Was it obvious to anybody else? MAJOR SPOILER!!!

I didnt catch that they were the same at that time... This is a pretty cool picture, I knew Warren was a little "off" but i could not put my finger on why, when they revealed the end i could have kicked myself for not seeing the twist earlier... Cool film........

I consider myself pretty astute, but I have to admit that I didn't see it coming. I knew something was "off", even strangely compelling about about Warren, but couldn't place exactly what.

I think the dubbing was a good idea in the fact that it added to the "something is off" vibe. Even if the voice was dubbed in, it was still the actress's actual voice!

I really was shocked by the end reveal, and felt foolish for not having figured it out (I live in NYC, I have drag queen friends!).

I rewound the movie several times to see the similarities between Warren and Emily and thought they were two different people but then realized they were never in the same room together, at least not face to face (they were supposedly in the bedroom together when Warren was in the bed). Even with Jean Arliss wearing a man’s suit and using manly posturing, her femininity still shows. This is what made Warren seem either gay or being played by a woman.

By the way, this was an homage or tribute to Psycho. Hitchcock would have sued the pants off Castle if he thought it was a rip off of his more success film but apparently hit didn’t. Don’t forget, Castle made low budget movie while Hitchcock had a bigger budget with top notch talent. I love Psycho but Homicidal was the scary one.

The "tip offs" for me were:

1) Women part their lips and and stand w/ their mouths slightly open quite frequently. Jean Arliss does this all through the film. It's actually how I can tell most tranvestites/transsexuals from "real" women.(not that I use that skill that much...LOL)

2) Warren was rather...umm.."b*tchy.". And not in the single male child or cranky old guy way,either.

3) His face was a little too smooth to be a guy's.

Beside all of that, this is was a wild romp of a movie and I'd recommend it to people.

Bad films are a crime against humanity.

It's easy to forget that this was radical stuff for people in the early 1960s. They didn't have Maury Povich doing "man or woman" episodes once a week when he was taking a break from the paternity tests. I'm pretty sure a lot of people then didn't even know what a transvestite was. Not to mention, a movie having a twist at the end was still a surprise, rather than a given and a cliche like it is now. So, before we all get to feeling too superior, let's have a little context and perspective. It's not great art to be sure, but it's a spiffy little piece of exploitation filmmaking.


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First time I saw this was when I was about 10 years old and it was playing on late night TV, so, No, I had no idea at the time that they were one and the same person.

The hairs on the back of my neck did go up with just about every scene that Warren was in -- like, there is something not quite right with that guy.

And, this movie scared the bejeezers out of me when I was a kid -- especially the scene after the Fright Break.


As an aside: For those posters ragging on William Castle -- I think you aren't 'getting him'. He was a showman, for sure, and was actually quite satirical. Maybe he is an acquired taste, but I adore his stuff.



"I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than..a rude remark or a vulgar action" Blanche DuBois

I suddenly became pretty sure that Warren and Emily were one and the same during the first scene in the drugstore when the doctor came in and mentioned how much Warren's father had wanted a boy. As he said this, the camera focused on Emily, who said in a meaningful-sounding way that she wished she had known Warren "when he was younger." Plus, I remembered once hearing or reading that "going to Denmark" used to be a euphemism for undergoing sex reassignment surgery, and there was the continued emphasis on how Warren and Emily had met in Denmark.

Then when she let herself into Miriam's flower shop, matched up the bride and groom figurines and smashed them, I became even more suspicious. When she went into Miriam's living room and picked up the framed picture of Warren, her pained reflection floating over Warren's like-featured face sealed it for me.

I still was surprised, though: I had thought Warren was a "woman in a man's body," not a cisgender girl forced by her mother and nanny to live as a boy.

The instant Warren's face appeared on screen and I heard his ridiculously dubbed voice, I knew what was really going on. I predicted everything that would follow, which was all such a shameless rip-off of Psycho it was border-line copy-cat.



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