Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade
Author: Mario Degiglio-Bellemare; Charlie Ellbé; Kristopher Woofter
Date: 2014-12-11 05:00:00+00:00
Description: The 1940s is a lost decade in horror cinema, undervalued and written out of most horror scholarship. This book deconstructs persistent scholarly discourse by re-evaluating the historical, political, economic, and cultural factors of 1940s horror cinema to recover a decade of horror.
Publisher: Lexington Books

1

Recovering 1940s

Horror Cinema

Recovering 1940s

Horror Cinema

Traces of a Lost Decade

Edited by

Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare,

Charlie Ellbé, and Kristopher Woofter

L E X I N G TO N B O O K S

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books

An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com

Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26–34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB

Copyright © 2015 by Lexington Books

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Recovering 1940s horror cinema : traces of a lost decade / edited by Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare, Charlie Ellb?, and Kristopher Woofter.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4985-0379-2 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4985-0380-8 (electronic) 1. Horror films—United States—History and criticism. 2. Motion pictures—United States—History—20th century. I. DeGiglio-Bellemare, Mario, 1965– editor. II. Ellb?, Charlie, 1986– editor. III. Woofter, Kristopher, 1971– editor.

PN1995.9.H6R43 2014

791.43’616409044—dc23 2014037628

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

For Rondo Hatton

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Fragments of the Monster: Recovering a Lost Decade
xi

Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare and Kristopher Woofter

Image: “Motion Picture Purgatory: The Devil Bat (1940)”

xxiii

Rick Trembles

Part I: InterventIons

1

1 A “Darkly Hypothetical Reality”: “Gothic Realism” in 1940s

Hollywood Horror

3

Kristopher Woofter

2 “Strange Pleasure”: 1940s Proto-Slasher Cinema

27

Peter Marra

3 Dead Zone: Genre, Gender, and the “Lost Decade”

of Horror Cinema, 1946–1956

47

Ian Olney

4 Val Lewton, Mr. Gross, and the Grand-Guignol: Re-Staging
the Corpse in The Body Snatcher 67

Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare

Part II: HybrIDIty

87

5 Robert Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase: Horror Genre Hybridity,

Vertical Alterity, and the Avant-Garde

89

Anne Golden

6 The Child Witness: Peril and Empowerment in 1940s Horror,
from The East Side Kids to The Window 109

Kier-La Janisse
vii
viii Contents

7 Making Visible the Sonic Threat: The Inner Sanctum Mysteries

Radio Series and Its Universal Studios Film Adaptations

129

Charlie Ellbé

8 Poe, Horror, and the Cinematic Mystery Hybrids of the 1940s

147

Dennis R. Perry

9 “The Murderer’s Mind”: Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart,
and the Monstrous Psychologies of 1940s Horror Film

161

Mark Jancovich

Part III: HIstory

179

10 Serial Killers, Deals with the Devil, and the Madness of Crowds:

The Horror Film in Nazi-Occupied France

181

David Hanley

11 “Always Hearing Voices, Never Hearing Mine”: Sound and Fury
in The Snake Pit 203

Karen Herland

12 The Demise of the Cinematic Zombie: From the Golden Age
of Hollywood to the 1940s

225

Louise Fenton

13 Fears New and Old: The Post-War American Horror Film

239

Gary D. Rhodes

Part Iv: Poverty row

259

14 Hypodermic Needles and Evil Twins: The Poverty Row Wartime

Horrors of Sam Newfield

261

Paul Corupe

15 Of Apes and Men (and Monsters and Girls): The Ape Film
and 1940s Horror Cinema

275

Blair Davis

16 “The Perfect Neanderthal Man”: Rondo Hatton as The Creeper
and the Cultural Economy of 1940s B-Films

295

Cory Legassic

17 The Vampire’s Ghost: The Case for a Poverty Row Classic

319

Selma A. Purac

Index 339

About the Editors and Contributors

349

Acknowledgments

Several essays in this collection grew out of presentations given in the Horror Area of the Popular Culture/American Culture Associations (PCA/ACA) National Conference between 2010 and 2014. The editors also would like to thank the students and faculty of the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies in Montréal, Québec (http://www.miskatonicinstitute.com/) who participated in the course, Fragments of the Monster: Recovering Forties Horror (from October 29 to December 3, 2012), especially Esinam Beckley, Ariel Esteban Cayer, Brad Colbourne, Anne Golden, Karen Herland, Kier-La Janisse, Cory Legassic, and Tamara Vukov. Special thanks go to the contributors to the collection for their excellent research into a neglected era of horror cinema, and to the following for their support and/or assistance in the preparation of this collection: Laura Beauchamp, Catherine Bernier, Tanya Cochran, Oksana Dykyj, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Eric Franchi, Jim Iaccino, Sophie Lessard, Ursula Misztal, Matthew Ogonoski, Pradeep Pillai, Lindsey Porambo, Carl Sederholm, Rick Trembles, Annaëlle Winand, and Rick Worland.

ix

Introduction

Fragments of the Monster

Recovering a Lost Decade

Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare and Kristopher Woofter

The opening image reveals the logo of a studio not usually associated with the horror genre of the classic period in Hollywood: Columbia Pictures.

As the Columbia logo fades out, a woman’s face appears in shadowy close-up. Her look is one of distress as she slowly backs away from the camera.

Fear seems to be the determining factor in her shrinking demeanor, yet we are still not sure of the source of the threat. We could be watching the opening credits of an early film noir, a mystery, a paranoid woman’s picture, a police procedural, or a supernatural chiller. Cryptic words appear on the screen, superimposed over the image of the woman: “The imagination of man at
times sires the fantastic and the grotesque. That the imagination of man can soar into the stratosphere of fantasy is attested by ———.” The statement is unfinished, its implications unattributed to any source. We are left with an overwhelming sense of puzzlement. Something appears now out of the shadows—a dark figure that moves in on the woman, its arms spread wide as she continues to back away. A black cape overtakes the woman and the entire frame. The iconic signifiers—shadows, cape, cringing female form—
lead us to the conclusion that we have witnessed the appearance of Dracula.

The Columbia Pictures signature reappears again over the figure, as if staking a claim to the horror canon of classic Hollywood, which the prevailing discourse assigns to the immutable dominance of Universal Studios. A scream pierces the soundtrack, and a waft of smoke fills the screen. The title is finally revealed as The Return of the Vampire (1944). In these opening moments, the
monster appears to us only in fragments, a phantom figure to be fully unveiled only at the 23-minute mark of this 69-minute film. But the generic mimicry of classical horror traits in these images prepares us well for the monstrous

“return” promised in the title.

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Cycles of unwelcome repetition and return: this has been the most consistent framing of the horror film in the decade of production that encompasses World War II. Accordingly, the tendency has been to read images like those in Return of the Vampire’s title sequence as indicative more of campy allusion than canny intertext. Even the titles of the Universal horror films of the period reflect an almost obsessive awareness of a tradition of horror inherited from more “classical” 1930s origins: Son of Frankenstein (Rowland V. Lee, 1939), Son of Dracula (Robert Siodmak, 1943), The Mummy’s Ghost (Reginald Le Borg, 1944), The Mummy’s Curse (Leslie Goodwins, 1944), House of Frankenstein (Erle C. Kenton, 1944), House of Dracula (Erle C. Kenton, 1945).

An anxiety of influence has been read into these titles, a framing that has done damage to the importance of the horror sequel in the conceptualization of the genre’s presence in the 1940s, and the genre’s formation in general. Peter Hutchings argues that the “negative perception of sequel-heavy 1940s Universal horror is often intertwined with a prejudice against the sequel itself as a particular cinematic format, with the sequelisation process seeming to mark the moment where innovation ends and exploitation begins” (2007: 20). Less a sequel than a variation on a theme, Return of the Vampire has nonetheless suffered the kind of critical prejudice that Hutchings describes.

The title sequence of Return of the Vampire is suggestively palimpsestic by design, one referential image overtaking another in continual rewriting and revision. The title appears superimposed over the image of a menacing vulture, conjuring up images from the independently-produced White Zombie (Victor Halperin, 1932) starring Bela Lugosi. The next set of credits affirms this connection as the name of Lugosi appears on screen. Lugosi is, of course, one of the most iconic actors of the classic horror period, his name (Todd Browning) forever associated with Universal’s Dracula from 1931.

Yet the ominous, oboe-like sounds of the musical score attributed to Mario C. Tedesco in the credits recall not Dracula, but another movie, released by Universal in 1941, The Wolf Man (George Waggner), which was scored by Charles Previn, Hans J. Salter, and Frank Skinner. The final credit reveals the name of the film’s director, Lew Landers. This was the pseudonym of the man who directed Bela Lugosi in Universal’s The Raven in 1935, as Louis Friedlander. At this point in the 1940s, Landers was working in the B-unit of Columbia Pictures, which was overseen by Sam White, a much less prestigious job than working with Lugosi at Universal in the 1930s, the period often understood as the most innovative time in American horror. This one-minute credit sequence thus encapsulates many of the themes of this book: the intermingling aspects of genre hybridity, generic intertextuality, along with a prestige-film vs. B-list film binary and its association with both periodization (the 30s vs. the 40s) and studio branding (horror = Universal).

The Return of the Vampire discloses the fraught landscape of 1940s horror, a landscape that is, according to Mark Jancovich, shrouded in fog and

Introduction
xiii
the uncertainties of World War II (2008a: 29). The opening shot pans away from the looming vulture to a fog-shrouded cemetery, in which the werewolf Andreas (Matt Willis) lurks towards the crypt of his master—the titular vampire. These opening shots exhibit an excess of spectacle and a love of generic conventions of the horror genre: cemetery, fog, scraggly trees, werewolf, vampire, Gothic crypt, deep shadows. The success and influence of The Wolf Man on the 1940s is undeniable, yet for many Larry Talbot’s (Lon Chaney) tale of struggle against a beastly curse is Universal’s last great horror film of the 1940s, and thus marks the beginning of the end of horror until a surge of creativity in the 1950s. Every studio made its own version of The Wolf Man, and most of these were dismissed as weak, unoriginal retreads. One is seen to stand out as a beacon of light in the darkness: Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942), whose producer-auteur, Val Lewton, is often described as the master of the unseen, a visionary who eschews crass attractions-like spectacle for the distinctively shadowy and psychological. Like so many films from the 1940s, The Return of the Vampire has been described as mere empty spectacle. The film embodies in itself many issues that frame 1940s horror, especially, as Rick Worland has noted, “[t]he broad explanation for the decline of the horror film to B-movie or programmer status” (1997: 47). David J. Skal describes the film as “one of those fascinating junk films . . . [which] relying on warmed-over clichés . . . becomes a vessel for unintentional historical subtext” (2001: 222).

Tom Weaver, who is generally friendly towards B-list films, praises Landers’s direction and Lugosi’s performance in “mist-shrouded scenes that reeked with atmosphere”; but, he continues, “the rest of the picture, unhappily, just reeked” (1993: 164). These reviews are typical of how horror in the 1940s has been discussed in genre scholarship more broadly.

It was not until 1997 that Rick Worland, in his essay “OWI Meets the

Monsters: Hollywood Horror Films and War Propaganda, 1942 to 1945,”

initiated the critical reappraisal that The Return of the Vampire deserves.

Worland argued that the film, like any popular text, “lies at the intersection of any number of historical and intertextual currents” (1997: 57). In other words, The Return of the Vampire is a film that speaks to multiple issues about 1940s horror within the very specific context of the World War II years on the “home front.” This is most obviously present in the powerful figure of Lady Jane Ainsley (Frieda Inescort), an accomplished scientist, mother, and of course, vampire hunter, who embodies a challenge to patriarchal gender roles during the war years. Worland argues that the film “instantiated the metaphorical figure of ‘Rosie the Riveter,’ that pervasive symbol of one of the most significant rearrangements of feminine gender roles . . . in that time” (1997: 57). War is explicitly present in this film; it opens in England at the end of World War I (1918), and quickly jumps to World War II (1941) for its denouement. Stock footage from the war is directly cut into the film.

The Rumanian vampire, Armand Tesla (Bela Lugosi), is resurrected by a Nazi
xiv Introduction
bombing, linking persistent vampirism to German aggression. Stylistically, the use of fog and smoke in the film, associated with the vampire, sweeps into people’s rooms like a bomb attack. The fact that vampires can only be killed by a “steel spike” is not so much an erring around vampire mythology, but a clear association of the spike to the kind of blitz debris that killed civilians during the war. How Skal could deem this “unintentional subtext” is very strange to say the least. Deep psychological trauma pervades The Return of the Vampire, especially as embodied in the character of Andreas, whose werewolf curse comes to embody the “shell shock” of returning soldiers.

The bomb craters and rubble of the film’s finale seem to suggest, or hauntingly foreshadow, the Atomic anxieties of the 1950s. The period of the 1950s is often understood as the time when the internal psychological horrors of the 1940s are turned out against the enemies. The importance of the Theremin in film scores comes to mind here: in the 1940s, its eerie, high-pitched squeal indicates psychological trauma in films such as 1945’s Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock) and The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder), but its usage in the 1950s was turned outwardly to embody the threat of creatures from outer space. While no Theremin is used in The Return of the Vampire, the tragic Larry Talbot-like character of Andreas gripped in existential dread of the werewolf curse embodies the deep psychological anxieties of the period, linked as they were to the war, the growth of monopoly capitalism, and gender disorientation (Harvey,

1978: 26). The werewolf here is the Theremin-cue of this film, a barometer of sorts, for the rising pressures of a bombed-out psyche. As Andreas overcomes evil and defeats Tesla through the power of goodness taught to him by Lady Ainsley in his first recovery from the werewolf curse, we are not left with a cozy victory over wartime evils, but an insecurity about the very real possibility of unseen forces undermining rational scientific certainties.

The scientific certainties in the film are so shaken that the skeptical investigating police officer Sir Frederick Fleet (Miles Mander) turns his gaze to the camera and breaks diegetic illusion in a direct address that takes us back to the primitive cinema of the silent years, or what Tom Gunning has called the “cinema of attractions” (1989). After a confident rebuff by Lady Ainsley about his skepticism towards vampirism, the inspector turns to the audience and asks: “And do you people?” Gunning argues that attractions cinema survives in the avant-garde, but the horror genre is obviously another location where attractions cinema survives. The spectacular vaudevillian roots of primitive cinema find a home in The Return of the Vampire, especially as they undercut the seriousness of the film’s catastrophic conclusion. The film incorporates elements of psychological trauma with elements of attractions spectacle in ways that were quite avant-garde for the period. As mentioned already, the 1940s is a time where the shadowy psychological films of Val Lewton were valorized as “chamber music” (Clarens, 1967: 111) in

Introduction
xv
relation to the spectacle of attractions cinema. But what about the ways in which Lewton’s films also incorporate spectacle? Is he not claimed to be the inventor of “buses,” those show-stopping set pieces that came to be called

“stingers” during the period of the later Slasher subgenre? Against prevailing notions, the 1940s stand out as a very avant-garde time period for the horror genre, a time of significant experimentation.

The Return of the Vampire is also a border of sorts, a marker of a ghostly

“end” of the horror cycle and the beginning of a new movement towards realism in Hollywood horror cinema, one that never self-consciously named itself. In dominant film scholarship, the post-war years have been devoted to film noir, especially since 1944 is also the year that Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder) was released. That film’s shadowy web-like narrative of a beautiful woman (Barbara Stanwyck) luring a man (Fred MacMurray) into killing her husband for money is considered by some scholars to be the first “authentic”

film noir. Paul Schrader’s influential essay on film noir suggests that the “German influence,” namely the expressionism brought by German filmmakers to Hollywood, is a key condition for the flourishing of film noir ([1972] 1996: 55). However, this account of the birth of film noir completely erases the place of the horror genre in the development of film noir, or how the horror genre preserved and developed expressionism in Hollywood long before film noir came around. According to the accounts that prioritize film noir, the “horror genre” seems to drop off the map. Even recent work (Copjec, 1993; Bould,

2005) leaves horror’s influence on the 1940s film noir relegated to the realm of suggestion. Here, Worland’s article on the “war years” (a periodization ending in 1945) is a marker of another limit that needs to be crossed. What constitutes a decade? Does the 1940s begin on January 1, 1940? When does it end? What about the post–World War II years? Films like Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady (1944) and The Spiral Staircase (1945) are often categorized as film noir in scholarship. But these are films that challenge strict categorization; they invite new readings and fresh reformulations. They bring together aspects of French poetic realism, surrealism, the avant-garde, and the Gothic. As Jancovich convincingly argues, marketing and reception in the 1940s is often more complex than later scholarship often acknowledges. What we now call horror, mystery, the paranoid woman’s film, even detective films, may have fallen under the category of thriller or chiller in the 1940s. The studios attempted to sell their products in “a number of different ways that were designed to appeal to a number of different audiences” (Jancovich, 2005: 44). James Naremore
also problematizes the pervasive myth of “noirness” (2008: 2), arguing that not only has the term itself shifted, but also what constitutes noir.

This book pushes the limits of the pervasive devaluation of 1940s horror by rethinking and reframing persistent claims about what constitutes horror in that decade. It may be that 1940s horror has faded into the shadows. But the
xvi Introduction
monster is also characterized by escape—even if we are left only with traces,
footprints, bones, teeth, and obscured glimpses (Cohen, 1996: 4–5). The figure of the monster is of course a very slippery one, moving into a terrain not always associated with the horror genre. Hence, the notion of genre hybridity is central here. Forties horror escapes epistemological frameworks that leave out other media (radio, comics, literature) and other sub-genres, such as the paranoid woman’s film, or even film noir. The important work that was done at Poverty Row studios (Monogram, Producers Releasing Corporation

[PRC], Republic) in the 1940s also requires serious excavation, because very few serious studies (Weaver, Rhodes, Davis) have attempted to mine its creative bottom-of-the-barrel aesthetics. Poverty Row created its own “auteurs”

(Edgar G. Ulmer, Jean Yarbrough, Sam Newfield) and hired important horror icons (Karloff, Lugosi, Carradine, Zucco), making it an indispensible part of the 1940s horror landscape.

