The Victims... (spoilers)
So all the people that get killed,, the ones who practically run the town, were once murderous asylum inmates that escaped? The Mayor for example.
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Wow, that's messed up.
shareI've heard that in the distant past (in this case, the 1930's), many completely sane people were admitted to sanitariums. Viewers of this film just have to consider the possibility that the mayor, the sheriff, Tess, and Towman were all actually sane. They would have to be to have obtained their city council positions!
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I've heard that in the distant past (in this case, the 1930's), many completely sane people were admitted to sanitariums. Viewers of this film just have to consider the possibility that the mayor, the sheriff, Tess, and Towman were all actually sane. They would have to be to have obtained their city council positions!
But even that I find hard to follow. Those people were out of their murderous minds.
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That one of the factors I liked most about this film. The fact that these people we've been watching, rooting for, scared for, the entire time, are actually insane murderers! It's really the ultimate plot twist, too bad the movie didn't play up that aspect of it more.
They go in Hollister as cute little kids and come out THE STEPFORD TEENS
If you note their character setup scenes each one of them has some kind of bizarre quirk, the most notable being the switchboard lady who has all those bird cages stuffed into her house: It's not just that she is a pet lover but is obsessive about it to the point of absurdity, or insanity. John Carradine's voice and that bell he keeps ringing too is something more than just an old man with a throat problem, it's a manifestation of his psychosis. The cop doesn't seem to be at all with it, and the mayor has this kind of detached demeanor that doesn't seem right either. He also goes straight for that gun rack immediately after the phone call from Wilfred Butler, which is as much as proving his own guilt of the past and knowledge of exactly what was going on in the present.
The film is actually sort of an interesting statement about "insanity" in that when we typically think of people who are crazy we have this picture of someone jabbering away in a straight jacket and unable to comprehend reality. What SNBN is telling is is that crazy people can also appear to be in control of their faculties & functional as everyone else, sort of like Norman Bates. He was a personable young man who ran a nice, clean motel and just happened to have dug up his mother, stuffed her, and hid her down in the fruit cellar after going over the edge. You wouldn't know it unless you were an attractive young woman whom his mother would have been jealous of, or went looking in the house for answers.
Somehow, I cannot accept this explanation. The inmates released were in a really bad shape. It is strange to think that the same people could suddenly run town. Ok, so Tess had an obsession with caged birds. But is that enough to put her in an asylum? No. So, Towman has a throat problem. Does that make him insane? No. He didn't do anything strange although his reactions were slow.
The other poster's answer seems more plausible. They were probably NOT insane but treacherously treated as though they were. The unscrupulous doctors running the mansion were experimenting with these people and with Marianne. That's also probably why Towman lost his voice. This explains why the "insane" were able to control their faculties later on in life.