It was director Henri-Georges Clouzot, [often referred to as the French Hitchcock] who made Les Diaboliques in 1954, a film that, up until the release of Psycho, was considered to be the scariest picture ever made. What he crafted was a masterwork of meticulously claculated suspense and a finely built sense of pervading dread, a film so cold and intense that it is often considered to be as one of the greatest thrillers of all time, far superior to the generic thrillers that are often released nowadays. Ever captivating and intoxicatingly eerie in every sense, Les Diaboliques set a new standard for the horror genre - a standard that, even to this day, has seldom been reached - let alone surpassed. Les Diaboliques is a film so Hitchcokian that one often wonders why it was not directed by The Master of Suspense himself. Indeed, though he's always been heralded as one of the best directors of all time, he once admitted that, just as he had been a major influence on Clouzot, Clouzot had also been a major influence on him.