that starts to form and then 'M'.

Do the initials JM mean anything to you?

They do.

They do, now I want you to think about who this person was.

Actually visualize their name,

see it right here in front of you.

You're imagining Jim Morrison right now.

Is that accurate?

Yes. Yes, it is.

Without giving it away, obviously, how?

Well, you may remember I had a chance

to talk with you a little bit backstage before we came here.

You're inside of a club,

and there's really loud music playing

and all of these things are swirling around

and you see some doors in front of you,

and you take those doors and you swing them open.

You walk outside, and it's silent.

I told you to imagine that you were in a music club

and I asked you to imagine the doors opening.

So you put music into your mind,

I tried to assess what kind of music you might like,

what you might be interested in.

Once I have an idea of how you think,

now I'm going to try and implant that suggestion into your mind.

So I mentioned implanting The Doors,

and after you were able to think of a person,

I said go ahead and shut the doors on that person

to lock them into your head,

and that influenced you to go for Jim Morrison.

Jesus Christ. Let's just talk about the psychology

of the human mind, because you kind of brought up suggesting

and leading me along to that kind of answer.

Where does it all start?Everything starts in the brain.

Let's say that I want to plant something

in your mind and make you think that you really care about me.

Okay, I can ask you to do a small favor.

It might be something as simple as I'm carrying something in

and you see a stranger, and you go,

"I'm really sorry, would you mind giving me

a hand bringing this in?"

What scientists have found

is that by asking somebody to do something for you,

it actually endears you to that person more,

and the reason is, that person has to go,

"Why am I doing this for this stranger right now?

Well, it must be because I like this person."

That's the way our brain reasons things.

So let's talk about the process of kind of

like reading people in a way.

Are there common, telltale signs of body language

that people convey that kind of lead you towards something?

It depends what you're looking for.

So for instance, lie detection,

polygraph tests have historically been ways

that people try to detect if you're lying

or telling the truth.

The problem with a polygraph

is that it's also very inaccurate.

Take a serial killer, okay?

A lot of times serial killers

will have issues with polygraph machines,

and the reason is that they don't really

feel a lot inside, right?

They're acting like they feel things,

but a lot of times they're really numb inside.

So when you take somebody like that and put them

under a polygraph,

their behavior doesn't change that much,

and they're not going to get that rapid heartbeat,

because that's all based on emotional responses.

-Right. -So, for me,

if I'm watching somebody on stage,

and I'm asking them questions

and trying to do a lie detection routine,

I'll look for a change in the way that the person

is responding to me.

Do you find that it's different when

it comes to crowds as opposed to individual people?

Is there ways to...?

Whether you're performing for 7 people

or 777 people,

it doesn't matter how many people you're working for,

the rules of engagement kind of stay the same.

It's about creating a personal connection with people.

It's not always about how do you fool them the best,

it's how do you entertain them the best.

Let me actually ask you something.

If I had you

commit to a number from, like,

one to a thousand, you have one in your mind, right?

I do, yes.

Okay, and what I want you to do,

just let me know what's that number

you're thinking about right now?

13. 13.

And let's try this, did you have maybe another number

in your mind, a number that you had set

on that you had kind of committed to,

that you thought about?

Yes, yeah.

What was that number that you were also thinking about?

That number was 7.

Really?

Yes, I swear to God.

Okay, that's interesting,

because remember a little while back,

about audiences and I said it doesn't matter if there are

7 people in a room or 777 people in a room, right?

So that's a way to prime people,

and a way to get people to think in the direction

that you want them to go.

Sure. Do you mind if we do another experiment?

Please, no absolutely.

So I want you to think about a word

that I wouldn't have been able to guess,

something that you don't think I could guide you to say.

Got it.

Go for it, just call out a word.

I was actually thinking of the word dictionary.

Dictionary.

We'll try one last thing.

I'm going to have you imagine that you are

surrounded by a color.

Now here's what's interesting about this,

there are 31,178

different colors out there.

What's the color that you were picturing yourself

being surrounded by?

Blue. Blue.

So a few things that I want to point out to you

that you may not have realized, okay?

Since I've been here,

I've been trying to avoid the color blue with you.

So if you look around, from the shirt to the vest, to the shoes,

to the markers, if you look around here,

you'll notice the only real color missing is blue.

We have red, we have a silver balloon.

So the interesting thing about that number, 31,178,

if you look at it upside down it actually is blue.

You can see that, blue.

Now, inside of that balloon,

you'll see that there is a little slip of paper.

Do you see that there? Yeah.

