The Collector is a terrifying film, much more so than the dozens of progeny it’s spawned, either directly or not, in the forty-plus years since the film was released. The story of a man so obsessed with “collecting” that he catches another human being for the purpose of making her fall in love with him is disturbing for all the reasons the modern serial killer films are not. Everything we see in The Collector feels like it could happen and it’s told to the audience almost entirely the way any other movie would be. No jump-cuts, no shaky camera, no throbbing death metal. Nothing to distinguish it stylistically from a typical Maurice Jarre-scored love story. In fact, the same year The Collector was released, 1965, Jarre actually did score David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago, which was chosen by the AFI as the number 7 love story in the history of American movies.

I’m not crazy about Jarre’s work on The Collector, but I do think it adds an eerie quality indicative of the wolf in sheep’s clothing aspect found in Terence Stamp’s Freddie Clegg. A former bank employee who hit some sort of monetary windfall, Clegg buys a large piece of isolated property in the English countryside. He dresses very normal and clean-cut, speaks with emotionless calm, and is a psychopath. His target is Miranda Grey, an art student he’s observed for years without gaining the courage to talk to. Freddie’s solution to this bit of shyness is to kidnap Miranda and throw her in what is essentially a well-stocked dungeon. He thinks she’ll eventually fall in love with him once she gets to know the type of person he truly is. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t work out quite like Freddie had hoped. Women, he finds out, are less submissive than the butterflies he captures in jars. If left in captivity long enough, the same result does occur, but only one of the two species can be pinned and framed.

The film was based on a popular novel by John Fowles published in 1963, two years before the big screen version. The structure of the book was apparently altered for the movie, with Freddie’s bank life reduced to a quick black and white flashback. Instead, we’re introduced to the collector in the film’s opening titles, hunting butterflies before finding a secluded house in Kent. The idea that this man views his hobby as an “entomologist,” as he later describes himself, much the same way he treats the pursuit and capture of his victim is obvious and intentional. Is there a larger point to be made though? Could such “collecting” be metaphorical for the vast need of man to essentially devour as much as he possibly can, be it material objects, sexual conquests, or anything else in his path? Humans are certainly a possessive lot, concerned less with need than want it seems, so such an analogy might fit. Like most of the questions I pose to myself when thinking about particular movies (in a non-pretentious way, of course), I really don’t know the answer, but it’s still fun to consider.

Something else I found interesting in The Collector was how director William Wyler and his screenwriters positioned the film as a demented love story. Stamp and Samantha Eggar as Miranda are the only two actors in the vast majority of the picture, feeding off each other’s conflicting styles. Both are absolutely superb. Eggar was nominated for an Academy Award and truly builds a dynamic performance out of her role, evolving Miranda from a somewhat spoiled, naive girl when she’s captured to a wiser, fully empowered woman by the end. Stamp (who couldn’t manage to surmount a stellar quintet of actors receiving Oscar nods that year - Olivier, Steiger, Werner, Burton and ultimate winner Lee Marvin) is so good the audience can never tell just how demented his character will be. I was even struck by a slight sympathy for Freddie at times. The closest cinematic relative I can think of from roughly this same time period would be Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, made five years earlier, and Stamp makes Carl Boehm’s performance in that film look almost embarrassingly shallow.

The strength of the two central performances in The Collector allows the film to function, like the poster tagline, as “almost a love story.” Freddie and Miranda have the perverse equivalent of a courtship and, then, a domestic life. Miranda’s shocking inability to secure her freedom near the end, when she chooses instead to save Freddie from further injury and potential death, seems to indicate that she has developed some attachment to him (or that she’s unable to kill, depending on individual interpretation I guess, though the two aren’t mutually exclusive). While there’s no love or potential for future friendship, a bond was nevertheless formed between these two. What Freddie’s unable to understand is that even after Miranda gets to know him, she’s never going to feel love for a man who’s trapped her for weeks against her will.

In the realm of films where a psychotic shares a non-romantic bond with a young woman, there’s only one other halfway accomplished denizen that I can think of. That would be The Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme and screenwriter Ted Tally’s take on the novel by Thomas Harris. Though there are many, many differences between the two book-to-film translations, it seems a little obvious that Harris was familiar with The Collector, either in its book or film incarnation. Buffalo Bill in the latter film is also collecting women (Freddie Clegg’s victims seem destined to multiply) in dungeon-type rooms, though for a far more sinister reason. The relationship between Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling is at least reminiscent of some of what we see in The Collector between Freddie and Miranda. Also, coincidence or not, The Silence of the Lambs book cover and film poster both prominently feature a moth, which is quite similar to a butterfly. And I’d wager it’s definitely not a coincidence that Sony slapped a huge butterfly picture on their R1 DVD cover for The Collector instead of using something more restrained like the original poster art.

Thankfully, it’s restraint in Wyler’s film that makes it seem so iconoclastic today. I can’t think of other prominent films of this time that dared go to the places The Collector takes us. Calling it ahead of its time almost seems like a disrespectful understatement. If you removed Jarre’s score, the film could be made today exactly the same and still feel fresh and different. Having said that, I’m pleasantly surprised no one’s remade it yet. If that ever happens, I can only imagine it would be a disaster on all accounts. The reason The Collector works so well is because no one was making these types of movies in the classic Hollywood mold at the time. What may seem tame today for lacking excessive blood and violence plays as a more organically creepy look at the mind of obsession. It’s not nostalgia that makes the film so engrossing when watching it now, it’s the shocking and unexpected removal of the Hollywood safety net for two hours.

(The Sony R1 DVD is overpriced with a mostly sharp, but inconsistent image and disappointingly free of extra features. Contextual material, not necessarily along these lines, but maybe discussion of Fowles and interviews with Stamp and Eggar, doesn’t seem like too much to ask for.)