Robert Altman's IMAGES

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Certain films not usually categorized as horror might as well be called horror. KISS ME DEADLY, IVAN'S CHILDHOOD, SECONDS, THE SILENCE, THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY, SHAME, PERSONA, THE SERPENT'S EGG, THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN, all create a mood of escalating dread in ways that can rival or even surpass films people think of as horror.

In a similar way, Robert Altman's IMAGES, from 1972, might as well be called a ghost story. Even if the lead character is haunted not by ghosts but by mental illness, the manifestations of her condition appear and vanish like ghosts, lurk about like ghosts, cause eruptions of panic and anxiety that we would expect from ghosts. The result is a film that kept me on edge in ways that HEREDITARY and SINISTER never could.

Altman achieves his effects with simple techniques from horror films of the past, but applied here with a focus and confidence that stand out. Characters transform from one person to another in mid-conversation. The room-within-room complexities of an ordinary cottage in full daylight become frames-within-frames for sudden appearances and disappearances. "Ghosts" can wait quietly in the background in full view, or they can erupt from the foreground without warning or motivation.

In the role of protagonist, Susannah York shrieks in panic when these manifestations begin early in the film, but as the story continues, she develops a sinister tone: knowing, calculating, almost gleeful in her mental collapse. Her performance is aided by one of the few John Williams musical scores that I like: in its abstraction, its emphasis upon detached or unmotivated sounds, it reminds me less of a typical score by Williams than of a beautifully experimental score akin to those created by Jerry Goldsmith in the 1960s and '70s. I wish that John Williams had written more like it.

Compared to Altman's later quasi-horror film, 3 WOMEN, with its wide-open buildings and stark desert spaces, IMAGES remains more focused, more intimate, with a smaller cast, with smaller rooms, and with beautifully-photographed Irish hillscapes that seem at once grandiose yet magically compact, that begin to seem as haunted and sinister as the film's protagonist.

Never as popular as it should have been, IMAGES deserves to be rediscovered.