The essays in this anthology revise, reframe and deconstruct persistent critical binaries that have been put in place by scholarly discourse to label 1940s horror as somehow inferior to a “classical” or “canonical” mode of horror in the 1930s, especially as represented by the monster films of Universal Studios. The book works against formulations that put 1940s horror in evolutionary terms of genre “exhaustion,” “crisis,” “mimicry,” and “inferiority.” Some of these “high” and “low,” “active” and “passive,” binaries come from theorizations of terror and horror in studies of the Gothic, an important discourse for 1940s horror in its focus on irrationality and excess, on collaps-ing the past and present, on traumatic histories resurfacing, and on (uncanny) linkages between space and psyche. The characteristics and conventions that scholars group under the term, “genre,” are in constant flux as a result of historical factors, conditions of production and distribution, audience/fan reception, the influence of other films and genres, and the (often overlooked) contributions of critics, journalists and scholars. We have utilized Lew Landers’ The Return of the Vampire as a way to frame some of the issues that plague the horror genre in the 1940s. The film is a springboard of sorts for the essays you are about to encounter in this book. Like the monster, this film is a very powerful glyph that needs deciphering, but it is also offers a series of boundaries that beg transgression. The essays in this book reveal the possibilities that horror offers in 1940s. “The imagination of man at times sires the fantastic and the grotesque. . . .” In a decade so complex as the 1940s, the grotesque and fantastic were never so well-matched.

This book is divided into four sections. Section I, “Interventions,” features chapters that interrogate persistent scholarly and popular (mis)conceptions regarding canonical 1940s horror figures such as RKO producer Val Lewton (DeGiglio-Bellemare); locate conventions in the 1940s thought to come much later, such as the Slasher film (Marra); rethink 1940s historical and

Introduction
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cultural contexts with specific emphasis on gender (Olney); and theorize the Gothic discourse that causes the horror genre in the 1940s to seemingly disperse into a number of cycles (film noir, paranoid woman’s film, etc.) (Woofter). Section II, “Hybridity,” questions strict classifications systems that have rendered certain films, artists and trends difficult to pin down.

Chapters in this section, explore fan reception and youth culture surrounding 1940s cinema (Janisse), and highlight the persistent and paradigmatic influence of Edgar Allan Poe during the period (Perry). This section also takes on “slippery” auteur figures like Robert Siodmak (Golden), hybrid films like The Spiral Staircase (1945) (Golden) and the Inner Sanctum series (1943–1945) (Ellbé), and oft-overlooked factors such as performance and star persona (Jancovich). Section III, “History,” rethinks 1940s historical and cultural contexts. Chapters in this section discuss the trauma of World War II in France (Hanley), the pathologizing of women’s experience through madness (Herland), the shifting critical and cultural currency of the 1940s zombie film (Fenton), and the reception and distribution of horror films in the late 1940s (Rhodes). The essays in Section IV, “Poverty Row,” undertake a reevaluation of the important work that was done at studios such as Monogram, PRC, and Republic, which worked independently of the major

Hollywood studios in the 1940s. Essays in this section discuss the major contributions of Poverty Row horror “auteur” Sam Newfield (Corupe), the issues raised by the critical undervaluation of the “ape film” (Davis) and forgotten masterpieces such as The Vampire’s Ghost (1945) (Purac), and the 1940s

“politics of disfigurement” surrounding star Rondo Hatton’s various turns as

“real-life monster,” The Creeper (Legassic).

Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema is unique in its in-depth explorations of a “lost” decade of horror cinema. A number of works treat 1940s horror cinema either peripherally, or in ways that merely suggest (yet do not follow through on) important ruptures and openings in the ways that 1940s horror has been conceived. General histories focused on the period are few, but illuminating in this respect. The earliest of these, Charles Higham’s and Joel Greenberg’s Hollywood in the 1940s (1970) offers historical insights with a tendency towards descriptive listings of films that can become tedious.

(The book is subtitled, “A Critical Survey of Hollywood Films from 1940 to 1950.”) But the logic behind Higham’s and Greenberg’s lists reveals some of the categorical slippage that was written out of later studies of 1940s genre cinema. Their chapter on “fantasy and horror cinema,” for example, collapses supernatural horror films, monster films, whimsical fantasies and comedies, prestige pictures and Poverty Row “exploitation” films (1970: 70). The resulting mish-mash of titles seems meant to serve their conclusion that monsters in the 1940s were “seldom terrifying and often downright benign” (1970, 55).

Additionally, while they separate film noir (“black film” as they term it) from
xviii Introduction
horror and fantasy, as Mark Bould points out, they list almost exclusively films noir in their section on melodramas (2005: 19).

Dana Polan’s 1986 study, Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940–1950, is unique in featuring a chapter on how 1940s horror films work within and against what he sees as the period’s overall epistemological tendency towards scientific rationalism. Overall, however, Polan is concerned in the chapter and the book with wider historical trends in 1940s Hollywood and he does not provide a sustained analysis of horror.

Otto Friedrich’s much-lauded City of Nets: Hollywood in the 1940s (1986) is a meticulously researched and richly detailed cultural history of the period’s wartime anxieties, shady industry deals, blacklisting and encroaching cold-war anxieties, but with an overarching narrative that traces a “tragic” decline similar to that which 1940s horror has suffered at the hands of scholars.

Wheeler Winston Dixon’s edited anthology, American Cinema of the 1940s: Themes and Variations (2006) relegates horror to the margins, even though it contains chapters with tempting titles such as “Movies and the Renegotiation of Genre” and “Movies and the Fate of Genre” (which handles several horror and noir films under the sub-heading “melodrama” [2006: 230]).

McFarland has published a number of useful surveys, including Gregory William Mank’s Hollywood Cauldron (1994), which treats thirteen horror films under the heading of horror’s “golden age,” six of which are 1940s productions ranging from big budget ( The Picture of Dorian Gray, Albert Lewin; Hangover Square, John Brahm) (both 1945), to mid-range ( Bedlam, Mark Robson, 1946), to Poverty Row ( Bluebeard, Edgar G. Ulmer, 1944). Offering a production history, summary, and thematic analysis of each film, Mank’s book is useful as a reference, but features little in the way of the critical reshaping its intriguing grouping of films implies. Likewise, Tom Weaver’s Poverty Row Horrors! (1993, McFarland) and Michael R. Pitts’ Poverty Row Studios, 1929–1940 (1997, McFarland) provide excellent resources for scholars beginning research into 1940s independent horror, but, unlike our collection, they do not engage with the problematical critical vacuum around 1940s horror that creates the need for their studies. Several books take a more in-depth historical approach to 1940s horror and related subjects, among them Arthur Lyons’ Death on the Cheap: The Lost B Movies of Film Noir! (2000, Da Capo Press) and Richard M. Hurst’s Republic Studios: Between Poverty Row and the Majors (2007, Scarecrow). Again, these useful texts provide solid historical context and analysis of their subjects, and therefore remain important introductory resources. The collection of essays in Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema aims for a more extensive look at 1940s horror from a variety of theoretical approaches.

The Battle for the Bs: 1950s Hollywood and the Rebirth of Low-Budget Cinema (2012, Rutgers University Press), by Blair Davis (one of the

Introduction
xix
contributors to our collection) enacts something closer to the kind of critical analysis that our collection attempts, in its handling of the history, industry, culture and aesthetics of the 1950s B-movie. Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema is (at least in part) a similar investigation of parallel trends in the 1940s. The collection of essays in Edgar G. Ulmer: Detour on Poverty Row (2008, Lexington Books), edited by Gary D. Rhodes (another contributor to our collection), forms another extensive analysis of a major creative force in the low-budget, independent scene. Rhodes’s anthology is indispensible for reevaluating the period, in that its subject was a key figure in both classic horror ( The Black Cat 1934, Universal) and later, Poverty Row ( Bluebeard 1944, PRC), to which he turned by choice (2008: 9).

Gene D. Phillips’s Out of the Shadows (2012, Scarecrow) and Paul Meehan’s Horror Noir (2011, McFarland) treat the idea of hybrids and boundaries around genres. While Phillips’s study is provocative in its goal to expand film noir to include various types of cinema not thought of as film noir, it does not engage significantly with the question of film noir’s roots in horror (or why the film noir canon demands expansion). Meehan’s study (ultimately another summary and thematic survey of films) manages only to raise the specter of the horror-noir connection, resulting in a relatively prescriptive taxonomical assessment of films that share the long-established conventions of horror and film noir. Much stronger in this respect is Blair Davis’s essay, “Horror Meets Noir: The Evolution of Cinematic Style, 1931–1958” in Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear (2004), which looks at the ways that horror film contributed to the film noir aesthetic. Our collection takes up the very questions these studies raise around periodization and genre formation.

We have already mentioned above the important work by Rick Worland

(1997), whose rethinking of 1940s horror in the context of the horror-war films produced under the influence of the Office of War Information productively links genre hybridity to historical factors. Richard J. Hand’s Terror on the Air: Horror Radio in America, 1931–1952 (2006, McFarland), offers an extended study of an under-studied medium that significantly influences 1940s horror cinema and, in the late-1940s, television. Other significant work has been done by Mark Jancovich (also a contributor to our collection), whose research in the reception of 1940s horror films includes key essays such as “The Meaning of Mystery: Genre, Marketing and the Universal

Sherlock Holmes Series of the 1940s” (2005), “Pale Shadows: Narrative Hierarchies in the Historiography of 1940s Horror” (2008a), and “‘Two Ways of Looking’: The Critical Reception of 1940s Horror” (2010). It was, in fact, Jancovich’s reception studies that encouraged us to embark upon a project to reopen the case of 1940s horror. Jancovich’s research has touched upon critical reception of films now labeled “thriller,” “film noir,” “woman’s film,”

and “mystery film,” as well as the problematic 30s–40s binary framing that
xx Introduction
suggest the 1940s as an inferior decade of sequels, copies, and parodies. We see Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade as taking up the call that Jancovich has sounded in his most recent work.

ReFeRenCes

Bould, Mark. 2005. Film Noir: From Berlin to Sin City. London and New York: Wallflower Press.

Brunas, M., J. Brunas, and T. Weaver. 1990. Universal Horrors : The Studio’s Classic Films, 1931–1946. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Butler, Ivan. [1967] 1970. Horror in the Cinema: Second Revised Edition. New York: A.S. Barnes and Co.

Clarens, Carlos. 1967. An Illustrated History of the Horror Film. New York: Capricorn Books.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 1996. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Ed., Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 3–25.

Copjec, Joan, ed. 1993. Shades of Noir: A Reader. London and New York: Verso.

Davis, Blair. 2012. The Battle for the Bs: 1950s Hollywood and the Rebirth of Low-Budget Cinema. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

———. 2004. “Horror Meets Noir: The Evolution of Cinematic Style, 1931–1958.”

Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear. Ed. Steffen Hantke. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 191–212.

Dixon, Wheeler Winston. 2006. American Cinema of the 1940s: Themes and Variations. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Frank, Alan G. 1974. Horror Movies: Tales of Terror in the Cinema. Secaucus, NJ: Derbibooks.

Friedrich, Otto. 1986. City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s. New York: Harper & Row.

Gelder, Ken. Ed. 2000. The Horror Reader. New York: Routledge.

Gunning, Tom. 1989. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, Ed. Thomas Elsaesser.

London: BFI Publishing. 1–10.

Hand, Richard J. 2012. Terror on the Air: Horror Radio in America, 1931–1952.

Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland.

Harvey, Sylvia. 1978. “Woman’s Place: The Absent Family of Film Noir.” Women in Film Noir, Ed. Ann E. Kaplan. BFI Publishing: London. 35–46.

Higham, Charles, and Joel Greenberg. 1968. Hollywood in the Forties. London: Zwemmer.

Hurst, Richard M. 1979. Republic Studios: Between Poverty Row and the Majors.

Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press.

Hutchings, Peter. 2004. The Horror Film. London: Pearson Longman.

Jancovich, Mark. 2005. “The Meaning of Mystery: Genre, Marketing and the Universal Sherlock Holmes Series of the 1940s.” Film International (17). 34–45.

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———. 2008a. “Pale Shadows: Narrative Hierarchies in the Historiography of 1940s Horror.” Shifting Definitions of Genre, eds. Lincoln Geraghty and Mark Jancovich.

Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland. 15–32.

———. 2010. “‘Two Ways of Looking’: The Critical Reception of 1940s Horror.”

Cinema Journal XLIX (3). 45–66.

Lennig, Arthur. 2003. The Immortal Count: The Life and Films of Bela Lugosi. Vol. 1.

Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky.

Lyons, Arthur. 2000. Death on the Cheap: The Lost B Movies of Film Noir.

Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press.

Mank, Gregory William. 2009. Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff: The Expanded Story of a Haunting Collaboration, with a Complete Filmography of Their Films Together.

Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Meehan, Paul. 2011. Horror Noir: Where Cinema’s Dark Sisters Meet. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Naremore, James. 2008. More than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts—Updated and Expanded. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Phillips, Gene D. 2012. Out of the Shadows: Expanding the Canon of Classic Film Noir. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

Pitts, Michael R. 1997. Poverty Row Studios, 1929–1940: An Illustrated History of 53 Independent Film Companies, with a Filmography for Each. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Polan, Dana B. 1986. Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940–1950. New York: Columbia University Press.

Rhodes, Gary D., Ed. 2008. Edgar G. Ulmer: Detour on Poverty Row. Lanham, MD.

Lexington Books.

Schrader, Paul. [1972] 1996. “Notes on Film Noir.” Film Noir Reader, eds. Alain Silver and James Ursini, New York: Limelight Editions. 53–65.

Siegel, Joel E. 1973. Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror. New York: Viking Press.

Skal, David. 2001. The Monster Show: Revised Edition. New York: Faber and Faber.

Weaver, Tom. 1993. Poverty Row Horrors! Monogram, PRC, and Republic Horror Films of the Forties. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Worland, Rick. 1997. “OWI Meets the Monsters: Hollywood Horror Films and War Propaganda, 1942 to 1945.” Cinema Journal. Vol. 37, No. 1. 47–65.

———. 2007. The Horror Film: An Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

FiLMogRApHy

Return of the Vampire. Directed by Lew Landers. Columbia, 1944. Culver City, CA: Columbia/Tri-Star, 2002. DVD.

The Wolf Man. Directed by George Waggner. Universal, 1941. Universal City, CA: Universal Home Video, 1999. DVD.

Figure 0.1 “Motion Picture Purgatory: The Devil Bat (1940).”

Part I
inTeRvenTions

Chapter 1

A “Darkly Hypothetical Reality”

“Gothic Realism” in 1940s

Hollywood Horror

Kristopher Woofter1

Gothic is a discourse that shows the cracks in the system that constitutes consciousness, “reality.”

—Anne Williams in Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (1995: 66) Scholarship on American horror films has severely limited the ways we can talk about the presence of a horror genre in 1940s Hollywood cinema by defining “horror” only in terms of the supposed diminishing returns of its fidelity to the classic Universal monster mode. As Mark Jancovich has observed, it remains common in current critical discourse to hold 1940s horror “in terms of imitation and corruption” of a 1930s horror canon (2008: 16).

This critical narrative has left many horror films (especially those produced by the independent “Poverty Row” studios) underrepresented in, or overlooked by scholarship that fails to consider the dialogic nature of genre objects as they work within and against the cultural and aesthetic trends that
inform and inspire them (Jancovich, 2008: 27). My goal in this chapter is to
introduce a new way of looking into how horror develops in the 1940s into other cinematic modes that were proliferating at the time, indicating a sense of rupture in aesthetic representations of American subjectivity and experience. I argue that the horror modes of the 1940s that are now commonly known in scholarship under various sub-generic tags (e.g., film noir, the paranoid woman’s film, the mystery film, and so on) share a sensibility and an aesthetic that indicates an uneasy fusion of (American) Gothic discourse with 1940s notions of cinematic realism in Hollywood.

The Gothic mode is commonly understood to have manifested as a direct challenge to the mimetic and positivistic aims of the realist novel in the eighteenth century. But in that challenge also lies an inherent reflexivity that has engendered a discourse engaged with exploring the limitations of literary 3

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(and, later, photographic and filmic) representation to capture or reveal the real. In the American Gothic tradition the text is nearly always suspect in terms of its offering unfettered access to the real. American Gothic narratives are intensely interiorized projections of psychic trauma, especially related to the subject’s witnessing, and subsequent struggle to chronicle, past events that have left psychological scars. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” is the instructional American Gothic text in this vein, the ultimate vision of an America in ruins—a fissured “house” that compels, but ultimately resists, artistic attempts to express or contain its affective power. It is an allegory of a family (and a national) history characterized by (in some cases, willful) forgetting, and yielding an infectious neurosis fueled by frustrated artistic creation, moral and physical degradation, and violence born of unfulfilled longing. Poe’s story is also an extended metaphor for the failure of its narrator and titular character to detect meaning in its many meta-textual symbols—landscape, house, bodies, music, musical lyrics, books, painting—that are ripe with uncanny revelations. Eric Savoy argues that the American Gothic’s “allegorical turn” in works like “Usher” “veers away from the clarity of denotation toward the ghostly realm of connotation: accordingly, the [G]othic registers a trauma in the strategies of representation as it brings forward a traumatic history toward which it gestures but can never finally refer” (1998: 11). Reality in the American Gothic tradition is, like this “traumatic history,” by turns, overwhelming and inscrutable in its haunting implications, characteristics that bleed into the style and structure of the texts themselves to form an early version of what Steven Schneider, writ-
ing of late-twentieth-century horror cinema, calls “uncanny realism” (1997).2

This realism of dreadful imminence (and immanence) is also in keeping with Fredric Jameson’s notion of realism “in terms of the un- or not-yet-spoken”

(2007: 167), a conceit that “impli[es] the possibility of knowledge” (2007: 158, original emphasis).

Many 1940s horror films pick up on the everyday terrors of this American Gothic discourse of dreadful expectation, and implied but not necessarily deliverable knowledge, to address the horrors of wartime America domestically, in its morally murky and labyrinthine cities (e.g., Mark Robson’s The Seventh Victim [1943], Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady [1944]), in the corrupted spaces of its psychically charged prison-house homes and rural spaces (e.g., Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt [1943], Frank Wisbar’s Strangler of the Swamp [1946]), and in its figuring of wartime American subjectivity as characterized by feelings of anxiety and paranoia in the face of an
ambiguous future (e.g., John Farrow’s Night Has a Thousand Eyes [1948]).

The seemingly oppositional intertwining of Gothic and realist traditions in 1940s horror cinema reflects the epistemological paradigms at work in wartime America, and parallels contemporaneous national-realist traditions in

A “Darkly Hypothetical Reality”

5

French Poetic Realism and Italian Neorealism—both of which eschew the idea of a transparent realism by blending in degrees of “transfigur[ation]”

(Andrew, 1995: 38), lyricism and melodrama (Bayman, 2009). Ultimately,

I suggest that the concept of “Gothic realism” can help scholars to interrogate the degree to which 1940s Hollywood offers examples of a varied and profoundly pervasive horror cinema that appears to have become lost in the real.