There is a small pair of scissors in there.

If you could grab those scissors for me.

Take the balloon, put it down onto the table and go ahead

and just puncture that.

Okay, there is a slip of paper.

Okay, you see that?

Yeah.

-I'm freaked out. -I am too.

Mickey, check this out.

You committed to a few pieces of information.

You named a couple of numbers,

you'll notice also that that's a blue slip

that had a blue paper clip around it.

I knew that you were going to go for blue,

but not only did I know you would go for blue,

I also wrote down a couple of different things

that I thought you would do.

Mickey will say the numbers 13 and 7,

and say dictionary.

I don't like this one bit, and I'm terrified now.

How the fuck do you do that?

You know what? Some secrets are better kept unsaid.

My mind's been successfully blown.

I've learned a lot.Thank you.

Thank you so much for being here.

My honor.

Sam, old buddy, old pal,

I have been waiting all day to say this

and have it actually make sense.

I have to return some video tapes.

"American Psycho," very good.

Thanks, I've been practicing.

I've got some stuff for you today.

Lay it on me.

Hitchcock. Love him.

Big influence on everyone.Yes.

Big influence on Mary Harron, who you spoke to today.Oh, yes.

Let's talk about some of the best films

directly influenced by Hitchcock on Shudder.

My favorite subject.

All right, we've got an Italian double feature,

and some new-school suspense favorites.

First up, "The Evil Eye," Mario Bava.

The godfather of Italian horror,

and really the progenitor of the Giallo, "Evil Eye"

is the first Giallo.

It's alternate title is "The Girl Who Knew Too Much,"

a direct rift on Hitchcock,

and it's just this fun, black and white,

elegant thriller about a girl who loves crime books,

she loves pulp, and she gets caught up

in a murder mystery herself.

There are great foot chases, there are great twists,

there is everything you want in that sort of world

as the Italian style starts to establish itself.

Next up, "Cat o' Nine Tails."

Headquarters is here. The DA's here, too.

How much they get away with?

Nothing, as far as they can tell.

The best.

The best.

So this is similar because

we've got someone caught up

in something bigger than themselves,

one of those great Hitchcock motifs.

This is a bit more of a conspiracy thriller,

but it's fun and it teases you out the whole way,

and again, you're starting to see the flair

and the flourish of someone like Argento

inject into what is otherwise a classical thriller.

It's awesome.

I can't wait.Now we're going to go to Spain

for one of my favorite movies of the last couple of years,

"Shrew's Nest."

This is a great thriller, actually produced

by Alex De La Iglesia of "Day of the Beast"

and "Witching and Bitching" fame.

Okay. So this is his really stunning period thriller

about a woman who is agoraphobic and overbearing.

She takes care of her younger sister,

and their neighbor falls down the stairs.

She takes him inside, and there is a little shades of "Misery,"

she brings him in, she's half-taking care of him,

half-keeping him hostage.

So what you have is this tense,

amazing movie where three people are stuck in this apartment

and they all have to maneuver around each other.

There is "Rope" in there, there is "Rear Window" in there,

and it spills over into such a bloody,

Grand Guignol, operatic piece of work.

I love it so much, I think you will, too.

Well, I'm excited.

Clem: Keep looking.

That's the entry wound

of a Rochester .47 automatic

with scope laser aim and silencer.

Now, "Grand Piano."

Great movie.

Isn't it? It's amazing.

And it's so much fun.

It's so cheeky, it's beautiful.

Elijah Wood plays a concert pianist,

he has to play every note correctly, or he will die.

Can't get more Hitchcockian than that.

I know, it rules.

And again, someone's caught up in something bigger,

there is something else at play here.

And the movie just plays.

It has so much fun with itself,

with its actors -- You've got Alex Winter from "Bill & Ted"

and "The Lost Boys."Which is so random, but awesome.

I think you're going to have so much fun with this,

even though you've seen it, watch it again.

How could you not have fun with this?

Hey, I'm going to reorganize the identity crisis section.

You want to hang out?

I have to go return some video tapes.

Where?

That's it for "The Core."

I want to thank Mary Harron for showing us

the cinematic tools of manipulation,

and Kevin Viner for scrambling my --

Scrambling my...

Hm, I seem to have forgotten something.

Something that could have dire consequences for me

or those around me.

-Hey, good job Mickey. -Hey, thanks!

-Let me get your mic. -Yeah, sure, no problem.

-Just over here. -Right there.

Cool. Great show today.

Thank you so much.

See you tomorrow.

Hey, man, have you seen my car...keys?