The Hypnotic Eye

Plot

A young woman comes into her kitchen rubbing shampoo into her hair, lights a gas burner on her stove and bends over it as if it were the sink, then rises up screaming with her hair on fire. Later, doctors and police tend her, and Detective Dave Kennedy ask her why she did it. She does not remember. He lies that her looks will be restored, and she dies. She is the first fatality of eleven women who have mutilated their faces in the past few months, and the police are baffled about whether there is a common cause. Dave consults his psychiatrist friend Dr. Philip Hecht, who is an expert on hypnosis and disapproves of its use on the stage.

Dave, his girlfriend Marcia Blaine and her friend Dodie Wilson go to see the stage show of the famous hypnotist Desmond. Dave does not believe in hypnotism and thinks the men who are hypnotized into various abnormal states are stooges. Desmond calls for three women volunteers, and his assistant Justine chooses two of them for him, including Dodie. Desmond hypnotizes her into becoming rigid as a board and levitates her. But before he brings her out of it, he whispers something in her ear. Dave tries to get Dodie to say she was faking; she denies this, will not go for coffee with them and goes back into the theater when they leave. Later, at home, she pours acid instead of lotion into her washbasin, and applies it to her face. Dave and Marcia question her in the hospital, and find that she has forgotten how her terrible facial burns happened. Marcia begins to wonder if hypnotic suggestion from Desmond is the common cause of the mutilations. She goes back to the theater alone to investigate, and is chosen by Justine’s significant look at Desmond as a volunteer. When beginning to hypnotize her, he uses an eyeball-shaped device he holds up in the palm of his hand, with concentric circles of flashing light. Marcia closes her eyes before he tells her to and is not hypnotized.

She reports to Dave and Dr. Hecht that she thinks Desmond is guilty; Dr. Hecht agrees that he is a genuine hypnotist with a dangerous, powerful new technique. She tells them of Desmond’s post-hypnotic command to come to his dressing room at midnight. When she does, she opens a box in which the eye-shaped device is flashing, and this time is genuinely hypnotized. Dave and Dr. Hecht follow in Dave's car as Desmond takes her to a fancy restaurant, to a beatnik coffee-house to hear Beat poetry and dance, and back to her apartment. He starts to make out with her, while the two men sit outside, Dave thinking jealously that she is a willing participant and Dr. Hecht wanting more information. Desmond is finally interrupted by the entrance of Justine, who dismisses him and keeps Marcia under hypnosis herself. In his only moment of possible conscience, he asks resentfully “How many more?” and Justine replies “As long as there are faces like this.” She turns on Marcia’s shower with scalding hot water and tells her to step into the cool refreshment. Dave and Dr. Hecht turn up at the door at last and stop this; Justine instructs Marcia to tell them she is an old school roommate and leaves. Dave sees through this story because he knows Marcia never went away to school. He is convinced by Dr. Hecht that Marcia was really hypnotized.

The two men interview past victims of self-mutilation. They all deny ever going to Desmond’s show or hearing of a woman named Justine, but Dave finds a balloon with the hypnotic eye design on it, that is given out at the show, in the purse of a woman who blinded herself. Even Dodie denies ever seeing Desmond’s show or knowing a Justine, but her doctor tells them she was terrified of that name when she was brought in.

Marcia, still under Desmond and Justine’s influence, goes back to the show, where Desmond takes the whole audience through several demonstrations of mass hypnosis or the power of suggestion. The balloons are for the purpose of a suggestion that they are too heavy to lift. Dave and Dr. Hecht break in and try to get to Marcia, but Justine drags her up onto the stage while Desmond tries to stop the men with the hypnotic eye. Dave breaks through its power and the two men get onto the stage. Justine drags Marcia up onto a swinging catwalk and threatens to jump and drag her down. When Dr. Hecht remonstrates with her, she tears off her mask and shows that she has a badly mutilated face like Dodie’s. Desmond overpowers Dr. Hecht, Dave shoots him from above, and Justine jumps to her death beside him. Dave pulls Marcia up and she comes out of her trance. Dr. Hecht addresses the audience, including the audience in the movie theater, and tells them never to let themselves be hypnotized except under medical supervision.

Cast