In contrast to my approach, “Gothic” as a critical term has been deployed by much scholarship on horror cinema to set up a convenient binary between (1) the supernatural (“Gothic”) horrors of the Universal monster film of the 1930s, and (2) the 1940s shift to psychological realism in film noir and the paranoid woman’s film, and to didactic sensationalism in the late-decade

“documentary” thrillers of producer Louis de Rochemont.3 Jancovich has shown that “critics began to dissociate the thriller from Gothic fantasy” in the late 1940s, having assigned “thriller” to those films that moved towards realism, and “Gothic” to those films that maintained a degree of remove from the everyday (2012: 26). This critical trend towards framing realist horror as

“thriller” against the non-realist “Gothic fantasy” (Jancovich, 2007: 2012)

of more traditional horror occurs early in scholarship on 1940s cinema.

Raymond Durgnat, in his seminal 1970 essay on film noir, invokes the Gothic to reframe several wartime horror films as “thrillers”: “A postwar subgenre is the thriller,” he writes, “developed into plain clothes Gothic ( The Spiral Staircase [1945], The Red House [1947], Sorry, Wrong Number [1948]). Phantom Lady [1944] (in its very title) indicates their interechoing” (1970: 51).

Durgnat here inadvertently identifies the generic dialogism that makes such films difficult to label; his assignment of “thriller” to these (horror) films indicates their status as conflations of the “plain” (the contemporary everyday) and the “Gothic” (here used to indicate “horror”). “Gothic horror” has since gained critical currency as a keyword in scholarship for indicating illusion and allegory, and an emphasis on a mythical timelessness, as opposed to the contemporaneity and locality that is said to underscore the cinematic realism of, for example, 1940s noir films.

Val Lewton’s 1940s horror productions for RKO Studios have been
instrumental as a critical reference point for scholarship that maintains this binary of Gothic-versus-realist horror. Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942)

initiates a string of successful Lewton productions4 that are typically seen
as subtle, intelligent, psychologically nuanced, and decidedly poetic alternatives to a general 1940s horror genre product that was (and largely still is) seen to be crude and formulaic. Notwithstanding his tantalizing suggestion that the Lewton films provide “the clearest link between 1930s horror and 1940s Film Noir” (2007: 178), Rick Worland sees film noir less as a blend of Gothic horror’s focus on repression, madness, and moral degeneracy, than as the reapplication of the expressionist style common to 1930s horror to

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form a parallel (and oppositional) set of realist conventions emphasizing the

“psychological subjectivity pertinent to [film noir’s] violent, sexually obsessive, or otherwise deviant characters” (2007: 178). What needs to be stated more explicitly—and what bears further analysis—is that the elements that Worland identifies here in film noir (violence, sexual obsession, deviance) are exactly the elements that characterize American Gothic horror. Despite their decidedly Gothic leanings—a chiaroscuro aesthetic, baroque mise-en-scène and set design, labyrinthine psychically charged environments, and suggestively supernatural elements—the Lewton-produced films consistently have been framed by horror scholars as characterised by refreshing realism in their placement of characters in urban settings with everyday jobs, and their narrative focus on rooting out the source of psychological
trauma (see Siegel, 1973). In a fairly typical formulation, David J. Skal
describes the Lewton unit films as “an artistically and financially successful cycle of atmospheric, psychological shockers, relying on shadows and understatement rather than obvious makeup effects” (1993: 218). Even the latter Lewton productions ( The Body Snatcher [Robert Wise, 1945], Isle of the Dead [Mark Robson, 1945], and Bedlam [Mark Robson, 1946])—which turn to more traditional nineteenth-century literary sources, costume and period settings, and heightened allegory (especially Isle and Bedlam)—have been grouped with the everyday realism of the earlier films in the Lewton cycle, especially when read against the more marvelous tendencies of the 30s. Paul Wells observes, for example, that in the final three Lewton films iconic horror star Boris Karloff “subordinated his Universal persona to Lewton’s more naturalistic style, and in so doing demonstrated the shift of emphasis that had occurred in the 1940s” (2000: 56, emphasis added) to more subtle, because “unseen” horrors (2000: 55). That Lewton’s horror productions indicate a perceptible “shift” towards the “unseen” in 1940s horror is part of a critical narrative of the genre that forgets Lewton’s films are—like many 1940s horror films—quite upfront in their deployment of attractions-based spectacle. 5 In fact, the generally perceived aesthetics of absence that scholars highlight in the more celebrated horror films of the 1940s (e.g., The Uninvited [Lewis Allen, 1944], Gaslight [George Cukor, 1944]) becomes a chiaroscuro spectacle in its own right. Derived from the Gothic’s emphasis on lack—of easily identifiable monsters, of moral and epistemological certainties, of perspectival clarity, and of clear narrative causality and closure—the Gothic realism of 1940s horror cycles such as film noir and the paranoid woman’s film relies heavily on polysemic symbolism, and on abstractions of space via shadows and oblique angles, to render America’s urban, rural and domestic spaces disturbing. An aesthetics of absence undergirds the spectral spaces of these films with uncanny potential for revelation of repressed desires and fears.

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My use of “Gothic” as a critical term thus runs counter to the use of

“Gothic” by horror scholars to indicate “fantasy”; instead, it derives from applications of Gothic as a reflexive discourse on representation that challenges positivistic and “constructive” notions of a persuasive, even didactic realism. Gothic realism is an emergent 1940s realism that generates a sense of the real through affect, and runs contrapuntally to the “association with real-
ism and contemporary social commentary” that Jancovich (2007: paragraph

7) identifies in the critical reception of 1940s horror. Gothic realism is a mode
of critical rupture, not of pointed closure.

goTHiC ReALisM AnD THe insCRuTAbLe ReAL

Insofar as realism is associated with the mimetic and quotidian, and Gothic with the irrational and the dreamlike, “Gothic realism” would seem to be a contradiction in terms. The Gothic arose in the eighteenth century as a reaction to the realist novel developed by authors such as Samuel Richardson (e.g., Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, 1740), and therefore has come to be associated with literary and visual modes that operate as a challenge to teleological modes, including dark fantasy, allegory, and the

“fantastic-marvelous” as defined by Tzvetan Todorov (1975). 6 George Haggerty has argued the eighteenth century Gothic novel as formal

“liberation” or “insurgency,” a revolutionary “rejection of the conventional demands of [realist eighteenth century] novel form” (1990: 3). Haggerty, and others, situate the Gothic at the center of a critical shift in eighteenth century aesthetics which emphasized “imagination and private experience”

(1989: 6) over the rational and quotidian. The eighteenth-century Gothic stressed sensation and excess of feeling, over rational cognition, as key to understanding the human experience. It is the Gothic’s turn to the personal and subjective in particular that informs Gothic realism’s “realism of the psyche” in the 1940s that pricks at the collective traumas of World War II and postwar America, and questions the comprehensiveness of
all attempts at representing the overwhelming emotions (not all of them unpleasurable) that come with witnessing, chronicling, or resisting the anxieties of wartime.

Gothic realism collapses realist and anti-realist discourses to form
a hyperrealism characterized by troubled and/or conflicting subjective responses to the real, an increased attention to framing experience through affect, and added scrutiny on the power of narrative and the responsibility of the witness in relaying experience. From its beginnings in the eighteenth century with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765), 7 the Gothic’s characteristic focus on tortured language and textuality—its burdened

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narrators, multilayered or embedded narratives, found manuscripts, journalistic accounts, fragmented documents and cryptic ruins—has come to play a significant part in addressing the limited degree to which even documentary evidence and testimony can be deployed teleologically in the form of narrative to render any experience coherent or comprehensive. 8 In this way, the Gothic shares with the Modernist text a preoccupation with textuality such that text, space and psyche collapse together within an epistemological focus on lived experience as an extended act of witnessing, reportage and, perhaps above all, interpretation. Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace cite Dracula (1897) in this vein, particularly Jonathan Harker’s being “struck by the very materiality of writing and representation, a concern,” they stress,

“which modernism comes to share with the Gothic” (2001: 4). Others, as well, have noted that Gothic in the twentieth century becomes a mode or discourse of addressing the real. Smith and Wallace note that it is the “process, or quest [of raising questions about reality], which brings together the Gothic and the modernist text in their mutual search for a world of meaning which needs to be both recorded and affirmed” (2001: 2). As Fred Botting has pointed out, from the nineteenth century onward, Gothic texts turn increasingly to “concerns about the limits, effects and power of representation in the formation of identities, realities and institutions” (1996: 14).

These concerns are significant to what Botting calls the “diffusion” (1996) of Gothic’s reflexive tendencies, which, along with its conventional nar-
rative “anticlosure” (Heller, 1987: 110), cohere into a twentieth-century
realist discourse emphasizing a reality characterized by indeterminacy, ambiguity, and/or multiplicity of meaning. In the terms of the twentieth century Gothic, reality is that which escapes representation, or lies tantalizingly beyond it.

Gothic and realist discourses meet, then, in their shared concerns with the productive degree to which a text might achieve a sense of immediacy through highlighting its status as a mediation of the real. Over the twentieth century, for example, documentary film and, later, reality television have experimented with increasing degrees of what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin term “hypermediation” (1999), calling attention to style and structure (or highlighting themselves as “spontaneous acts of recording”) to achieve an immediacy (i.e., a sense of realism) characterized by frankness regarding their authorship.9 Louis Bayman, writing of the persistent use of melodrama to highlight the emotional impact of the postwar social realities expressed in Italian Neorealism, explains that

[r]ealism is not simply that which is “realistic,” nor is it one single set of properties, but rather a claim (open to argument and dependent on the conventions an audience is used to) that a particular artwork reaches closer to an important,

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9
otherwise neglected, aspect of reality. Realism then is not a fixed attribute, but a relationship between text, reality and audience that changes as does the culture in which it operates. (2009: 47)

The idea of a realism gesturing towards a “neglected” reality, something beyond the actual that constitutes a sense of the immanent, suggests links to surrealism (as Dudley Andrews notes of French Poetic Realism’s realism of the senses [1995: 20]), and to early twentieth-century revelationist theoretical formulations on photography and the cinema, such as Jean Epstein’s concept of “photogenie” (c. 1924), which shares with surrealism a focus on visual art as an act of uncovering repression. 10 What these revelationist traditions highlight
is the power of affect as a response that approaches more closely those (unrepresentable) aspects of reality which might be associated with overwhelming experience and trauma. Eric Savoy argues that “the overarching tendency of the [American] Gothic has been toward a suspension between the immediacy of terrible affect and its linguistic and epistemological unaccountability” (1998: 14). Some 1940s horror films seem as distant historically and spatially from the immediate or remote concerns of World War II as Poe’s allegorical tales seem to be from the rapidly industrializing nineteenth century United States; yet they similarly redraw the American landscape in terms of affect and excess, evoking a sense of dread infused by the spectral and the uncanny. Three such films— Bluebeard (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1944), Hangover Square (John Brahm, 1945), and House of Dracula (Erle C. Kenton, 1944)—feature scenes of spectacle that resist definitions of affect as “emerg[ing] out of muddy, unmediated
relatedness” (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010: 4), to highlight the gap between
rational understanding and deep feeling in confronting the real .

Comprehension of one’s world in the Gothic is sought through appeals
to sensation rather than logic. Accordingly, it is often in scenes of aesthetic excess that we see the revelatory potential of moments of hypermediation in Gothic realism. Many of these moments of hypermediation are figured through reflexive artistic representations in the diegesis itself—especially music and painting—that halt the narrative, or complement it thematically, serving as what Jane Feuer terms a “defamiliarization device” (quoted in

Jameson, 2007: 166), an act of reflexive interpretation that distances the
viewer from the causal flow of narrative. One such example occurs in Edgar

G. Ulmer’s Bluebeard (1944), which opens with scenes that establish a
nineteenth-century Paris stilled by fears of the film’s eponymous serial killer.

The actual Bluebeard of the film is Gaston Morel (played by John Carradine), a tormented artist who performs puppet operas (for which he also sings the lead), designs his own puppets, and, on the side, creates portraits of beautiful women—his potential victims. Bluebeard is one of several 1940s horror films featuring suffering artists who become somewhat sympathetic monsters, and

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in which those artists are shown struggling creatively to expressed repressed desires. Both The Locket (John Brahm, 1946) and The Two Mrs. Carrolls (Peter Godfrey, 1947), for example, feature scenes seemingly inspired by Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891),11 where shocking paint-ings confront the viewer with overwhelming interpretations of the main characters that are impossible to grasp in one viewing, or without contemplation that extends beyond narrative causality and into the realm of artistic representation. Just after the opening scene of Bluebeard, Ulmer’s film features an attractions-based puppet opera of the story of Faust in miniature—a scene, like those in musicals, played mostly in direct-address to the camera as it announces the film’s thematic focus on the inevitable death of beauty. As the tragic scene plays out for a live audience in a public park, its victimized puppet character, Marguerite, is given a doppelgänger when Morel takes a break to gaze out, wide-eyed, at one of a set of lovely ladies he’s invited to this particular performance. The narrative motivation of this scene is clear: this young lady will become an inspiration, a love interest, and a torment for the insane artist. But the scene itself—alternating amongst Morel, his puppeteers, the puppet opera, the Paris park crowd, and Morel’s potential victims—creates a sense of uncanny space collapsed into Morel’s psyche. Similar to many films noir, there is a sense of deep desire and repression in this performative scene, achieved through the Gothic suggestion that the entire diegesis (like Morel’s puppets) is being orchestrated by an unseen hand.

John Brahm’s Hangover Square (1945), set in London during the Guy

Fawkes era, features another such moment of reflexive excess in its synec-dochic finale. The scene recalls the burning of Manderley in Hitchcock’s

Rebecca (1940), and is set to an eleven-minute “Concerto Macabre” by

Bernard Herrmann (a stunning piece that prefigures themes in the composer’s score for Hitchcock’s Vertigo [1958]). The scene is a self-contained extrava-ganza that caps Brahm’s film with the fiery death of his anxiety-ridden serial killer-composer, George Harvey Bone (played by the equally ill-fated, brilliant actor, Laird Cregar), accompanied by Bone’s (and Herrmann’s) masterpiece of romantic musical excess. The scene is shot through with commingled beauty and horror played directly to the cinemagoer, the camera pushing through the threatening flames towards the long-suffering Bone as he bangs away at a grand piano in anticipation of his demise in a final creative fury.

Despite nineteenth-century historical settings placing their narratives in that

“other” time and space of allegory, these two films’ key scenes extend beyond narrative requirements to speak directly to 1940s audiences of overwhelming emotions and realties that will transcend any representation—realities that must only be evoked, felt, as affect. While moments of spectacle are not unique to cinematic horror in any era, the emotional resonance of these scenes is striking, even shocking, and excessive in the context of the rest of

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the films they punctuate. While it may not be possible to judge the exact reactions 1940s audiences might have had to these scenes, they so greatly extend beyond the requirements of narrative causality that they beg to be considered paradigmatically. In Kristen Thompson’s terms, stylistic “[e]xcess is not only counternarrative; it is also counterunity” (1986: 134), urging the viewer to participate in the highlighting of an extra-textual or para-textual rupture.

In short, cinematic excess invites audiences to contemplate a moment of hypermediation in such moments that speaks to them on an affective level that exceeds the emotional logic of narrative.

In Erle C. Kenton’s underrated “monster rally” 12 film, House of Dracula

(1944), the titular count (again, played by John Carradine) and the Wolf Man

(Lon Chaney Jr.) take on the role of suffering monsters, both seeking a scientific cure for their cursed conditions. In a scene that highlights the same fatal (and futile) romantic pairing that 1940s viewers were likely to find in film noir and the paranoid woman’s film, Dracula enters to exercise his hypnotic will over an unwitting potential victim, Miliza Morelle (Martha O’Driscoll), who sits playing Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” on a grand piano.

As Miliza falls under Dracula’s power, the scene becomes a tour de force psychic staging of the anxieties of the potential victim, figured through her sudden virtuosity in creating unconscious (and even gloomier) variations on the familiar Beethoven piece she has been playing. “I never heard this music before; yet, I’m playing it,” she says as the Count approaches, his eyes wid-ened in tight close-up—a clear imitation of both Lugosi’s performance and Karl Freund’s persistent framing of him in Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931). 13

The scene is choreographed like a dance, emphasizing and then gradually shrinking the vast Victorian-era set to a focus on just the two actors’ faces.

As Miliza’s music becomes wildly variant, the following dialogue occurs, hinting at mingled feelings of desire, alienation, and dread:

Dracula: You’re creating it, for me.

Miliza: It frightens me.

Dracula: It’s beautiful. It’s the music of the world from which I come.

Miliza: It makes me see strange things . . . people who are dead, yet they’re alive.

Dracula: Mine is a world without material needs.

Miliza: It calls to me. But I’m afraid.

The dialogue collapses fears of the past, longing in the present, and anxiety about the future, highlighting the scene as a classic formulation of what Kirsten Moana Thompson calls “scopic dread” (2007: 25), or that dread

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which is associated with repressed knowledge. 14 Thompson bases her con-
ceptualization of dread on the Kierkegaardian model, which sees dread as an open-ended concept oriented towards the future, but informed by past trauma, and “a paradoxical form of desire and fear” (2007: 8). As Thompson explains, “Kierkegaardian dread [ . . . ] has three principal components

[ . . . ]: first, radical freedom (or the moral dread occasioned by absolute choice), which gives rise to a fear of the future and which is mediated by past actions; second, a paradoxical ambivalence that is connected to the uncanny; and third, a connection to the cataclysmic qualities of trauma” (2007: 18).

In American Gothic discourse, the mythical notion of “America the Free”

collapses with the “moral dread occasioned by absolute choice.” Dracula’s past(ness) haunts Miliza with both the possibility of another world and the fear of choosing her own path; ironically, this choice is offered to her under Dracula’s hypnotic will, suggesting that in this world, such radical choice is perhaps only hypothetical, linking House of Dracula to a thematic tradition of
determinism usually attributed to 1940s film noir (See Bould, 2005).

