Le Boucher

Claude Chabrol's Le Boucher is one of the most frightening and humanely tragic thrillers ever made. The story opens in a small French village of Tremolat, Peridogrd, as a strong and sophisticated school mistress from Paris develops a close bond with an unusured small town butcher. Both of these characters obscure great loneliness, and their sexual tension is peculiarly skewed. When they do start to spend time together, their relationship seems uneventful and ordinary, but it sets terrible repressed emotions at work and it is clear by the end of the film that this friendship will set loose violent impulses from the butcher and the school mistress will be forever traumatized.  French director Claude Chabrol was like New Wavers Godard and Truffaut, a movie critic writing for the magazine 'Cahiers du Cinema,' and was one of the voices of the European auteur movement. He has outlasted many of his contemporaries making more than 50 films most of them psychological thrillers, and many looked at as some of the greatest thrillers since the work of Alfred Hitchcock.

There is no great mystery about the identity of the killer; it must be the butcher, because no other plausible suspects are brought onscreen. We know it, the butcher knows it, and at some point, the school mistress, certainly knows it. Chabrol treats his audiences intelligently and doesn't rely on cheap horror gimmicks or unnecessarily plot twists. Chabrol instead brings the audience closer in getting to know a monster, and we end up coming away looking at him less as a monster and more as a sad and tragic victim. Surely the horrors that he had experienced in the Algerian and Indochina war clearly traumatized him, and the school mistress seems slightly fascinated by the mysterious danger that the butcher embodies. Some come away believing that the butcher is driven to kill because the school teacher remains distant and unavailable, and that if she'd only slept with the butcher his savage and animalistic impulses would have been diverted. Le Boucher builds to a highly emotional climax that is at the same time absolutely horrifying and heartbreaking, making Le Boucher one of the most frightening and moving horror films ever made.