Die! Die! My Darling!

Die! Die! My Darling!, starring a raspy-throated Tallulah Bankhead as a gun-toting religious psychopath, is a movie that most famously inspired a song by horror-punk legends The Misfits, eventually covered by heavy-metal titans Metallica—although the lyrics don't reference the events of the film to any great degree. It's a fairly passable film, but there’s not much there that's memorable.

Tallulah Bankhead comes across like Norma Bates without Norman to pass her insanity on to. Ed Gein, the real-life inspiration for Norman, was driven to depths of insanity by his godforsaken yet entirely God-fearing bitch of a mother—depths few of us can ever contemplate. And maybe, in the grand scheme of things, it was all for the best, eh? I mean, otherwise horror cinema would be a paltry, wanting place without the existence of such films as Deranged (1974), Ed Gein (2000), and, of course, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Psycho (1960), the latter of which—its popularity—was clearly the spur to create the somewhat less-than-exceptional Die! Die!.

Oh, it's not as if the movie isn't likable—it features the aforementioned performance by Bankhead as the hideous Mrs. Trefoile, a harrowing old dowager type living in a great house in England with her servants—one of whom is a much-underused Donald Sutherland playing a mentally handicapped man. The other two servants—Harry (Peter Vaughn, renowned as a character actor who typically portrayed British cops) and his wife Anna (Yootha Joyce, famous for "Man About the House")—are enlisted to aid Bankhead in keeping Patricia (Stefanie Powers), her late son's fiancée (who has come to visit for what she thought was a single night), prisoner.

Trefoile is a terrible old termagant—she virtually starves Patricia, forces her to change her clothing, wipe off her lipstick, and performs other cruelties at gunpoint. The bitch is so incredibly icky and unpleasant, so infuriatingly blinded by her all-consuming religious fervor, that the viewer wants to—slightly quoting Roger Ebert writing about the equally witch-like Joan Crawford, played with questionable accuracy but incredible passion by Faye Dunaway in the cult camp classic Mommie Dearest (1981)—“scrape her off the screen with a spatula.” Bankhead, as the absolutely mind-fucked Mrs. Trefoile, gives audiences somewhat the same reaction—only maybe to a greater degree at times.

But no matter. Mrs. Trefoile has GOD on her side, and wouldn’t you know it, God has seen fit to give her the opportunity to revenge herself on the increasingly rebellious hussy Patricia, who submits to the indignities somewhat passively, even uncomprehendingly at first (what, after all, is one to do except nod off during an hours-long reading from the Book of Deuteronomy?). But she eventually gets enough of her blood up to try and get a message to boyfriend Alan (Maurice Kaufman), who is busy looking for his lost lamb. And this despite the fact that Mrs. Trefoile serves up a sumptuous table with such goodies as vegan meatloaf (which, apparently, is also unsalted). Mrs. Trefoile is, if nothing else, deeply concerned about the nutrition of whoever she takes a fancy to kidnapping and imprisoning against their will.

The plot is bloody good, and thin enough to bleed through with a transparency that makes the twists and turns (there aren't many) rather easy to see coming. Standing in a cemetery, a defiant Patricia informs Trefoile that her son—her precious Stephen, whom she still speaks to as if speaking to a ghost—in actuality did NOT die in an accident but instead committed suicide. This horrifies Trefoile/Bankhead, but it’s compounded when Patricia likewise informs her she actually had no plans of ever marrying Stephen. Trefoile recoils at this and damns Patricia to Hell—but goes there first.

And that last was a spoiler, I know.

You want to find out how it really ends though, you'll have to do more than just listen to the song that, more or less, borrowed the title (or, at least, one of the titles). You'll have to watch the damn movie, darling. Do. Or DIE.

Die Die My Darling

My book: Cult Films and Midnight Movies: From High Art to Low Trash Volume 1

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My book: "Silent Scream! Nosferatu. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, and Edison's Frankenstein--Four Novels."

“Silent Scream” plunges into the nightmares of early horror cinema, where shadows spoke louder than screams and monsters first took shape. Within these pages, you’ll find chilling new adaptations of Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Metropolis — stories that defined horror before Hollywood ever gave us Dracula or Frankenstein. These silent terrors return with all their eerie atmosphere intact: crooked streets, haunted castles, vampiric fiends, and madmen who bend reality itself. For fans of classic horror, this is a resurrection of the genre’s roots — when every flicker of film could conjure a nightmare, and silence itself was screaming.”

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