As Dracula releases Miliza, the music returns to the familiar cadenced melancholy of “Moonlight Sonata”—i.e., to form(ula) and to structure—but the excessive emotional overtones of Miliza’s sudden virtuosic performance, and the scene, remain. The entire scene, like that of the puppet opera in Bluebeard and Bone’s final orchestral masterpiece in Hangover Square, is focused on the imposition of a sinister will as an act (and a performance) of forced variation from the norm. Miliza may be falling under an evil spell, or she may be opening up to her own repressed desires for pleasures beyond the
physical and the everyday (and for death).15 It is this kind of pleasurable melancholy and barely capped longing for escape and release that characterizes 1940s horror cinema’s and film noir’s consistently humanized, eroticized, conflicted, and complicated monsters— as well as their potential victims. 16

The variation on a musical theme in this scene, like the scenes in Bluebeard and Hangover Square, underscores repression and seeks to shock in the Benjaminian sense of “tactile appropriation” (quoted in Reyes, 2013: 253), where a shift occurs from identification to affect and sensation, relating particularly to the spectator’s bodily relationship to the cinematic object. These scenes play against formula—they perform for us—addressing the audience directly in terms that do not encourage closure, but instead, as Eric Savoy puts it, discussing the Lacanian notion of the unrepresentable “Real,” suggest

“the myriad things and amorphous physicality beyond our representation that haunt our subjectivity and demand our attention, that compel us to explana-
tory language, but resist the strategies of that language” (Savoy, 2002: 169).

Laura Frost, referring to the aesthetics of post 9/11 horror cinema, has termed this disjunction between the onset of traumatic events and their representation, the “drama of the discrepancy between the spectacle and its meaning”

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(2011: 14). This drama in 1940s horror cinema occurs within the realm of sensation. In such scenes, the horror genre begins, via Gothic discourses around representation, to tackle the question of representation of experience through epistemologies of feeling. Emotion and affect are the tools here, but not only generating what Noel Carroll (1990) calls “art-horror”—affect here pushes beyond cognitive processes that engender “pleasurable horror,” to the sublime, the melancholy, the tactile, and the profoundly spiritual moment of experiencing art, or an artistic moment. These films highlight themselves as self-conscious works of art, these scenes as cultural markers of emotional embodiment and feeling that awaken viewers to a sense of history. They are akin to what Adam Lowenstein calls “allegorical moment[s]”: “a shocking collision of film, spectator, and history where registers of bodily space and historical time are disrupted, confronted, and intertwined” (2005: 2). 17

I would suggest in this light that 1940s horror films show artists deeply engaged in questions of realism to express the depth of the domestic experience of 1940s Americans during wartime, even to the point of anticipating the exigencies around the problems of documentary representation, and knowing through feeling, that will be taken up by later twentieth-century filmmakers such as James Marsh ( Wisconsin Death Trip, 1999) and Jessica Yu ( In the Realms of the Unreal, 2004), and theorists such as Bill Nichols (1995, 1992) and Elizabeth Cowie (2011, 1999).

FoRTies ReALisM: “suspenDeD
on THe bRink oF MeAning”

Forties genre cinema is frequently discussed as gradually shifting towards a realist mode interested in rational explorations of the psychology of wartime America. Dana Polan argues that the “war period becomes discursively a moment of psychical tension—the difficulties of homefront life and a fear of war as a source of irremediable psychological change” (1986: 180–81). This, he suggests, makes the era ripe for narratives that turn on tropes of chaos and closure, illness and cure, especially through recourse to the teleological psychoanalytical models gaining popularity at the time. Within the context of 1940s horror, specifically, this same “psychical tension” yields narratives of mystery and detection that generate a sense of pervasive dread of wholesale psychic rupture, and that yield a number of horror-inflected cycles that work within the troubling discourses of the American Gothic. Certainly films like Rebecca and The Uninvited flaunt their high-Gothic legacies proudly (and expensively) in narratives of hauntings (supernatural or otherwise) that, once solved, announce psychic release and closure. But these discourses of haunting are also in operation in film noir and the paranoid woman’s film, where

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there prevails a sense that everyday domestic, rural, urban spaces are murky moral labyrinths that suggest discernible but otherwise impenetrable menace.

Writing in 1946, Siegfried Kracauer identifies this interiorizing of the source of horror in his discussion of a number of “horror thrillers” ([1946] 2003: 110) of the 1940s. I cite Kracauer’s use of the phrase because the films that he discusses as “terror films” and “horror thrillers” would not be categorized as horror according to current critical trends, but instead as (1) film noir ( Shadow of a Doubt [1943], Somewhere in the Night [1946], Shock [1946], The Lost Weekend [1945], Dark Corner [1946]); (2) paranoid woman’s films ( Suspicion [1941], Gaslight); or (3) hybrids that resist and/or combine such categories ( Spellbound [1945], The Spiral Staircase). 18 Kracauer particularly
singles out the turn in 1940s horror cinema to madness, sadism, and morbidity. 19 He laments what he sees as the “failure of the movies to offer or
suggest solutions” to the psychological and moral morass they conceptualize, adding that “the all-pervasive fear that threatens the psychic integrity of the average person seems accepted as inevitable and almost inscrutable”

in 1940s films ([1946] 2003: 107). Kracauer’s observations here parallel the “psychical tension” and “irremediable psychological change” that Polan identifies as paradigmatic of 1940s cinema. Additionally, the lack of closure and the “inscrutability” that Kracauer sees as attending these concerns is, of course, characteristic of a long-standing tradition in Gothic discourse to test the teleological paradigms of rational analysis as a way of documenting or expressing experience.

Though appealing to decidedly bourgeois tastes, Gothic realism nonetheless draws its inspiration from the same sensationalist appeal to the emotions as the “low” nineteenth-century sources that inspired writers such as Poe and Melville. David Reid and Jayne Walker trace the abandoned city of film noir back through to the Gothic conventions of nineteenth century sensation fiction and the popular “city mysteries” and “dark adventure” 20 novels that
period produced in large numbers (1999: 67–68). Though often disguising this “crude” appeal behind big budgets, Hollywood’s Gothic realism is not unlike other national realisms forming around WWII. Noting that Italian

“neorealist revelation occurs frequently through the excessive melodramatic impact of social reality” (2009: 56), Louis Bayman makes explicit parallels between the realism of American crime fiction and Italy’s popular national realism:

This realism is in tune with the legacy of the American novelists of the 1930s—

Ernest Hemingway and the crime writers Dashiell Hammett and James M.

Cain (whose The Postman Always Rings Twice provided the basis for [Lucino Visconti’s] Ossessione [1943]). These writers provide another example of a realism that is not based on rationalist epistemology, but a direct vividness of

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communication, a newsworthiness within environments that flesh out a wider social picture, and, like nineteenth-century verism, the realism of a non-idealized portrayal of reality. (2009, 55)

Bayman’s work suggests a clear parallel here between the two realist trends in Italy and the United States similar to Dudley Andrew’s discussion of the pulp tradition that inspired French poetic realism. In effect, these national realisms are not only comparable in their derivation from crime, pulp, sensationalist and Gothic literature, but also in their decided shift away from

“rationalist epistemolog[ies]” towards “another,” “direct” and “vivid” realism of the senses. Likewise, in their linking of nineteenth-century tabloid actualities and pseudoscience to the moody visions of the noir city and the 1940s film’s typical turn to “vulgar Freudianism” (1993: 68), I see Reid and Walker identifying a cinematic iteration in 1940s Hollywood of the literary American Gothic’s peculiar (and visceral) interrogation of the real through what would otherwise seem to be incongruous gestures to documentary subject matter (intriguing ciphers, traumatic events) and aesthetics (documents and records, private journals, first-person chronicles).

The turn in film noir to the struggle to represent the potentially unfathom-able lived experience of modernity through affective means that suggest doom, fatalism, and potentially overwhelming revelations is a feature of quintessential American Gothic texts from as early as the mid-nineteenth century. Referring to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s works, Eric Savoy highlights an American Gothic para-reality where “the actual is imbued with the darkly
hypothetical” (Savoy, 1998: 6). This “darkly hypothetical” reality is charac-
teristic of works such as Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) (a hoax framed as a found manuscript); 21 Melville’s metaphysical adventure epic, Moby-Dick (1851); and, in the twentieth-century, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) with its multiple, conflicting interior monologues. But it is also characteristic of 1940s films such as Citizen Kane

(Orson Welles, 1941) and The Locket. In these works, narratives are framed as extended interpretations and impressions by characters who function in what Roger B. Salomon calls the “crucial role of witnessing” (2002: 76) in horror. In The Locket, Nancy Monks (Laraine Day), a character associated with both the homefront (as a secretive serial bride) and the war effort (as a nurse), is neither knowable, nor is she capable of knowing herself. The mystery surrounding Nancy produces only a palimpsestic “heap of bewildering
fragments” (Toles, 2009: 45). In Orson Welles’s film, closest in conception
and form to Faulkner’s multi-perspective novel, the journalist who undertakes a quest to discover the mystery of “Rosebud,” the final word spoken by Charles Foster Kane, initiates an often conflicting and over-determined polyvocal narrative delivered (because “witnessed”) by several of Kane’s

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intimates—a narrative that J. P. Telotte suggests may parallel Kane’s own

“narrational longing for completion and explication, and which seems similarly destined to frustration and fragmentation, because of the absence of a single, coherent perspective on these events” (1984: 57). In Citizen Kane (as in Faulkner’s Absalom), storytelling itself becomes monstrous, as it serves only to construct manifold identities for Kane, like a series of masks over-laid, or like the multiplied mirror images of Kane that diminish into a mise-en-abyme in one of the film’s late scenes in the corridors of the castle-like

Xanadu (see Telotte, 1984: 61–62).

Citizen Kane generates a sense of realist horror via Gothic strategies of highlighting the failure of narrative to offer definitive conclusions. Like its literary precursors in Poe, Melville, and Faulkner, Welles’s film fits squarely into an American Gothic tradition where narrator-witnesses struggle to comprehend maddeningly opaque symbols, to explore or evoke extreme emotions and states of mind, and to document or chronicle often shocking, incomprehensible experiences. The Gothic world offers itself up to be read, but it is also abstruse, densely layered, and polysemic. Kane’s “Rosebud,” for example—
like Kane himself, Melville’s white whale, the sealed plantation house of Sutpen’s Hundred in Faulkner’s Absalom, and the indecipherable hiero-glyphics and images of blankness that finish Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym—is an object that gives itself up to multiple interpretations prompting further questions, wider mysteries. It is, in Poe’s words, a “text that does not permit itself to be read” ([1840] 1984: 388). More horrifying than any revelation of monstrosity in these works is the idea that “reality” exists within a disjunc-ture between experience and any possibility of successful communication or comprehension of that experience. The interest here turns to the “failure of
language” (Salomon, 2002: 84) and representation to capture the real.

Anne Williams has discussed the Gothic’s preoccupation with the “implicit inadequacies” (1995: 67) of language, arguing that “[m]ost—perhaps all—

Gothic conventions express some anxiety about ‘meaning’” (1995: 67). In the American Gothic, particularly, metaphors are stretched towards inscrutability, and even monstrosity becomes so pervasive as to become unmoored from convenient fixed meanings. In Savoy’s terms, the American strain of

Gothic becomes a particularly “historiograph[ical]” mode (Savoy, 1998:

17), giving presence to a sense of history by constructing a perpetually-
questioning American subjectivity that is always-already haunted. Savoy cites David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpinski’s (1993) use of words like “rift” and “dark chasm” (1998: 7) to refer to American Gothic’s figuration of history as absented, threatening from the margins, something in excess of representation. This is a sense of history that “derives from [a]

conflict between the inscripted history of civilization and the history of the other, somehow immanent in the landscape of the frontier” (quoted in Savoy,

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1998: 17, emphasis added). Gothic realism in Hollywood cinema of the 1940s is, I wish to suggest, a national “realism of the senses” that runs in parallel to the melodramatic tendencies of Italian Neorealism (Bayman, 2009) and the lyricism of French Poetic realism. It is a realism characterized primarily by evoking dread in the face of potential horrific revelation of underlying, widespread trauma—a dread that extends to the inability of the subject to fully represent that trauma, or to presence it.

The lack of ethical focus and positivistic closure that Kracauer identifies in 1940s horror films is characteristic, then, of the American Gothic’s sense of the inscrutable, and its particular challenge to teleological realist representation, specifically running against the trend towards cure and closure that Polan indentifies in 1940s realist discourse. The films Kracauer discusses (ranging, in today’s critical terms, from horror, to film noir, to paranoid woman’s films) depict a highly subjective world in which past traumas haunt the present; in which everyday, personal, and domestic spaces are unstable,
unsettled, uncanny; and in which “erupti[ons]” (Kracauer, [1946] 2003: 106)

of violence are the subject’s common response to frustrated attempts to interpret a world that resists easy readings. Kracauer highlights the sense
of “ambient dread” (Cohen, 1996: viii) and paranoia that characterizes both
the American Gothic and 1940s horror. The conflicting discourses between rational (i.e., realist) and anti-rational (i.e., Gothic) modes announced by Kracauer’s concerns suggest horror films of the 1940s to be responding to wider epistemological shifts in wartime America that resonate throughout the decade in terms of the Gothic’s characteristic moral, psychological and formal “transgression” and “excess” (Botting, 1996), until they are taken up by 1950s horror cinema’s ostensibly more externalized focus on the blessings and curses of science and technology. 22 In the wake of popular social realist
films like I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Mervin LeRoy, 1932), which did for prison reform in the south what Anatole Litvak’s stark melodrama The Snake Pit (1948) did in the 1940s for mental institutions, or the very popular U.S.-sponsored documentary, The Plow that Broke the Plains (Pare Lorentz, 1937–1938) (Richardson, 1993: 16–17), it makes sense that Kracauer would envision a more constructive, “therapeutic” ([1946] 2003: 110) realism of social rehabilitation than he was seeing in the 1940s thrillers’ deployment of violence and uncertainty. Dudley Andrew has noted the continued trend in critical discussions of 1930s French Poetic Realism to frame “realism” in similar ways, as “a decidedly ethical term for which the word ‘conscience’

might readily substitute” (1995: 220).

Gothic-realist films derive much of their impact by generating what

E. Ann Kaplan calls an “affect aesthetic” (2005: 76). Kaplan describes this aesthetic as a manifestation of a “vicarious traumatization” (2005: 20) where trauma is not limited to the individual but can be shared by those exposed

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to it “indirectly” (2005: 1) or “collective[ly]” (2005: 19), such as in times of war, or where traumatic experience is disseminated through the mass-media (2005: 2). In the 1940s, cinemagoers would have been used to reportage from the war theater in the March of Time newsreels (1933–1943) created by Life magazine’s Henry Luce, and produced by Louis de Rochemont and Life’s Roy E. Larsen. Orson Welles, who had already shocked audiences into awareness of the manipulative power of the mass media with the thrill-inducing ontological uncertainty of his radio mockumentary, The War of the Worlds (1938) for The Mercury Theatre on the Air, brought the same experimentation to Citizen Kane in the form of his satirical mockumentary “News on the March”

sequence, which painstakingly recreated the March of Time expository form, grainy visuals and authoritative voice-over, and anticipated the roving-camera aesthetic that would only become popular in documentary a few decades later with the development of hand-held cameras. Welles’s quoting of the documentary style of his day was no mere ludic self-consciousness, but instead highlighted the limited degree to which the journalistic media could speak to 1940s experience. Laura Mulvey notes that the journalistic “quest for ‘Rosebud’ that precipitates the quest in Citizen Kane emanates directly from the

[ News on the March] editor’s dissatisfaction with the newsreel at the beginning of the film, and the editor himself, Rawlston, represents the new film journalism of [Henry] Luce himself” ([1992] 2012, 47) with its emphasis on offering audiences a clear, comprehensive narrative that includes a sense of closure. Luce publications were attached to social reform, and feature articles in Life often paralleled major Hollywood productions in the 1940s that acted as “therapeutic” (Kracauer) realist melodramatic exposés. 23 The producer of
the newsreel on Charles Foster Kane, however, calls for an account of Kane’s life that is more sensationalistic, perhaps, but more emotionally resonant, for sure. Getting at the heart of a potential tragic loss or lack in Kane’s life is, in other words, much more real than the authoritative closure of the newsreel.

While this moment could be read as a critique of the media’s drive towards comprehensiveness at all costs (including misrepresentation), it also smacks of Welles’s interest in exploring the degrees to which any representation can speak to the realities and key figures of his time.

Inside both the physical space of Xanadu and the haunted mind of megalomaniacal media mogul Kane, a traumatic history lies locked away, and the rather startling shock cut from a filtered extreme close-up of Kane’s lips whispering the word, “Rosebud” deep inside his immense palace, to the stark, expository newsreel style and bleating voice-over announcing the “News on the March!” sequence, blatantly proclaims the Gothic realist discourse that will go underground in most of 1940s horror-inflected cinema. 24 Laura

Mulvey (citing cinematographer James Wong Howe) notes that Welles and his cinematographer Greg Toland directly mimic the photojournalistic style

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of both Life (est. 1936) and Look (est. 1937) magazines in the film’s general use of sharper, high-contrast deep-focus photography ([1992], 2012). This aesthetic is in contrast, however, to the grainy murkiness of the film’s expressionistic opening and closing scenes, as well as with the nightmare-like beach

“picnic” excursion that Kane forces disillusioned wife, Susan Alexander Kane, to attend. In these scenes, Welles and Toland announce their film as high Gothic; and, indeed, the opening of their film recalls the opening of Hitchcock’s Rebecca, released the previous year, which invites audiences to enter a dream centered on another mysterious house: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” Similarly, Citizen Kane opens with the gloomiest of Gothic horror conventions: the isolated castle, Xanadu, viewed through the bars of locked wrought-iron gates. Kane’s haunted Usher-like estate is chock-full of the metaphorical accouterments of a diseased psyche: creeping mist, zoo animals stirring in cages, and signs warning trespassers to steer clear of this boundary marker into the irrational world of Kane.

