Paranoiac is a 1963 British psychological thriller film directed by Freddie Francis, and starring Janette Scott, Oliver Reed, Sheila Burrell, and Alexander Davion.

Eight years later, the younger son, Simon, is a cruel spendthrift alcoholic, who tries to have his sister, Eleanor, committed for insanity so that he can be the sole heir.

Eleanor and "Tony" investigate and see Simon playing the organ with a masked singer, but the singing emerges to be a recording.

The masked person is revealed to be Aunt Harriet, who explains that Simon has been driven insane by guilt over Tony's death.

He is about to leave but is stopped by Simon, who admits he had tricked the real Tony into writing the suicide note and then murdered him and that he had sabotaged the car.

[2] The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "A thinly disguised variation on Taste of Fear (1961) and Maniac (1963), this is perhaps the most bizarre, far-fetched and tasteless Grand Guignol which Jimmy Sangster has yet scripted.

Freddie Francis's direction is workmanlike without being notably imaginative; he has little luck solving the familiar Hammer problems of a diffuse, loose-ended script, stock characterisation and makeshift acting.

One finds oneself continually asking awkward questions, fatal in this kind of story which, if it is to work, needs to be consistently, rigidly stylised.

An indication of the film's lack of purpose, even on its own level, is the revelation of the mummified schoolboy, shorn of all shock by its risible resemblance to a wizened old gnome.

"[6] Leslie Halliwell said: "A complex maze of disguise, mistaken identity, family curses and revelations of something nasty in the woodshed, out of Psycho (1960) by Taste of Fear (1961).

"[7] AllMovie called the film a "solid if not entirely satisfying entry in the wave of Psycho-inspired thrillers produced by England's Hammer Studios during the early-to-mid-'60s" ...