Seconds

John Frankenheimer’s Seconds could almost serve as an emotional template for Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, made two years later in 1968, though Frankenheimer is working in black and white and brings much more of the live TV aesthetic to bear on his cool, highly influential horror movie – Face/Off, Total Recall and The Wicker Man also owe it a debt, and both Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon Ho are big fans. Seconds is the third, confusingly, in Frankenheimer’s so-called Paranoia Trilogy (after 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate and 1964’s Seven Days in May) and its Saul Bass opening titles neatly sum up what’s to come – distorted giant faces in extreme close-up fill the screen … Read more