In this chaos of words, images and generic cues, Welles’s film announces itself as an inscrutable text, or what Poe called “a mystery all insoluble”

in “The Fall of the House of Usher” ([1840] 1984: 317).25 Mulvey reads this opening as establishing oneiric, fragmentary, and disjunctive clues that announce the film as one that “challenges conventional relationship between screen and spectator and constructs a language of cinema that meshes with the language of the psyche” ([1992] 2012: 25). The straightforward, gloomy Gothic imagery that bookends the film not only refers back to two previous decades of Old Dark House films, Dracula’s castles, and mad scientists’ odd collected experiments—it also formally seals off and effectively buries its four narrative threads like Gothic hidden manuscripts waiting to be uncovered; this narrative preface and its coda are also, as Mulvey notes, given no source of enunciation in the film’s diegesis—they are directed solely to the viewer. The shocking juxtaposition of the “News on the March” segment with this decidedly Gothic framing thus becomes something of an intrusion into the intensely subjective psychical world that prefaces the film, announcing a clash of Gothic and realist discourses and styles that will be the film’s primary operative mode throughout as it layers chronicle upon chronicle of the enigmatic Kane. 26 Furthermore, by positioning the ostensibly “reliable”

and “authoritative” journalistic footage of the News on the March film as only one of several incomplete and ultimately incongruous takes on the story of Charles Foster Kane, the film highlights the effectiveness of the Gothic in service of questioning positivistic narratives even through a phantasmagoria of possibilities rather than via concrete, definitive closure. With Citizen Kane, Welles, co-writer Herman Mankiewicz, and cinematographer Toland initiate a mock-documentary discourse and aesthetic that will weave its way through much of 1940s horror and noir, arguably anticipating the increasingly popular

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turn after the war to the documentary-style thrillers of Louis de Rochemont (initiated by The House on 92nd Street [Henry Hathaway, 1945]), and laying the groundwork for fascinating semi-documentary experiments like Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948).

ConCLusion

Forties horror, supernatural or otherwise, can be said to shift towards a combination of psychological realism figured through a rationalist discourse of skeptics, detection, psychoanalysis, and a realism of affect that punctuates contemporary settings with moments of aesthetic excess that render the everyday disturbing and inscrutable. In identifying a discourse of Gothic realism in 1940s horror films, I do not mean to redraw the boundaries of horror cinema in the 1940s as merely a wider circle, but to suggest that 1940s Hollywood cinema becomes a hybrid site of struggle and contention regarding how best to articulate social, cultural and political anxieties on the homefront for both women and men. Viewed through the lens of Gothic realism, the paranoid woman’s film, and film noir, for example, can be said to form two sides of a coin, identifying a realist horror that plays upon dread of a world rendered suspect, unreadable and unsafe for women and men, respectively. These films and other 1940s horror films now labeled

“thriller,” “mystery film,” “serial killer film” (see Jancovich, 2012) and so
on, all evoke the Gothic’s disturbing (and disturbingly parallel) physical and psychic spaces, and they share its interest in complex monsters that provoke an ambivalent response from both other characters, and audiences. This turn to the Gothic—itself always a combination of pleasure and horror, belief and skepticism, the mundane and the absurd—shows 1940s horror films to form a significant contribution to Hollywood figurations of realism.

noTes

1. I would like to thank Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare, Cory Legassic, and Carl Sederholm for their invaluable editorial comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

2. On the uncanny as the intimation of a deeper or unseen reality, Samuel Weber writes:

The uncanny is a defense which is ambivalent and which expresses itself in the compulsive curiosity . . . the craving to penetrate the flimsy appearances to the essence beneath. . . .

This desire to penetrate, discover and ultimately to conserve the integrity of perception: perceiver and perceived, the wholeness of the body, the power of vision—all this implies a denial of that almost-nothing which can hardly be seen, a denial that in turn involves a certain structure of narration, in which this denial repeats and articulates itself. (1973: 73).

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3. For example, The House on 92nd Street (Henry Hathaway, 1945), 13 Rue Mad-eleine (Henry Hathaway, 1947), Boomerang! (Elia Kazan, 1947), Call Northside 777

(1948, d. Henry Hathaway), and The Whistle at Eaton Falls (Robert Siodmak, 1951).

4. The other films in the series are The Leopard Man (1943) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943), both directed by Jacques Tourneur; The Ghost Ship (1943) and The Seventh Victim (1943), both directed by Mark Robson; Curse of the Cat People (1944) and The Body Snatcher (1945), both directed by Robert Wise; and Isle of the Dead (1945) and Bedlam (1946) both directed by Robson. DeGiglio-Bellemare (2014) argues for including Lewton’s Mademoiselle Fifi (1944), directed by Robert Wise, as one of the Lewton unit’s horror productions, though this film is not included in the recent Turner Entertainment “Val Lewton Horror Collection” (2005). See Siegel (1973), Telotte (1985), and Newman (1999), for framings of the Lewton films as alternatives to the major trends in 1940s horror.

5. See Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare’s chapter in this collection for more on the attractions-based aesthetic of the Lewton productions.

6. Todorov describes the fantastic—that liminal space of “hesitation” between uncanny (i.e., psychological) and supernatural solutions—as “the bad conscience of

[the] positivist” (1975: 168) 19th century—and somewhat laments that it cannot have the same effect in a new era in which literature has lost its power to “transcri[be]”

even a skewed reality (1975: 168).

7. In his preface to The Castle of Otranto (1765), considered the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole highlights the inherent reflexivity of his project: “Terror, the author’s principal engine, prevents the story from ever languishing; and it is so often contrasted by pity, that the mind is kept up in a constant vicissitude of interesting passions. [ . . . ]

Though the machinery is invention, and the names of the actors imaginary, I cannot but believe that the groundwork of the story is founded on truth” (Horace Walpole, 1765).

Walpole originally framed The Castle of Otranto as a found text, “translated from the original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto” (from the frontispiece of the original edition in 1765). (I would like to thank Francesca Saggini for this insight.) Picking up on Walpole’s proto-mockumentary mode, Czech surrealist filmmaker Jan Svankmajer’s short adaptation of Walpole’s novel, Otrantský Zámek (1977), is itself a mockumentary, a pseudo-archaeological quest regarding the “actual” location of the novel’s events.

8. I have argued this point in terms of contemporary Gothic documentaries such as In the Realms of the Unreal (2004), Cropsey (2009), and Resurrect Dead (2011) in a co-authored article (with Papagena Robbins), “Gothumentary: The Gothic Unsettling of Documentary’s Rhetoric of Rationality,” in Textus: English Studies in Italy (25 [3]: 2012).

9. They write: “Hypermedia and transparent media are opposite manifestations of the same desire: the desire to get past the limits of representation and to achieve the real” (Bolter and Grusin, 1999: 53).

10. Discussing Epstein’s theories in terms of a cinema of “immanence,” Malcom Turvey (1998) uses Wittgenstein’s concept of “aspect dawning” to describe this sense of an “other” sense of the real. What is perceived during aspect-dawning, according to Wittgenstein, is “not a property of the object, but an internal relation between it and other objects” (quoted in Turvey, 1998: 45).

11. Adapted as a 1945 prestige horror film by Albert Lewin for MGM.

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12. The phrase refers to a subset of 1940s horror films that feature numerous classic monsters in the same film. Examples include House of Frankenstein (Erle C.

Kenton, 1944) and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (Charles Barton, 1948).

13. The cinematography for House of Dracula was by George Robinson, who also shot Universal’s Son of Frankenstein (Rowland V. Lee, 1939) and Tarantula (Jack Arnold, 1955).

14. Thompson divides her focus on dread into three types: “memorial,” or that dread which is associated with “remembering”; “scopic,” or that dread which is associated with repressed knowledge; and “specular,” or that dread which is “attache[d]

to” or projected onto a double (2007: 25).

15. Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady (1944) features a similar scene where music underscores repressed desires: we descend with disguised, questing heroine, Carol (Ella Raines), into the liminal depths of a basement nightclub, a clear setting for the unconscious—and the film noir’s equivalent of the Gothic’s attics and labyrinths.

The frenetic editing, oblique angles, aggressively improvised jazz, jutting trom-bones, pounding drums, and thrusting bodies in the claustrophobic space all work together to create a scene of stylistic excess that generates a frisson: about the sexual tension underlying this urban world, as well as the potential danger to the heroine who actively alienates herself by taking on the role of detective in a morally murky city. A moment in which Carol confronts her “masked” face to reapply her makeup underscores her—and perhaps the audience’s—discomfort with the scene. See Anne Golden’s chapter in this book for a discussion of similar scenes in Robert Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase, especially its opening scene, which plays upon nostalgia for silent cinema while constructing multiple desiring gazes (some sanctioned, some harmful) and a dense subjectivity.

16. See Mark Jancovich’s chapter in this book for how these shared traits among villains and victims play out in the arena of horror performance against 1940s conceptualizations of psychological monstrosity.

17. See Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare’s chapter in this book for his application of Walter Benjamin’s notion of shock to what Adam Lowenstein calls a “Grand-Guignol approach to history” (2005: 44).

18. Jancovich makes a similar observation in his chapter in this book. See Jancovich (2005, 2009, 2009b) for further discussion of how critical reception in the 1940s termed such films.

19. In her chapter in this book, Kier-La Janisse parallels Kracauer’s assessment of 1940s “sickness” in wartime to a similar “post-war disillusionment” and cultural malaise in the wake of the Vietnam War.

20. The term “dark adventure” is David S. Reynolds’s. Theresa A. Goddu (2008) highlights the problematic high-low cultural binaries attendant to the transference of terminology from “Gothic” (rooted in the popular) to “dark” (rooted in the Romantic tradition) (2008: 6–7).

21. Poe’s only novel-length work, Pym was presented as an “exposé” of an actual voyage—an autobiographical “account” by the “author,” Arthur Gordon Pym, who, as Poe explains in the book’s Preface, entrusted it to Poe as an editor. The Gothic concern here with highlighting the text’s status as “document” can be marked as early as the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1765). (See note 7 above.)

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22. See Ian Olney’s chapter in this book for a reading that challenges the traditional periodization of 1950s horror cinema as marked entirely by outside invaders.

23. As Karen Herland notes in her chapter in this book on Anatole Litvak’s The Snake Pit (1948).

24. In this way, at least, the decade begins and ends with de Rochemont’s documentary aesthetic.

25. Mulvey notes that the opening of the film establishes a “readerliness” that many have noted ([1992] 2012, 22). “NO TRESPASSING” is the first thing we see on a huge gate with a “K” on it. Later, “Rosebud” will be another textual cue and clue, as will Dorothy Comingore’s (Susan Alexander Kane’s) puzzles, which signal the film’s own act of narrative piecing-together. Most of the film’s major narrative segments identify their narrator-chroniclers by name: Susan Alexander’s name and face appear on a billboard, prefacing her narrative; a bust of Kane’s benefactor, Walter Parks Thatcher, is engraved with Thatcher’s name at the mausoleum-like Thatcher library where journalist Jerry Thompson reads the sections of Thatcher’s memoirs devoted to Kane (“pages 83 to 142” warns the stern librarian who recalls Kane’s equally stern mother).

26. Welles and Toland continually highlight the fact that the newsreel can only look at Kane from various distances outside his life: one particular image in the sequence underscores this idea by featuring a shaky camera peering through a chain-link fence mirroring the film’s opening image where the viewer similarly “peers”

through Kane’s wrought-iron gates.

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Bayman, Louis. 2009. “Melodrama as Realism in Italian Neorealism.” Realism and the Audiovisual Media. Edited by Lúcia Nagib and Cecília Mello. Basingstike, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bazin, André. 1967. What Is Cinema? Volume 1. Translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Benjamin, Walter. [1931] 2006. “A Short History of Photography.” The Archive.

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Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Botting, Fred. 1996. Gothic. New York: Routledge.

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Bourde, Raymond, and Etienne Chaumeton. [1955] 2006. “Towards a Definition of Film Noir.” Film Noir Reader. Ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini. Pompton Plains, NJ: Limelight Editions. 17–25.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 1996. “Monster Theory: Seven Theses.” Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (ed.) Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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Cowie, Elizabeth. 2011. Recording Reality, Desiring the Real. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

———. 1999. “The Spectacle of Actuality.” Ed. Jane Gaines and Michael Renov.

Visible Evidence. Mineapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 19–45.

DeGiglio-Bellemare, Mario. 2014. “Val Lewton and the Grand-Guignol: Mademoiselle Fifi and Horror Canonicity.” Horror Studies. 5 (1): 3–29.

Durgnat, Raymond. 1993. (1970) “Paint it Black: The Family Tree of the Film Noir.” Film Noir Reader. Ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini. New York: Limelight Editions. 37–52.

Feuer, Jane. 1993. The Hollywood Musical. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Frost, Laura. 2011. “Black Screens, Lost Bodies: The Cinematic Apparatus of 9/11

Horror.” Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror. (Eds.) Aviva Briefel and Sam J. Miller. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth. 2010. “An Inventory of Shimmers.” The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Haggerty, George E. 1989. Gothic Fiction / Gothic Form. University Park and London: Pennsylvania University Press.

Heller, Terry. 1987. The Delights of Terror: An Aesthetics of the Tale of Terror.

Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Jameson, Fredric. 2007. “On the Existence of Italy.” Signatures of the Visible.

Routledge classics. New York: Routledge.

Jancovich, Mark. 2012. “‘Frighteningly Real’: Realism, Social Criticism and the Psychological Killer in the Critical Reception of the Late 1940s Horror-Thriller.”

European Journal of American Culture. 31 (1): 25–39.

———. 2009. “‘Master of Concentrated Suspense’: Horror, Gender and Fantasy in the Critical Reception of Fritz Lang During the 1940s.” Studies in European Cinema. 5 (3): 171–183.

———. 2009b. “‘Thrills and Chills’: Horror, the Woman’s Film, and the Origins of Film Noir.” New Review of Film and Television Studies. 7 (2): 157–171.

———. 2008. “Pale Shadows: Narrative Hierarchies in the Historiography of 1940s Horror.” The Shifting Definitions of Genre. Eds. Lincoln Geraghty and Mark Jancovich. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. 15–32.

———. 2007. “Crack-Up: Psychological Realism, Generic Transformation and the Demise of the Paranoid Woman’s Film.” Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, available online at www.irishGothichorrorjournal.homestead.com.

Accessed 25 April, 2013.

———. 2005. “The Meaning of Mystery Genre, Marketing and the Universal Sherlock Holmes Series of the 1940s”. Film International. 3 (5): 34–45.

Kaplan, E. Ann. 2005. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Kracauer, Siegfried. (1946) Spring/Summer 2003. “Hollywood’s Terror Films: Do They Reflect an American State of Mind?” New German Critique. (89). 105–111.

Lowenstein, Adam. 2005. Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Mogen, David, Scott Patrick Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpinski. 1993. Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Mulvey, Laura. [1992] 2012. Citizen Kane. London: British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan.

Nichols, Bill. 1995. Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

———. 1991. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Poe, Edgar A. [1840] 1984. “The Man of the Crowd.” Poe: Poetry and Tales. Ed.

P. F. Quinn. New York: Library of America. 388–396.

———. [1839] 1984. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Poe: Poetry and Tales. Ed.

P. F. Quinn. New York: Library of America. 317–336.

Polan, Dana. 1986. Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940–1950. New York: Columbia University Press.

Reid, David, and Jayne L. Walker. 1993. “Strange Pursuit: Cornell Woolrich and the Abandoned City of the Forties.” Shades of Noir. Ed. Joan Copjec. London and New York: Verso. 57–96.

Reynolds, David S. 1988. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. New York: Knopf .

Robbins, Papagena, and Kristopher Woofter. 2012. “Gothumentary: The Gothic Unsettling of Documentary’s Rhetoric of Rationality.” Textus: English Studies in Italy. 25 (3): 49–62.

Salomon, Roger B. 2002. Mazes of the Serpent: An Anatomy of Horror Narrative.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Savoy, Eric. 2002. “The Rise of the American Gothic.” In Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

167–188.

———. 1998. “The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of the American Gothic.” American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative. Ed. Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Schneider, Steven. “Uncanny Realism and the Decline of the Modern Horror Film.”

Paradoxa. 3.3–4 (1997): 417–428. Print.

Siegel, Joel E. 1973. Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror. New York: Viking Press.

Skal, David J. (1993) 2001. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror.

New York: Faber and Faber.

Smith, Andrew, and Jeff Wallace. 2001. “Introduction: Gothic Modernisms: History, Culture and Aesthetics.” Gothic Modernisms. Ed. Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace.

New York: Palgrave. 1–10.

Telotte, J.P. 1985. Dreams of Darkness: Fantasy and the Films of Val Lewton.

Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

———. January 1984. “Narration, Desire, and a Lady from Shanghai.” South Atlantic Review. 49 (1): 56–71.

Thompson, Kirsten Moana. 2007. Apocalyptic Dread: American Film at the Turn of the Millennium. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

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Thompson, Kristin. 1986. “The Concept of Cinematic Excess.” Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. Ed. Philip Rosen. New York: Columbia University Press. 30–142.

Todorov, Tzvetan. 1975. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre.

Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP.

Toles, George. 2009. “The Gift of Amnesia in John Brahm’s The Locket.” Film International. (42): 32–55.

Turvey, Malcolm. 1998. “Jean Epstein’s Cinema of Immanence: The Rehabilitation of the Corporeal Eye.” October. 83 (Winter): 25–50.

Walpole, Horace. (1765) 1901. The Castle of Otranto, a Story. Translated by William Marshal, Gent. from the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto. London, Cassell and Company. Ebook. Project Gutenberg. 5 May, 2012.

———. 1765. The Castle of Otranto, a Story. London: Printed for Tho. Lownds.

Weber, Samuel. 1973. “The Sideshow, or: Remarks on a Canny Moment.” MLN.

88 (6) (December): 1133.

Wells, Paul. 2000. The Horror Genre: From Beelzebub to Blair Witch. London: Wallflower.

Williams, Anne. 1995. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Worland, Rick. 2007. The Horror Film: An Introduction. London: Blackwell.

FiLMogRApHy

Bluebeard. Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. PRC, 1944. Narberth, PA: Alpha Video, 2002. DVD.

Citizen Kane. Directed by Orson Welles. RKO, 1941. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2011. DVD.

Hangover Square. Directed by John Brahm. Twentieth Century Fox, 1944. Fox Horror Classics: A Terrifying Trilogy of Terror. Beverly Hills, CA: 20th Century Fox Entertainment, 2007. DVD.

House of Dracula. Directed by Erle C. Kenton. Universal, 1945. Dracula: The Legacy Collection. Universal City, CA: Universal Home Video, 2004. DVD.

The Locket. Directed by John Brahm. RKO, 1946. Burbank, CA: Turner Entertainment, 2010. DVD.

March of Time. Produced by Henry Luce, 1935–1951. Beverly Hills, CA: New Line/

Turner Home Video, 1995. VHS.

Night Has a Thousand Eyes. Directed by John Farrow. Paramount, 1948. RoDon Enterprises, Inc., 2006. DVD.

