“I don’t need backs, people.”  Dabney Coleman, TOOTSIE (1982)

Ever since Boris Karloff’s FRANKENSTEIN (1931) monster made his entrance by backing into the frame, fright films have found a myriad of spooky applications for an angle most directors would have left on the cutting room floor.  If the eyes are truly the window to the soul, then what’s the use of the back of someone’s head?  Well, if you make horror movies… plenty.

Certainly, Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960) picked up the gantlet dropped by James Whale a generation earlier by giving moviegoers — almost as a throwaway thrill — the immortal reveal of Norman Bates’ mother preserved like a baked apple head in the fruit cellar of the family home.  It’s a stunning crescendo to an already furious symphony of horrors and yet, for me, the real fright is not what Mrs. Bates ultimately looks like…

… but what you fear she’ll look like before Vera Miles spins her around.  It’s a terrible (terribly wonderful… terribly frabjuous even) moment of apprehension and dread that subsequent filmmakers have been ripping off ever since. 

One-shot feature film director Herk Harvey was probably the first to borrow Hitchcock’s swivel chair gag, in CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962).  Throughout the cult classic, bugged-out heroine Candice Hilligoss confesses her raging existential crisis to a kindly doctor, who often keeps his back to her while he takes notes.  The canny horror fan will recognize this charade as the set-up it is for a classic swivel shock…

 … as the good doctor spins around to reveal himself to be the leader of the dead (director Harvey in a generous cameo), who has been haunting the heroine ever since her involvement in a terrible car crash.  Dan Curtis had his own go at the terror turnabout in BURNT OFFERINGS (1976), with Karen Black unwisely paying her respects to the heretofore unseen attic-dwelling matriarch of a haunted house… with predictably horrific results.  Not so strange, I guess, to see hommage paid to Alfred Hitchcock in Hollywood but it’s weird-as-Hell to see the swivel shock translated into Italian…

 … as in this bit from Bruno Mattei’s HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD (1980).  Not content to merely rip off George Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978) with a plot involving SWAT members battling flesh eating zombies but Mattei stages a squishy setpiece midway through in which a provincial priest (Victor Isreal) standing alone in the empty school room of a village decimated by zombiism is tapped on the shoulder and turns…

… to reveal that he, too, has been infected — but he’s not at all unhappy about it.  Speaking of Italy, Nicolas Roeg used the back of a spectral child in a red raincoat to benight bereaved father Donald Sutherland in the supremely eerie DON’T LOOK NOW (1973)…

… but you have to wait nearly the entire 110 minute running time for the ghastly reveal — and for all that waiting it doesn’t disappoint.  Horror cinema is just loaded with jarring about-faces, too many to mention here, although a few choice examples include…

… terrorized motorist Dennis Weaver wondering which particular good ol’ boy is the driver of the 18-wheeler chasing him all over Hell and gone in Steven Spielberg’s DUEL (1970)…

… priest Max von Sydow’s approach to the cursed home in THE EXORCIST (1973)…

… Alice Krige’s entrance (well, after a fashion) in GHOST STORY (1981) and perhaps the greatest recent rearview frisson…

… the reveal of the recently-MIA Mike in THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999). 

It’s a no brainer as to why these simple scares work such a dark charm on us — it’s textbook fear of the unknown and it rarely fails.  It makes you wonder why filmmakers these days spend so much money on prosthetics and CGI when one of the genre’s greatest assets is the ability to take something simple and see it another way.