When I was in my twenties, I discovered the British film “Peeping Tom” about a serial killer who uses a movie camera to film his murders of young women. I suspect that film, made in 1960, as well as Hitchcock’s “Psycho”, released the same year, were big influences on 1965’s “The Collector.” All three movies investigate the psychology of the wallflower sadist, a term I use to describe a breed of cinematic psychopath not cool and cunning like Hannibal Lector, but neurotic, somewhat effeminate, and the kind of guy you would not notice. Think Woody Allen with a butcher knife.

Terrance Stamp’s Freddie in “The Collector” is so much of a simp he actually collects butterflies—bottling them up, killing them, and pinning them to cork boards. He’s exactly the kind of loser society can safely ignore—until he decides to switch out butterflies for humans. He follows Miranda, played by Samantha Eggar, chloroforms her, and locks her in a farmhouse cellar.

From there, much of the film proceed as you might expect. Samantha attempts several escapes, a nosy neighbor come around, but Freddie manages to keep a hold on his captive. And despite the fact that he has Miranda locked up, he clearly has some genuine affection for her (whether he ever commits a sexual act with her was unclear to me—so much of films of this era were intimated as opposed to presented.) And perhaps she starts to return his feelings in some strange way. (When I saw the film’s tag line after writing this—”almost a love story”—I audibly laughed in the coffee shop I was working in.)

There are some interesting subtexts at play, especially around the issue of class. Miranda is an artist who touts the benefits of high art and culture. Freddie is low class and provincial (though still dapper) and feels self conscious about his condition. At one point, he reads Catcher in the Rye at Miranda’s requests and finds it confusing and lurid. The funny thing is, while appreciating that the book was a marker of sophistication in that era, it has been negatively reappraised in more recent times. Freddie might have been on to something.

I’ll confess, I was veering towards boredom with a lot of the movie. Man kidnaps woman… we’ve seen this stuff before. I also found the chirpy soundtrack at odds with the narrative tension.

But, the movie takes a dark turn towards the end. I don’t want to give anything away, but it’s bleak, with a nihilistic stinger of an epilogue. 

So, I’ll give this one a strong recommendation, but don’t go in expect frame jarring action or blood and guts.