Rebecca. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Selznick International / United Artists, 1940.

New York: Criterion Collection, 2001. DVD.

Chapter 2

“strange pleasure”

1940s Proto-Slasher Cinema

Peter Marra

The slasher subgenre of the horror film has become synonymous with a certain prominent formula, namely the stalking masked male predator in pursuit of vulnerable teen girl prey. The classic version of the slasher finds expression in iconic iterations such as Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978). In her book Men, Women, and Chain Saws, Carol J. Clover succinctly describes the conventions of the slasher subgenre in this way: “The killer is with few exceptions recognizably human and distinctly male; his fury is unmistakably sexual in both roots and expression; his victims are mostly women, often sexually free and always young and beautiful” (1992: 42). Peeping Tom (Michael Powell,

1960) and Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) have frequently been identified
as precursors to the slasher that introduce horror tropes essential to its formulation. The general contention of horror scholarship is that the year 1960
signals a dramatic turn in the nature of horror from gothic monsters to human killers. However, critics have often overlooked earlier examples that deploy similar narrative and thematic patterns to those which Clover identifies as slasher norms. These classical Hollywood horror films also foreshadow the principal innovations most commonly ascribed to the 1960 “turning point”

of Peeping Tom and Psycho: the emphasis on a psychologically motivated human killer who functions unrecognizably in normalized society and elicits audience sympathy; the distinct association made by the film between its audience and the killer’s perspective, specifically through the use of point-of-view shots; the attempts of the killer to assert his masculinity through sexualized acts of violence with a phallic weapon (crucially but not consistently, the knife). Collectively these developments suggest a deepening of the association between audiences and horror killers and highlight an inability to distinguish the monstrous human from his peers. While Psycho and Peeping Tom undoubtedly popularize the pathological human killer, he is significantly 27

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prefigured by films from the classical Hollywood era, such as The Leopard

Man (Jacques Tourneur, 1943), The Lodger (John Brahm, 1944), Bluebeard

(Edgar G. Ulmer, 1944), The Spiral Staircase (Robert Siodmak, 1945), and

Hangover Square (John Brahm, 1945). I aim to insert these films into the
dominant historical timeline for understanding the association of the audience with the horror killer, revising the historical narrative that equates classical Hollywood with comfortable detachment from movie monsters and attributes uncomfortable killer closeness exclusively to post-1960s horror cinema. Such a revision identifies these classical Hollywood titles as prefiguring Psycho, Halloween, and the slasher subgenre rather than seeing 1960 as a singular moment of cultural and filmic rupture wherein audiences first lose their sense of secure distance from murderous minds.

In The Lodger, Laird Cregar stars as a fictionalized version of Jack the Ripper. Here Cregar’s stalking male murderer, Mr. Slade, is overlooked by his landlords in pursuit of “the ripper” because Slade is a respectable doctor.

Ultimately, we learn the core of Slade’s neurosis stems from the moral and physical decline of his brother caused, in Slade’s opinion, by the charms of a wanton woman. This loathing leads him to both desire his female victims and murder them before he succumbs to their beauty. Director John Brahm and Cregar reunite one year later for another relevant title, Hangover Square in which Cregar plays another respected gentleman, a talented composer, who becomes seduced by a showgirl, Netta (Linda Darnell), and experiences

“psychic breaks” during which he murders her, and others. Netta serves as a muse for Cregar’s troubled composer, George Harvey Bone, and he as
her source for cabaret tunes. However, the revelation that Netta’s romantic advances have been manipulative attempts at extracting more songs prompts one of Bone’s merciless “breaks.” This artist/muse dichotomy also works in Bluebeard, a recasting of French folklore as the tale of a Parisian artist, Gaston Morrell (John Carradine) who paints his models before he kills them.

Gaston passes imperceptibly through society as a mild-mannered gentleman known around town for performing elaborate puppet shows in the park to the great pleasure of his audiences. He picks out a young woman named Lucille (Jean Parker) as his latest conquest, and it is this pursuit which becomes his undoing. Though named Bluebeard after the French tale about a reclusive murderer of wives, the emphasis on “models” (often suggestively prostitutes) and the city’s collective hysteria over a murderer at large more
accurately recall the story of Jack the Ripper.1 Robert Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase unfurls another tale about a town made frantic by the serial murders of a killer. In this instance, his victims are not models but those who exhibit culturally perceived signs of weakness, categorized by the killer as all women, but especially those with disabilities. This anonymous stalker lurks around the lush mansion of the respectable Warren family in pursuit of Helen

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(Dorothy McGuire), a mute woman whose “affliction” fascinates and disgusts him. In time, the killer is revealed as the family’s own well-to-do and educated son, Professor Albert Warren (George Brent), whose rage is stimulated by a psychological lack put in place by his own father’s disappointment with his failures to meet social standards of masculinity. Another such anonymous serial killer prowls The Leopard Man.2 He is eventually revealed to be

Dr. Galbraith (James Bell), a former college professor and cultured intellectual who demonstrates his virility by way of violent attacks on young women under the guise of a loose and wild leopard. A romantic couple, Kiki (Jean Brooks) and Jerry (Dennis O’Keefe), ultimately bring Galbraith’s murderous underpinnings to light.

Each of these films positions its audience in relation to a socially acceptable killer who passes easily through human society and who possesses a psychological motive for murder. However, the common discourse around the classical Hollywood horror film canon has been to emphasize externally monstrous and securely “other” threats such as the classic monsters found in Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931), Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931), their myriad peers, and subsequent sequels. While it may be fair to categorize these trends in horror as the dominant pattern, there has been limited consideration for what these minority texts of dangerous humanity may offer to a study of the period. 3 Particularly worthy are those questions concerning male voyeurism and sexualized violence. These themes have classically been understood as a part of the “new horror” ushered in by Peeping Tom and Psycho in 1960, supposedly shifting the cultural conversation from one of external dangers to one of dangerous friends and neighbors.

This identification of Psycho and Peeping Tom as both utterly new and crucially influential is echoed repeatedly throughout horror scholarship. In Monsters and Mad Scientists, Andrew Tudor identifies 1960 as the most drastic shift in the history of film horror, one which befits a reading of the genre as “paranoid”—namely focused on everyday manifestations of horror emanating from within society—rather than “secure”—with emphasis only on outside threats from sources removed from the mainstream: the “monsters and mad scientists” of classical Hollywood horror (1989: 48). Tudor sets the innovations of Psycho and Peeping Tom in a distinct position of historical importance, stating, “Their overt concern with repressed sexuality, voyeurism, gratification through violent attack and women as victims is central to the burgeoning psycho-movie for the next 25 years” (1989: 184). In “When the Woman Looks,” Linda Williams also designates Psycho and Peeping Tom as a turning point in film horror, claiming “they marked a significant break in the structure of the classic horror film, inaugurating a new form of psychological horror” (1996: 24). Vera Dika, too, in her discussion of the stalker cycle (a more narrowly defined subset of the slasher subgenre), determines that the

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slasher is “not the product of an even evolution of elements, but a conscious going back to an earlier stage, specifically one that predates the late sixties and early seventies, and is instead taken from works popular in the fifties and early sixties” (1990: 51–52, original emphasis). This critical dialogue essentially reduces the slasher film to a conversation between John Carpenter and his peers in the 70s and 80s and directors such as Hitchcock and Powell circa 1960. It assumes no relationship to filmmaking transpiring in between these moments and implicitly suggests there is nothing of note before the earlier of these two periods.

Nonetheless, there have been filmic instances of audience-aligned voyeuristic stalking male killers both in the classical Hollywood period and in the period between Psycho and Halloween. One such area for consideration is the Italian Giallo thriller, which developed trends of this type in the 1960s and 1970s prior to John Carpenter’s Halloween. Films by Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci and others traded in the motifs of masked mass killers and violently slaughtered female victims. One such film, Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crys-
tal Plumage (1970), interestingly points us back to Hollywood and to the pulp
stories of the 1940s as it adapts the 1949 Frederic Brown novel The Screaming Mimi, which was also made into a crime thriller and late-period noir, Scream-
ing Mimi (Gerd Oswald, 1958). Quite interestingly, Oswald’s film opens with
a knife attack on a showering blonde two years prior to Psycho. The issue of mentally fractured and physically volatile males circulates throughout 1940s film noir. Consider, for example, the comparable killer of women seen in Robert Siodmak’s noir Phantom Lady (1944), released one year prior to his more gothic horror tale The Spiral Staircase. That film’s killer is equally human and similarly driven by violent rage brought upon by the emasculating rejection of a female suitor. Like those to be discussed here, his murders serve as an act of reaffirming male power. Moreover, POV and subjective camera uses function throughout noir as both points of character associations and illusions of interactivity. Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1947) famously
utilized first-person perspective for the duration of its runtime, limiting the film’s narration to the restricted point-of-view of Detective Phillip Marlowe (Robert Montgomery). Its trailer announced the technique as an interactive novelty, billing the film as “Mysteriously starring Robert Montgomery and . . .

YOU!” Later that year another MGM thriller, High Wall (Curtis Bernhardt,

1947) perverted this interaction by forcing the audience into the perspective of
a psychologically unstable World War II veteran who strangles his wife after discovering her wartime affair. The tumultuous nature of the decade, owing to gender disruptions instigated by World War II, manifests on screen in the form of an emasculated or otherwise psychologically unstable male protagonist (often, but not always explicitly a war veteran) who succumbs to violent tendencies in order to reclaim his sense of power and control. While this

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figure has been identified significantly in film noir, horror peers also express some of these same concerns regarding renegotiated gender roles during and after World War II. For this reason, 1940s horror offers a particularly rich site for the consideration of non-normative masculinity and the compensations made by male killers to affirm dominance over women.

My intention here is not to deny the historical value of the Psycho and Peeping Tom, or dispute the manner in which they mutually contributed thematic and stylistic patterns to a longstanding tradition of psychological horror developed across decades into a popular formula including, but not limited to, the slasher picture. More accurately, I mean to reconfigure this discussion from one of singular filmic rupture (i.e., 1960 changes everything) to one about an ongoing series of films throughout the twentieth century contributing to an overall pattern heretofore overly associated with its most respected auteurs. By highlighting aspects of these 1940s thrillers which correlate to those qualities scholarship designates as exclusive to post-1960s horror, I demonstrate that these titles belong to a group of films which I describe as proto-slasher cinema. This category is not intended to retroactively suggest that all horror cinema has been journeying toward the accomplishment of a categorical task in forming the slasher picture. However, it means to convey the way in which the slasher subgenre, one of horror’s most formidable legacies and horror scholarship’s most carefully studied subjects, inevitably results from a rich heritage of screen terror. By considering the 1940s, which distinctly predates Dika’s deadline of slasher influence and occupies Tudor’s

“secure” period for horror, I hope to open the conversation of influence up to earlier films. I also point out some of the crucial ways that tension over American gender roles during World War II, often cited as subtext in film noir, can be seen to cross genre boundaries via the marginalized figure of the human psycho killer in classical Hollywood horror. However, it is essential to distinguish these 1940s male killers from the period specific slasher killers of 1978–1985. These proto-slasher titles are not equal in style and ideology to the slasher, but simply related in numerous respects, particularly through their innovation of certain stylistic and thematic concerns that scholarship has incorrectly attributed to later films. In order to assess their relevance to the larger twentieth century concerns over male killers and voyeuristic danger, I will consider the following attributes: socially normalized killers, an audience association with the killer, and a thematic development of sexual repression leading to sexualized violence.

The danger of an unknowable, socially passable human killer with psy-
chological motivations for murder works integrally within the mystery structure of several of these horror films of the 1940s. In shaping the story as a

“whodunit” tale keeping the audience in suspense by omission, The Lodger, The Leopard Man, and The Spiral Staircase inherently put forth the notion

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that any ordinary human participant of the story could be withholding ruthless designs for murder. Moreover, throughout all of these films, the terror of normality is emphasized as a particular source of dread. Notably, when pressed for the identity of the killer, an investigator in The Spiral Staircase draws no boundaries between the murderer and the townspeople. He plainly states that the killer must be “Somebody in this town. Somebody we all know. Somebody we see every day. Might be me. Might be you.” Likewise, Bluebeard opens with a warning printed on a signpost: “WARNING! CITIZENS OF

PARIS! A murderer is in your midst!” The “in your midst” makes reference to the communal nervousness around the imperceptible killer, the murderous man. It is echoed in the opening scene of The Lodger where a similar sign reads: “Murder has been committed in our midst. Police inadequate.” In a subsequent scene in Bluebeard, Lucille and her friends are shown discussing the dangers of walking home after dark with Bluebeard on the loose. They walk in a row of three down a dark street in Paris, startled by the approaching silhouette of a mysterious man. They gasp, and then laugh upon discovering that it is only “the puppeteer” (Gaston). Despite being comforted by Gaston’s familiarity, they have indeed unknowingly collided with the killer Bluebeard in the night.

Similarly, the killers in other films often go undetected because of their status as respectable citizens within the community. While the charms of the killers offset any expectations of murderous intentions, their high status in society ensures their mobility throughout social spaces without suspicion.

Mr. Slade in The Lodger is repeatedly identified as bearing likeness to the killer and being seen with similar possessions (a small black tool bag).

However, the Bontings, who lodge him, are frequently shown writing off the possibility that he could be the killer because he is a doctor, a gentleman.

Likewise, Dr. Galbraith in The Leopard Man holds a PhD and is a former college professor. Mr. Bone in Hangover Square is a famous composer married into an upper class family. Albert Warren in The Spiral Staircase is both the son of a respectable family and a professor himself. He is perceived as the kinder of the two Warren sons, leading several characters, including their mother, to suspect it is his roguish womanizing brother Steven (Gordon Oliver) who murders women.

These films also often cite specific instances of human violence as a way of presenting to the audience a real world correlation to the violence on screen.

This strategy serves to convince the audience of precedence for the human killers manifested in the films. The Lodger takes Marie Belloc Lowndes’ 1913
novel of the same name and adapts the tale of a mass killer similar to Jack the Ripper (in the novel, he is called “The Avenger”) into one which specifically identifies the subject of the story as Jack the Ripper in 1889 Whitechapel.

Thus the central figure represents a historically true man. Jack the Ripper is

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also named by Dr. Galbraith in The Leopard Man. When posed a question about the sort of man who might be compelled to kill, he confers, “There was Bluebeard in France, Jack the Ripper in London. It’s not uncommon.”

The Leopard Man also depicts in its climax a memorial procession passing through its New Mexico setting. A dialogue exchange informs us that the procession commemorates an entire village of Native Americans being wiped out by the Conquistadors in the seventeenth century. Meanwhile, Hangover Square integrally features Guy Fawkes Day and the ritualistic “burning of the Guys” (burning in effigy figures meant to resemble Guy Fawkes, who attempted to blow up Parliament in 1605). The central killer even disposes of one of his victims by placing the corpse on top of the bonfire of Guys, clearly identifying his murder as a continuation of a long line of cultural violence.

These allusions to broad cultural violence bring to bear through singular macabre tales underlying concerns of the 1940s about humanity’s own legacy of terror. Such a legacy suggests that plausible human violence is an imminent threat and one which descends from a vicious past. While Andew Tudor maintains the popular assumption that “In the thirties, forties, and fifties there are few films that even vaguely conceive of threatening insanity, and they pay little attention to either the mechanics or the sources of insane behavior”

(1989: 189), I argue that these 1940s films do present psychological causes for their killers’ violence, often pertaining to a sympathetic childhood trauma.

Linda Williams use sympathetic past traumas as a crux for understanding the new, more human killer from the latter half of the twentieth century and describes how in these new psychological horror films the audience is asked to “identify with [the killer’s] point of view, and even sympathize with the childhood traumas that produced this deranged behavior” (1996: 24). Despite the common contention that this sympathetic disclosure of trauma is a new trait in the 1960s, a burgeoning consideration of psychological motives for murder can be traced throughout the bulk of these 1940s films. Mr. Slade in The Lodger recounts the story of his brother’s decline and death, suggesting the manner in which his actions avenge the ruination of his sibling. Albert in The Spiral Staircase murders women with physical disabilities in a compulsive attempt to reenact his father’s torment over what he perceived to be Albert’s personal weaknesses. Dr. Galbraith in The Leopard Man is perhaps the least psychologically inspected of the killers discussed here but the language of his confession suggests a deranged psychology both troubled in its terrible compulsion to kill and erotic in its attraction to women’s suffering:

“In the whole world there isn’t a single human being who knows what it is to be tormented this way . . . I didn’t want to kill, but I had to . . . I saw her white face turned up to me—the eyes dark and wide with fear—the fear—that was it—the little frail body—the soft skin.” Hangover Square’s Mr. Bone experiences a similarly sympathetic agony in which his murders take place during

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“psychic breaks” brought on by underlying issues of anger and emasculation.

He murders Netta following the revelation that she is not romantically interested in him, but instead has only been using him for his songs. Though these systematic “breaks” might defer his active participation in the murders, much like Psycho they do not disavow his bodily involvement and the underlying psychology which motivates them.

An association between the killer and the audience can be found in these narrative references to sympathetic psychological compulsions, but this connection becomes most explicit in the spatial alignment between the killer and audience via first-person perspective. This access to the killer’s violence via POV shots is most explicitly embodied by scenes of murder photographed through the POV of the killer. The use of perspective to implicate the film viewer in the thrill of violence has been seen as a crucial component in the innovation of Psycho and in reiterations of Psycho such as John Carpenter’s Halloween. In assessing Halloween as a pioneering work in the stalker cycle, Vera Dika reads the use of POV shots in relaying violent impulses to the audience by placing them in the physical position of Norman Bates and Michael Myers respectively. 4

By seeing along with the killer, the viewer can satisfy an infantile desire to investigate the woman. This position allows him to be deeply implicated within the space but unfettered by a specific mediated presence. The unidentified quality of the fictionalized voyeur allows the responsibility for the sadistic action to be displaced onto a character who is decidedly “not like us.” (1990: 40) While I would agree with Dika that by withholding the character identity of the killer, “the viewer is figuratively put in a spatially congruent position with him, but not a narratively congruent one” (1990: 40), I would differ from her understanding of this as a way of preserving audience security and distance.

