People are voting emotionally.

Good start, but then it gets ruined

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Despite some silly religious symbolism, it was fun, as usual, to watch the painful expressions of the great Vincent Price. The poor guy sentences this guy to death. After he is dead, whatever was inside him that made him evil, goes into Price's body. From then on, this thing called the Horla becomes the driving force in Price's life. When he gets this cheesy green glow in his eyes, he becomes murderous. Price tries to find peace in his avocation, sculpture, but the cute little model he hires becomes his obsession. She is already married but Vincent has designs on her. But worse than the nasty mother of the girl is his Horla friend who makes the relationship impossible. Besides, she was indeed a fortune hunter. This is one of those fun 1960's horror films that I enjoyed when I was a kid. One shouldn't take it too seriously or analyze it too much. Just enjoy the story.

This is one of those movies where the story is the dominate driving force as it is fresh and fascinating at the same time. We are introduced to a new type of horror that quite frankly I am surprised didn't get more fame and exposure over the years since this movie was made. This entity is a force to be reckoned with and apparently very powerful but like anything that has life also has weakness. The movie at some point poses this to the viewer. How do you stop this thing? We are entertained for two hours with the answer and it doesn't disappoint. Vincent Price allows us to accept more of the concept because of his casting and of course his fine acting skills. I read the short story and it too has this way of pulling you into a premise that is strangely familiar i.e. a haunting feeling of not being alone when you are. That concept alone causes goosebumps and over the shoulder activity. Welcome to the world of the Horla when this happens. The book builds up to it as does the movie. What we all want to know after watching this is where does the Horla come from, what does it want, and can we ever be rid of it? Furthermore, following the premise of the Horla made me do it, we remain pawns of desperation when trying to explain how we were involved in something horrific and against our natures but the evidence clearly shows that it was us much to the Horlas delight. That is shown quite well in this movie's first few minutes when only through a dying mans confession are we told about his innocence and horror at the same time. The chills come in when its your turn to try to explain the same thing thus the Diary is used to communicate what took place. But then, is it the ravings of a madman or a prediction and testimony of what took place and what is to come. The answer awaits! Have a tasty drink and pay attention with no cell phones or interruptions. BTW...if you sense something in the room that isn't there while you are watching, perhaps you are not alone? Enjoy

Interestingly enough this is not based on Nikolai Gogol's short story Diary Of A Madman but on a short story by Guy de Maupassant called The Horla. The film is very different from the short story and takes a totally different direction with the plot while expanding on some things already established in the short story. The acting is decent(and of course there is Vincent Price who is awesome as always). The cinematography is pretty bland and there are some nice yet sparingly used special effects. The Horla is one of my favorite short stories so I just had to look this up but instead of being a study of a very deluded mind this adaptation was a cheesy 60s supernatural horror film with Vincent Price.Not terribly and not even that bad but it just could and should have been a lot better.

Simon Cordier (Vincent Price) is a well-respected magistrate who visits a condemned prisoner, Louis Girot (Harvey Stephens), just before the man's execution... and finds him to be possessed by a demon! The film's plot goes in directions one might not expect. The inmate has a very small role, and Price's character is shown to be dead at the beginning -- how far in the future is this? He spends much the time courting a woman and sculpting her bust. None of this is really in any way related to the demon-possessed prisoner.When the demon is free of a body, it may be less murderous, but no less influential, and I find that a nice twist. The demon is a "horla", whatever that is. The original story has been cited as an inspiration for Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu", which also features an extraterrestrial being who influences minds and who is destined to conquer humanity. If this film is important to horror history in any way, it may be seen as an offshoot of Lovecraft.Mike Mayo calls the film "one of Vincent Price's best but least remembered efforts." While I consider Price's greatest but least known role to be "The Mad Magician", Mayo's point is still true. Going into this one with no expectations (having not heard of it), I was fairly impressed. It ranks much higher on my list than others would rank it on theirs, I think.On Scream Factory's excellent disc (part of the Vincent Price Collection, Volume 3) we have another Steve Haberman audio commentary. We must talk about Haberman's style. Rather than discuss anything happening on screen, Haberman goes on a long, passionless tangent about the story's author... but he does make up for this a bit by offering an amusing abbreviated history of Vincent Price's cinematic wives. Haberman is a person who is very smart, does very good research, but has not mastered the way to present it -- he essentially writes bios of people in the film's he is reviewing and reads their biographies. This is very dry and often does not offer much more than Wikipedia could, unfortunately.