"Ranks with the best of Hitchcock, who wanted to make it but Clouzot beat him to the rights. It was made in the same year as Night and Fog and The Night of the Hunter, 1955—what a year, what a decade for world cinema. The penultimate scene had the same effect on me as Psycho. Though it no longer holds surprises for me, I watch it for its mastery of suspense and the performances of Paul Meurisse, Simone Signoret, and
 Véra Clouzot. But I confess that the nine-minute scene without words where 
Véra hears noises from her bedroom, goes down the hall to check them out, and is literally scared to death still nails me. You can bet I thought 
about how it was shot and paced when I sent Ellen Burstyn up to that attic in The Exorcist. No nudity, no sexuality, no violence, just pure, slow-building suspense that escalates to terror. The original novel was written by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, who also wrote Vertigo."

"I didn’t know there were films that represented the things represented in this film. I didn’t know you could do that. People didn’t think you could do that when this film came out. I always ask myself: how macabre can we go, how graphic can we go, how dark can we go. And the commitment of these actors to the horror that they’re subjected to in this film—you can’t fake that stuff; it’s happening. This nudity is happening, this scatological stuff . . . I don’t know how much of that stuff was happening, but it’s just pure terror and pure excess. There’s also something unwittingly seductive about the beautiful, heightened elements of the film. There aren’t many films that communicate the dangers and trespasses of fascism better than this one. The terror is not in some externalized war story, it’s something that is very domestic and very tangible. You can’t forget a film like Salò, and the shock and the horror of it make such an effective medium for its serious political themes. I think it kind of shares that with Assassination Nation."