In the case of the 1940s horror films discussed here, there is an overarching paranoia perpetuated through the integration of the seemingly normal killer within the society. As the inspector in The Spiral Staircase suggests, we could all be killers, and in these moments of first-person violence wherein we see only from the killer’s position, we are all killers. The satisfying thrill of the violence and its implication of the viewer in its execution is the grandest of these films’ gestures toward a generalized cultural violence. In this way, the threat of the killer who “Might be me. Might be you,” is formally realized through the suggestion that any ordinary man could pose the kind of horror threat believed to come only from supernatural creatures.

In a central scene of murder within The Lodger, Jack the Ripper (whose identity the film withholds for most of its duration) cuts the throat of Jenny, a lower class street musician. The dimly lit sequence, set in Jenny’s bedroom,

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is built significantly around a shot in which the camera is aimed directly at Jenny and she reacts to it as if seeing a person, the realization of danger setting into her face as she stares back at it. As the camera lumbers forward, shaking and shifting in its approach as if it were taking human steps, Jenny’s fear rapidly accelerates to a muted scream of terror as she struggles to draw sounds from her own throat under the imminent threat of killer/camera violence. The camera’s approach is the killer’s approach and its proximity brings her death. The camera’s occupation of the killer’s perspective in this scene also allows the audience to experience the killer’s approach of Jenny in a visceral, firsthand manner. 5

Prefiguring the famous opening sequence of Halloween, Hangover Square begins with an unidentified first-person murder which puts the audience in the position of the killer before we know his identity. Unlike The Lodger, which simply recreates the gait and movement of an approaching male, Hangover Square creates a full visualization of the act of murder from the killer’s POV
complete with a knife-bearing arm swinging down in front of the camera. The animated limbs deliberately enhance the interactivity of the murder sequence, suggesting more than just a correlation between the camera’s sight and the killer’s eyes by also giving him (and us) arms to kill. Elsewhere in the film, Bone’s psychological instability becomes formally expressed through POV
shots. During the moments of his “psychic breaks,” we see Bone’s POV with the object of his gaze blurred and distorted to suggest his psychological conversion into his killer persona.

Bluebeard alters the pattern of photographing violence through the killer’s eyes, but continues this focus on the violence of “the look.” Rather than showing the scenes of murder through subjective shots, the off-screen murder happens during extreme close-ups on the killer’s bulging eyes. John Carradine’s performance conveys a passionate rage while dramatically distorting his face to create protruding eyes which communicate the manner in which his look and his violence are equal extensions of the same aggression.

“Looking” is deeply integrated into the film’s sense of violence as Gaston first studies his victims with his eyes, captures them in paint on a canvas, and then as an extension of this visual domination, proceeds to physically strangle each model. 6 First-person camera is used throughout the film to accentuate the connection between the audience and Gaston’s dangerous gaze, particularly early in the film when Gaston peers through a hole in the puppet theater and spies on Lucille in the audience. A POV shot provides his perspective as it finds and then locks upon Lucille in the audience. Much as a hunter peers through a gun sight, this predatory looking signals the audience to Gaston’s
selection of Lucille as prey.7

While it does not contain a POV murder, The Spiral Staircase is exceptionally worth noting for its way of more deeply aligning its audience not

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only with the killer’s perspective, but with the killer’s psychology. Similar to Bluebeard, extreme close-ups of the killer’s looming eye are used to suggest a dangerous gaze. Rather than cutting from shots of the eye to shots of what is being seen as is typical to point-of-view editing techniques, the film creates a superimposition over the image of the eye that allows the audience to see the eye and the object of its gaze simultaneously. In a particularly striking instance indicative of greater psychological depth, the camera slowly pushes in on the image of the killer’s eye. Superimposed over his eye is a shot of the film’s mute protagonist, Helen, looking in the mirror. These shots take the vantage point of the killer (behind Helen) which allows us only to see the back of Helen’s head. At the moment in which the killer’s eye compasses the whole frame, a superimposition is shown over the eye not depicting what the killer sees (the back of Helen’s head staring into the mirror) but what he imagines he sees: Helen’s face in a close-up with her mouth surreally blurred
out.8 This echoes the killer’s motivations to correct flaws by killing women
that he perceives as having “imperfect.” It develops the aforementioned connection between the killer’s eye and the film’s audience into one which additionally presents us with a deeper link to the killer’s psychology.

In almost all of these films the central killers become the subject of a manhunt and each of them is ultimately identified, or “unmasked” to the public.

The Lodger and Hangover Square both frame this through the use of POV
shots which create for the audience the experience of being the subject of the manhunt. In a reversal of the films’ systematic presentation of the killer’s violence from his perspective as a camera moving toward the victim, these films now give us the POV of the frazzled killer as his captors approach him. Close-ups of his nervous realization that he has been discovered are cut together with shots from his perspective as the police and/or community move in closer toward him. The perspectives of the representatives of authority are withheld. We are not given the perspective of those with whom we should typically identify in conservative horror (the police, the townspeople, the “safe” community) and instead see as the killer. In as much as we were given a vicarious thrill through our visual access to murder, that thrill is now punished and we as a group are made to feel the weight of collective societal judgment. We associate with the killer. We take his perspective. We sympathize with his compulsions. He is not “other than” and “outside society” but continuous with the viewing body of pretenders wearing the normative mask of social acceptability.

The Leopard Man performs a similar feat with some unique variation.

In this instance, the film spotlights a murder spree of young women, and repeatedly photographs these young women walking down dark alleys and cemeteries, nervously reacting to sounds, and ultimately screaming at the sight of a thing which the audience is unable to see. The POV of the victim

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which would reveal the attacker is withheld. The camera remains trained only on their harried expressions and never allows them to return the killer’s gaze.

In its final act, the film’s protagonists, Jerry and Kiki, set up a sting to catch suspected killer, Dr. Galbraith, by tricking him into believing his most recent victim, performer and dancer Clo-Clo (Margo), is haunting him. Walking down the same dark alley as Clo-Clo’s murder, he begins to hear the sound of Clo-Clo’s castanets (the product of Jerry and Kiki’s deception) and believes she is following or haunting him. During the ruse, Dr. Galbraith is made to experience a similar dark walk as his victims and as such is literally put into the victim’s perspective. The audience experience is again to understand events through his senses. Shots of his attentive face mark each sound of the castanets. The camera shows Galbraith’s concerned stare and then cuts to his POV as he peers down the dark alley alone. His perspective is now emphasized as a potential victim in yet another reversal which puts the killer on the receiving end of the pursuit and the audience there with him. 9

Having considered the association between the audience and the killer perspective, it is important also to address the issues of repressed sexuality and sexualized violence as they relate to the killer’s voyeurism. The understanding of the slasher’s knife as a phallic expression of male dominance in lieu of a sexual assault has been a cornerstone of horror scholarship for some time.

Carol J. Clover writes, “Actual rape is practically nonexistent in the slasher film, evidently on the premise [. . .] that violence and sex are not concomitants but alternatives” (1992: 29). Robin Wood’s work on the slasher film makes a similar observation. Discussing The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974), he makes the case that violence sublimates sexual impulses.

He says, “Here sexuality is totally perverted from its functions into sadism, violence, and cannibalism. It is striking that no suggestion exists anywhere that Sally [the film’s primary victim] is the object of an overtly sexual threat: she is to be tormented, killed, dismembered, eaten, but not raped” (1986: 91). These works suggest a dominant trend in which the slasher film utilizes phallic images of violence to suggest sexual dominance, almost always in the gendered direction of male dominance over female bodies.

There is additionally a legacy of film noir masculinity to be considered in relation to the sublimated voyeuristic sexuality and subsequent violence of the slasher. Film noir, a style primarily associated with 1940s cinema, has a long history of conveying complex and often damaged masculinity. Such a state can often be associated with veterans returning home to restructured gender politics. Dana Polan discusses the trope of the “postwar neurotic man”

as one which foregrounds cultural issues of masculinity in flux, being heightened for military service and then deflated by the ordinariness of domestic contentment. He states, “According to the postwar discourse, the problem of the neurotic man is not necessarily only his capacity for violence but, as

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much, his potential refusal to form a family, to enter into the traditional patterns of domesticity and home building” (1986: 248). Mark Osteen draws direct connections between this cultural trope and the characters of film noir, determining that these male characters are suggestive of the tension over the need for veterans to dispense with their wartime roles. The resulting friction causes them to be described as “hypermasculine, aggressive, impatient with women, and incapable or unwilling to alter their warrior mentality for humdrum realities of civilian life” (2013: 78). Weakness is essential to this discourse as military service, coded as highly masculine work, now gives way to post-war trauma and often physical disabilities or psychological disorders.

Conflating masculinity with a superior physicality, veteran characters often

“define masculinity against disability: if masculinity equals strength and achievement, disability must signify weakness and inadequacy” (2013: 78).

This construction significantly resembles the opinions of Albert Warren, who murders the “weak” (conflating the physically disabled with the weakness of women). More generally, horror’s trope of the passive, voyeuristic male killer demonstrates a compromised masculine identity looking to reassert itself by violence. These 1940s horror films feature sexual voyeurism via “the look,”

repressed sexuality (often depicted as coded queerness or emasculation), and the use of violence to resolve this sexual fecklessness (associating violence with phallic reclamation of masculinity).

A sexually compensating form of killing can be seen in The Leopard Man which speculates sexual queerness as a catalyst for psychological abnormality. In his own dialogue, Dr. Galbraith answers for the men with “kinks in their brain” by attesting to the historical lineage and violent proclivities of

“men who kill for pleasure—strange pleasure.” The “strangeness” of such pleasure is rooted in the way these murderers operate in a predatory manner toward their female victims and derive satisfaction from their acts of murder.

“Strange” in the film connotes social abnormality which becomes policed by way of assessing masculine conventions. Dr. Galbraith and Jerry engage distinctly in coded conversations about masculinity through use of the term

“softness.” Jerry’s love interest Kiki warns him, “don’t be soft,” following the first murder. When called upon to help in a search party, Jerry shamefully identifies himself as a “tenderfoot.” After Dr. Galbraith learns that Jerry has forced himself to join the search party in spite of his inexperience and earlier stated inability, Jerry deflects Galbraith’s judgment by stating, “Where I was brought up, you had to be tough.” Galbraith, the film’s pathological killer, stands throughout the film as a symbol of compromised masculinity, even before his true nature is known. His background as a professor gives him the effeminized codifications associated within inactive, intellectual work.

Characters refer to his past with “fancy college courses.” He is most pleased at meeting Kiki, a stage actress, and proclaims his glee in loaded terms,

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stating “You lead such a gay and exciting life.” He makes detailed references to his love of theater. This includes a reference to an ecstatic experience he once had waiting to see Mrs. Leslie Carter after a performance of Zaza. Galbraith boldly embodies the “softness” of the effeminate, intellectualized male as well as the “strangeness” of the men with “kinks in their brain.” Jerry’s journey is a constant negotiation of his desire not to appear soft and likewise to attempt some preservation of ordinariness in the face of the destabilizing gender and psychology of Dr. Galbraith. In his murder confession, Galbraith conflates terror with erotics describing the fear in his victim’s eyes in the same breath as the softness of her skin and grows excited when recounting her terrified screams. This is one in a series of male killers compensating for

“softness” through an aggressive assault on a woman. Such an assault is suggested by the killer’s psychology to reconstitute his masculinity by way of the violent sublimation of a sexual conquest.

The Spiral Staircase revolves around similar discourses of “weakness” and

“imperfection” and likens such categories to an absence of archetypal masculine dominance. The film’s killer, Albert Warren, attempts to compensate for his effeminacy in the eyes of his father by acting out violently toward “weak”

or “imperfect” women and thereby destroying the weakness (and the woman-liness) he sees in himself. Albert is yet another intellectual, a professor, who does not demonstrate the degree of active interest in courting women which his brother Steven does throughout the film. Steven plainly states, “You know I’m inclined to think that father was disappointed by both of us. Neither of us fitted his concept of what a real man should be—a gun-toting, hard-drinking, tough-living, god-fearing citizen. He always used to say, ‘the strong survive the, the weak die.’” It is the approval of his judgmental father, who deemed him “weak” (suggested by Steven’s dialogue to mean the opposite of a “real man”) that Albert seeks to attain through violence. When he ultimately corners Helen in a final showdown, he expresses very clearly that his act of murder will obliterate the “weakness” in Helen that equals that which his father saw in him. As Albert puts it, “Steven is weak as I once was. What a pity my father didn’t live to see me become strong, to see me dispose of the weak and imperfects of the world whom he detested. He would have admired me for what I’m going to do.”

In Bluebeard, Gaston tells Lucille that he cannot paint her because he loves her. Here he distinctly separates this potentially sincere connection from the perverse relationships of looking and violence that he has with his models/
victims. Gaston relays to Lucille that he was a “sensitive” child, a starving artist. He stumbled upon an ill woman in the street named Jeanette. To pass the time, he paints her portrait. He recounts his passion for both her tranquility and her pain, stating “There was something in her fevered tormented eyes that was almost spiritual.” He sees in the recovering woman an image reminiscent

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of The Maid of Orleans (Joan of Arc), particularly having visited her tomb.

This fixation on the peaceful, yet long suffering female image inspires his first masterful painting and ignites his career. Following his success, he tracks his muse down and discovers a fully recovered Jeannette working unashamedly in a brothel. He describes her as a “low, coarse, loathsome creature.” She tries to pay him for his services, mocking him both with her flagrant sexuality and her fiscal independence. In refusing the position of the suffering saint, and instead acting as a brazen woman who refuses Gaston’s vision of female passivity, Jeanette infuriates the painter by “defiling the image [he] created of her.” Gaston retaliates by strangling Jeanette to restate his power by physical violence. He subsequently strangles all of the women he paints in a recreation of this original act, for he sees in all of them the potential to defy him just as Jeanette had done.

Consistent with its peers, Hangover Square’s central murder is also driven by the rejection of a brazen and independent female. The composer, Mr. Bone, stalls his work on an important symphony in order to write more songs for Netta’s cabaret act. He makes her career his primary goal. When Bone turns up unexpectedly one night at Netta’s apartment, she brushes him off by claiming she is too ill to see him. When he later sees her leaving in full costume for a singing engagement, Bone recognizes that he has been lied to and rejected in his romantic advances by music. Netta chastises his conservative attitudes, calling him a “bore.” His wife later berates him for wasting his talents on a club singer with a poor reputation, seemingly less bothered by his potential infidelity than by the embarrassment he may cause to the family in squandering his musical prestige. Under the weight of these condemning remarks from the various women in his life, Bone strikes out, strangles Netta, and burns her with the Guys.

This loathing of women and the use of violence to extinguish the source of this loathing is also seen in The Lodger. Throughout the film Slade expresses disgust for actresses who paint themselves to look beautiful and display themselves on the stage for men’s pleasure. His disgust includes a complex duality, which he openly acknowledges, whereby he both loves to look at women but in this arousal sees the potential for his demise. He articulates in plain and striking terms this killer psychology in a dressing room conversation he shares with the Bontings’ daughter, Kitty, a chorus girl. He says,

“You wouldn’t think that anyone could hate a thing and love it too.” In this moment, Slade steps forward and his image is multiplied by a line of dressing mirrors, indicating the kind of split psychology or fractured persona of the killer. He goes on to imply that possession in a sexual sense is damning, but somehow satisfied in the destructive act of cutting, stabbing, and killing.

He says, “A man can destroy what he hates and love what he destroys.” That there is “evil in beauty,” but “when the evil is cut out of a beautiful thing, then

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only the beauty remains.” His simultaneous arousal and hatred of women stems from a story he tells about his deceased brother who was seduced by a beautiful woman and then led to his ruin. His story hinges on an understanding that it is by this attraction that men succumb to ruination, and violence is the corrective alternative to seduction (murder not sex). 10

His final attempted murder of Kitty comes after a scene in which he
watches her perform in a chorus number on stage, “Parisian Trot.” The camera pushes in slowly on his increasingly excited expression. Shots of the dancers do not take Slade’s POV but instead rapidly splice together images of the performance from multiple angles. As the camera pushes in closer to Slade, the cuts to the dancers become increasingly rapid, and Laird Cregar’s performance as Slade more distinctly expresses arousal. Thus, the thrill of his experience watching the dance is conveyed formally by the film. Following this spectacle of female beauty, Slade becomes determined to finally murder Kitty because he believes she is the kind of beautiful woman who leads men to their ruin. The pinnacle of his sexual desire equals the moment of his most extreme urge to murder her. This scene provides a valuable precursor to the classic slasher combination of voyeuristic excitement, sexual repression, and the satisfaction of a sexual urge through an attempt at violence. Though often credited as an innovation of Peeping Tom and Psycho, such a pattern actually owes its history to 1940s concerns about perverse masculinities, and the cultural shifts affording American women greater independence. The stigma of male lack created by disability due to military service or the general emasculation of being returned from heroic duty to domestic monotony provides a backdrop by which to understand the value of horror’s ordinary male killer in the 1940s. The existence in 1944 of a scene such as the climax of The Lodger which links the audience to a dangerous male gaze and the male gaze to acts of sexualized violence suggests that we may not see 1960 as a singular revolution in depicting voyeuristic horror killers but rather as the next phase in an ongoing evolution of thematic and stylistic elements.

While scholarship commonly asserts that 1940s horror represents a relatively static period populated only with juvenile sequels and comic variations on the major movie monsters of the 1930s, the complexity of the horror
films discussed here poses a problem to this narrative.11 Particularly, the
nuanced psychologies of the male killers in The Leopard Man, The Lodger, Bluebeard, Hangover Square, and The Spiral Staircase offer a link between horror cinema of the 1940s and significant concerns of the decade over the simultaneous valorization of the hypermasculine soldier and subsequent domestic displacement of this hypermasculine figure upon return to a more independent generation of working women. Cinematic traces of this cultural shift are located frequently in the psychologically fractured men of film noir, yet the similarly damaged male figures in horror have been significantly

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marginalized as inconsistent outliers set against the dominant norm of the classical Hollywood monster. However, as has been shown here, a striking set of commonalties emerge when considering these titles side by side, particularly around the themes of voyeurism and sexual violence. Such consistency is suggestive of a significant trend of its time. Additionally, the relevance these themes continue to have throughout twentieth-century horror cinema, particularly as is discussed in the aftermath of 1960, suggests these films actually constitute the crucially important foundation in an evolving cinematic conversation regarding male gender norms and the uses of violence to assert masculine dominance. That critics have produced fruitful discussions of these themes as found in Peeping Tom, Psycho, and the slasher subgenre, raises questions around what way these discussions might be extended to an earlier period of relevance. To begin with, this implicates the former half of the twentieth century in cynicism often reserved for the latter half. Namely, the idea of internal cultural security, where community members rightfully trust each other and need only worry about foreign dangers (metaphorically, the supernatural), seems corrupted by these films. Indeed, charming killers did exist before Norman Bates. The internal discomfort of imperceptible insanity did not emerge as a cultural concern of the 1960s, but rather the 1960s continued the development of preexisting nervousness around potentially volatile, yet seemingly ordinary men. Through the perverse implication of the spectator via POV murder and the general proliferation of paranoia about the killer “in our midst,” these 1940s horror films betray conventional notions of unwavering unity within World War II–era America. Instead, they suggest that in addition to those foreign “monsters,” the nation also feared the curious men in its midst, the ones unknowably perverse and psychologically inclined toward dangerous acts of strange pleasure.

noTes

1. With the exception of The Leopard Man, each of the five films of focus here sets its story in what is indicated by detail or suggested by costume and setting to be the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. This potentially suggests an underlying motive by all four films to implicitly reference the Ripper whose murders occurred in this period.

