Twisted Nerve1968

Name: Twisted Nerve
Genre: Psychological, Slasher
Released: 1968-12-20
Rating: 6.9

“Cleaver. Cleaver. Chop. Chop. First the mom and then the pop. Then we'll get the pretty girl. We'll get her right between the curl.”

Directed by Roy Boulting

6.9

Crypt Score

Blended from 2 sources

IMDb 7.0TMDB 6.8

✍ Review

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Year

1968

Runtime

112 min

Box Office

🏆 Won 1 BAFTA Award1 win total

The premise

Martin Durnley is a young man with an infantilizing mother, resentful stepfather and an institutionalized brother with Down's syndrome. To cope, he retreats into an alternate child personality he calls Georgie. After being caught during a theft attempt at a department store, he befriends a female customer who is sympathetic to him, but his friendship soon turns into obsession.

Horror Vault's take

A deeply disturbed young man copes with a suffocating home life by retreating into a childlike alter ego, using it to manoeuvre his way into the world of a kind-hearted woman who showed him a moment of sympathy. What begins as an uneasy friendship steadily curdles into something far more threatening as the mask between his two selves grows dangerously thin. Rooted in the anxieties of late-1960s British society, Twisted Nerve is a slow-burn character study that lingers long after the credits roll — not least thanks to its memorably eerie whistled theme.

Content: Violence, Depictions Of Mental Illness, Controversial Handling Of Disability, Threat And Stalking Behaviour