Psychos: Eighty Years of Mad Movies, Maniacs, and Murderous Deeds

John McCarty. St. Martin's Press, $12.95 (211pp) ISBN 978-0-312-65341-5

This is a comprehensive study of what McCarty terms the ""psychofilm'' and its various subgenres: child psychos (for example, The Bad Seed, female psychos (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, real-life psychos (In Cold Blood and exploitation psychos (Halloween. Other sections examine Jekyll and Hyde, Jack the Ripper, master fiends (Dr. Mabuse, assassins (The Manchurian Candidate and Hitchcock classics. Because equal coverage is devoted to little known, forgotten or ignored films, such as Hugo Haas's Lizzie (1957) and Noel Black's Pretty Poison (1968), the book is of more than routine interest. It includes some 400 titles in the concluding ``Psychofilmography.'' (April)

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