2. Although Val Lewton’s productions have often been singled out as superior examples amid 1940s horror mediocrity, the consistency of The Leopard Man in theme and style with these other 1940s peers suggest that the decade was rich with complex horror overall.

3. There are several passages dedicated to this topic of study. However, mostly these titles are invoked only to be excluded as minor examples of an unsuccessful

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countertrend. For such discussions see William Schoell’s Stay Out of the Shower (1985: 3–5) and Andrew Tudor’s Monsters and Mad Scientists (1989: 188–190).

4. Carol J. Clover offers an opposite understanding of the first-person camera in Men, Women, and Chain Saws, citing its visual shakiness as a feature which calls greater attention to the filmic mediation of the experience and undermines the authority of the killer by emphasizing his limitations (1992: 187).

5. This technique is in some ways preceded by a similar device at the end of an earlier adaptation of The Lodger, released in America as The Phantom Fiend (Maurice Elvey, 1932). In that film, the final approach by the killer (Ivor Novello) toward the heroine, Daisy (Elizabeth Allan) is filmed as a POV push-in on the victim. The attack, however, does not end in murder. Hitchcock’s adaptation of the novel in 1927
introduced first-person from the perspective of the “possible” killer (Hitchcock’s version affirms the protagonist’s innocence) as he first approaches the Buntings’ door.

Murders often become visualized in this version only with close-ups of the screaming female victims, thereby preserving the anonymity of the killer without using POV.

The subsequent remake of Brahm’s 1940s version, Man in the Attic (Hugo Fregonese, 1953) preserves the POV murder technique introduced here.

6. This construction is similar to Mark’s process in Peeping Tom of filming models before and during their deaths.

7. The peephole scene of Psycho in which Norman spies upon Marion as she undresses before stepping into the shower resembles this moment.

8. See Anne Golden’s chapter in this collection for an extended discussion of The Spiral Staircase in terms of its aesthetic dialogue with avant-garde cinema.

9. Bluebeard does have a final confrontation where law enforcement chases Gaston to his death. However, the perspective of the scene is handled in relative balance with several shots that preclude Gaston’s knowledge such as one showing the authorities breaking down the door from the outside. The Spiral Staircase has no public revelation of the killer. However, there is the dramatic realization by the family matriarch that her son is the murderer. Ultimately, she is the one who shoots and kills him, ending his murder spree.

10. There is a pointed affinity given to the retelling of Slade’s details about his brother. He relays with relish the “sensitivity about his lips” and the “strange eyes”

belonging to a “strange man.” It potentially puts him in line with Dr. Galbraith and Professor Warren as expressing an atypical masculinity, potentially interpreted as an early form of coded queerness.

11. For a sample of this conservative view, see Rick Worland’s The Horror Film: An Introduction (2007: 69–75).

ReFeRenCes

Clover, Carol J. 1992. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Dika, Vera. 1990. Games Of Terror: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and the Films of the Stalker Cycle. Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickenson University Press.

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Osteen, Mark. 2013. Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream.

Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press.

Polan, Dana. 1986. Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940–1950. New York: Columbia University Press.

Schoell, William. 1985. Stay Out of the Shower: 25 years of Shocker Films Beginning with “Psycho.” New York: Dembner Books.

Tudor, Andrew. 1989. Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.

Williams, Linda. 1996. “When the Woman Looks.” In The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant, 15–34. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Wood, Robin. 1986. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia University Press.

Worland, Rick. 2007. The Horror Film: An Introduction. Oxford, UK and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

FiLMogRApHy

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. Directed by Dario Argento. UMC, 1970. West Hollywood, CA: Blue Underground, 2005. DVD.

Bluebeard. Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. PRC, 1944. Narberth, PA: Alpha Bideo, 2002. DVD.

Halloween. Directed by John Carpenter. Compass International, 1978. Englewood, CO: Starz Entertainment, 2007. DVD.

Hangover Square. Directed by John Brahm. 20th-Century Fox, 1945. North Hollywood, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2007. DVD.

High Wall. Directed by Curtis Bernhardt. MGM, 1947. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2010. DVD.

Lady in the Lake. Directed by Robert Montgomery. MGM, 1947. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2006. DVD.

The Leopard Man. Direct by Jacques Tourneur. RKO, 1943. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2005. DVD.

The Lodger. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Gainsborough, 1927. Century City, CA: MGM / Beverly Hills, CA: 20th-Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2008.

The Lodger. Directed by John Brahm. 20th-Century Fox, 1944. North Hollywood, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2007. DVD.

Man in the Attic. Directed by Hugo Fregonese. 20th Century Fox, 1953. Tulsa, OK: VCI Entertainment, 2004. DVD.

Peeping Tom. Directed by Michael Powell. Anglo-Amalgamated, 1960. New York: Criterion Collection, 1999.

The Phantom Fiend. Directed by Maurice Elvey. Olympic, 1932. Minneapolis, MN: Mill Creek Entertainment.

Phantom Lady. Directed by Robert Siodmak. Universal, 1944. Universal City, CA; Universal Home Entertainment, 2012.

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Psycho. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Paramount, 1960. Universal City, CA: Universal Home Entertainment, 1998.

Screaming Mimi. Directed by Gerd Oswald. Columbia, 1958. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2010. DVD.

The Spiral Staircase. Directed by Robert Siodmak. RKO, 1945. Culver City, CA: MGM Home Entertainment, 2005. DVD.

Chapter 3

Dead Zone

Genre, Gender, and the “Lost Decade”

of Horror Cinema, 1946–1956

Ian Olney

This chapter examines a decade in the history of horror cinema—1946–1956—
generally characterized by critics as a dead zone: a rare period in the last century during which few if any real horror movies were being produced.

I point out that in fact a significant number of horror films were made across this “lost decade”; moreover, I argue that many are of considerable interest because, unlike the largely male-oriented and patriarchal horror movies that preceded them, they privilege female subjectivity and agency while critiquing patriarchy. These films feature women protagonists and valorize their perspective via voice-over narration, point-of-view editing, and other cinematic devices; conversely, they cast male authority figures—fathers, husbands, guardians—as villains, depicting patriarchal masculinity as monstrous. Telling stories that revolve around women’s struggle against and victory over the monstrous-masculine, they amount to an indictment of patriarchy as an iniquitous system that must be attacked and dismantled. In this way, they can be considered early examples of feminist horror cinema. Although they were not the first “women’s horror films,” they stand as important precursors to more recent female-centric horror movies, definitively putting to rest the notion that the genre’s immediate postwar era was a dead zone.

Horror criticism, academic and otherwise, tends to present the decade following World War II as a kind of interregnum: the interval between the end of the genre’s classical period and the beginning of its modern period. Having experienced a golden age defined by the Universal monster movies and Val Lewton’s atmospheric chillers at RKO, the story goes, horror went into decline in the mid-1940s, not be resurrected (and reinvented) until Hammer’s gothic revival and the advent of horror teenpics in the mid-1950s. With the exception of a few genre throwbacks made to exploit the novelty of 3-D—a

House of Wax (Andre de Toth, 1953) or a Creature from the Black Lagoon

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(Jack Arnold, 1954)—virtually no horror movies were made between 1946
and 1956. One finds this version of horror’s postwar history in the earliest studies of the genre. In his landmark Illustrated History of Horror and Science-Fiction Films, for example, Carlos Clarens writes that the late 1940s

“turned out to be a belated funeral march for the genre. Horror is perennial, but the Monsters were tired” (1997: 104). The genre did not recover, he maintains, until Terence Fisher’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) “helped establish Hammer as the successor to Universal as the world’s greatest producer of horror movies” (1997: 141). Ivan Butler’s Horror in the Cinema skips directly from the classical horror films produced by Val Lewton at RKO during the first half of the 1940s to the modern British horror films that began appearing in the second half of the 1950s. Similarly, Andrew Tudor moves right from “The War Years: 1941–1946” (1989: 33–38) to “The Fifties Boom: 1956–1960” (1989: 39–47) in Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie, neatly eliding the period under discussion here.

Since the publication of these foundational texts of horror criticism, the notion that horror experienced a lost decade following World War II has practically become an article of faith. In contemporary studies of the genre, it is routinely presented as an uncontested fact. Rick Worland’s The Horror Film: An Introduction flatly asserts: “For more than a decade after World War II the horror film nearly disappeared” (2007: 193). Wheeler Winston Dixon writes in A History of Horror that by the late 1940s, “Horror films had been killed. . . . But in England a revival was underway; it would change the shape of the horror film forever and present to the public a new version of the Gothic” (2010: 63–64). My own recent book Euro Horror: Classic European Horror Cinema in Contemporary American Culture claims that the “rise of Euro horror in the mid-1950s heralded the worldwide renaissance of the genre after a fallow period in the years following World War II” (2013: 8).

Even as horror criticism has evolved over the years, then—developing novel theories of the horror film, deepening our knowledge of horror directors and stars, bringing new national horror cinemas to light—the general consensus regarding the life of the genre between 1946 and 1956 has remained unchanged: it did not have one.

This begs an obvious question, however. Where did the horror film go
in the immediate postwar era? Is it possible for an entire genre to suddenly vanish—especially one as popular as horror was at the time? A variety of explanations have been offered to account for the disappearance of horror cinema in the mid-1940s. Some critics argue that the genre played itself out with Universal monster rallies and Abbott and Costello parodies that essentially lampooned earlier, canonical texts. Dixon suggests that the demise of classical horror cinema was due to “a plethora of poorly made sequels”

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(2010: 63) released during and directly after the war that “betray[ed] a lack of both care and inspiration” (2010: 63). Other critics contend that classical horror was rendered obsolete by the real-life trauma of the war or the new anxieties ushered in by the dawn of the Atomic Age. James B. Twitchell’s Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror holds that “World War II pretty much ruined horror art with the real thing” (1985: 59), while Jonathan Lake Crane’s Terror and Everyday Life: Singular Moments in the History of the Horror Film maintains that the outbreak of the Cold War “left the Universal monsters harmless nostalgic icons . . . The emergence of an overpowering everyday terror, listening to the atomic clock tick, wiped out earlier incarnations of the monstrous” (1994: 108).

By far the most common explanation for the disappearance of the horror film following World War II, though, is that it was subsumed by another, new genre: science fiction. According to this theory, when science fiction became increasingly popular with postwar audiences, producers simply switched gears, making space aliens or gigantic mutations the monsters in such movies as The Thing from Another World (Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks,

1951) and Them! (Gordon Douglas, 1954). It was only after the fad for science fiction cinema passed in the late 1950s that horror was able to reestablish itself as a genre in its own right. The notion that horror was temporarily incorporated by science fiction in the wake of World War II once again dates back to the earliest critical studies of horror cinema and once again has proven to be particularly tenacious. Indeed, as Peter Hutchings notes, it is now a part of the genre’s official history, which runs from the Universal horror of the 1930s to the Val Lewton productions of the 1940s to the science fiction/horror of the early 1950s to the British horror of the late 1950s to the modern American horror of the post-1968 era to the slasher film of the post-1978 era (2004: 27–28). This notion stems, however, from the same basic premise as the two others discussed above: that the horror film vanished, ghost-like, in the mid-1940s and did not rematerialize for a full decade. 1

I would like to offer an alternative theory: the horror film did not go anywhere. In writing about the genre over the years, I have become increasingly intrigued by its vanishing act following World War II and interested in establishing whether its disappearance was as complete as critics (myself included) would have it. My research indicates that while the production of horror films slowed during the immediate postwar era—for all of the reasons just noted—
they continued to appear in significant numbers throughout this period. Just
a few of the movies made during the genre’s “lost decade” are: The Spiral

Staircase (Robert Siodmak, 1945), Valley of the Zombies (Philip Ford, 1946),

Shock (Alfred Werker, 1946), The Face of Marble (William Beaudine, 1946),

She-Wolf of London (Jean Yarbrough, 1946), The Unknown (Henry Levin,

1946), The Inheritance (Charles Frank, 1947), The Ghost of Rashmon Hall

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(Denis Kavanagh, 1947), The Red House (Delmer Daves, 1947), The Lost

Moment (Martin Gabel, 1947), Scared to Death (Christy Cabanne, 1947),

Secret Beyond the Door (Fritz Lang, 1947), Daughter of Darkness (Lance

Comfort, 1948), The Amazing Mr. X (Bernard Vorhaus, 1948), The Three

Weird Sisters (Daniel Birt, 1948), House of Darkness (Oswald Mitchell,

1948), The Creeper (Jean Yarbrough, 1948), Caged Fury (William Berke,

1948), Man in Black (Francis Searle, 1949), Bride of the Gorilla (Curt Siod-
mak, 1951), Stolen Face (Terence Fisher, 1952), Ghost Ship (Vernon Sewell,

1952), The Maze (William Cameron Menzies, 1953), Violated (Walter Strate,

1953), The Snow Creature (W. Lee Wilder, 1954), Gog (Herbert L. Strock,

1954), Dementia (John Parker, 1955), The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino, 1953),

Man Beast (Jerry Warren, 1956), Bond of Fear (Henry Cass, 1956), Inde-
structible Man (Jack Pollexfen, 1956), and Fright (W. Lee Wilder, 1956) .

This short list includes horror films from the United States and from Great Britain. They range from ghost stories and monster movies to murder mysteries and psychological thrillers. Some were made by established horror auteurs (Robert Siodmak, Fritz Lang, Terence Fisher), while others were directed by filmmakers not typically associated with the genre (Delmer Daves, Lance Comfort, William Cameron Menzies). Some are well-crafted “B” films from major studios like RKO and Universal, while others are cheap exploitation movies from fly-by-night companies like Eagle-Lion Films and Golden Gate Pictures. Clearly, genre output between 1946 and 1956, albeit smaller than that of the preceding decade, was varied and robust on both sides of the Atlantic. Far from being a dead zone, the immediate postwar era represents a lively period in the history of horror cinema.

Even more startling, I discovered that many of the horror films made
during this period treat gender in an unconventional, even radical, fashion, positioning women as their protagonists and pitting them against male monsters in stories that could be described as feminist. In so doing, they depart significantly from earlier horror movies. Where gender is concerned, classical horror cinema generally caters to the male gaze, centering on the heroics of male protagonists and casting women in the role of fetishized sexual objects, as in King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933) or Mad

Love (Karl Freund, 1935), or avatars of the monstrous-feminine that must be
destroyed, as in She (Lansing C. Holden and Irving Pichel, 1935) or Dracu-
la’s Daughter (Lambert Hillyer, 1936). Consequently, even when the genre
permits “the expression of women’s sexual potency and desire and . . . associates this desire with the autonomous act of looking” (1996: 32), as Linda Williams writes, it is typically “only to punish her for this very act, only to demonstrate how monstrous female desire can be” (1996: 33). In contrast, postwar horror movies often not only grant their heroines the power to look, but also invite a female gaze; they tell women’s stories that are addressed to

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women. It is masculinity that is shown to be monstrous. Female protagonists must match wits with male villains—typically patriarchal authority figures like fathers, husbands, or guardians—who plot to deceive, entrap, or murder them. Thus in Delmer Daves’s The Red House, a teenage farm girl, Meg (Allene Roberts), discovers that her guardian, Pete (Edward G. Robinson), murdered her parents when she was a baby after her mother, with whom he was infatuated, refused to leave her father for him; now that Meg is of age, she has become the object of Pete’s deadly obsession. Meanwhile, in Bernard Vorhaus’s The Amazing Mr. X, the widowed Christine (Lynn Bari) becomes the target not only of a phony spiritualist, Alexis (Turhan Bey), who claims that he can put her in touch with her late husband, but also of her supposedly dead spouse Paul (Donald Curtis), who is actually very much alive and planning her demise. Both of these movies offer us narratives rare in classical horror cinema, narratives revolving around women who take on and triumph over male monsters bent on their subjugation or destruction. Postwar horror films do not simply feature female protagonists doing battle with male villains, however; they also frequently invite us, via a variety of cinematic devices, to identify with their heroines, to adopt a female gaze. This is the case, for example, with Fritz’s Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door, which uses voice-over narration and point-of-view editing to align us with its protagonist, a young woman named Celia (Joan Bennett) who impulsively marries a mysterious architect, Mark (Michael Redgrave), only to learn that he is a modern Bluebeard intent on murdering her just as he murdered his previous wife. Similarly, John J. Parker’s remarkable, nearly wordless cult horror film Dementia, which follows a switchblade-wielding Gamin (Adrienne Barrett) as she navigates a nightmarish city full of abusive husbands, lecherous winos, sleazy pimps, gluttonous johns, and crooked cops, ensures our identification with its heroine by having us share her surreal dreams and fantasies.

It is perhaps unsurprising that horror movies made during the decade following World War II treat gender so differently than films from the genre’s classical era; after all, the war had radically reconfigured gender roles in the United States and Great Britain. Whereas horror movies of the 1930s and early 1940s reflect a reversal in the struggle for women’s rights—a return to traditional, patriarchal attitudes toward gender and family prompted by the calamity of the Great Depression and a general reaction against the cultural

“excesses” of the 1920s—horror movies of the immediate postwar era reflect the greater independence and mobility women enjoyed as a result of their role during World War II. As Andrea S. Walsh observes, although “women hardly welcomed war, their homefront experience created exciting, and often unimagined, possibilities” (1984: 55) for them. Mobilized as factory workers, clericals, and farm laborers in service of the war effort, they became central to—and emancipated in—British and American society in a way they had

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never been before. The prominence and power they gained is embodied by the heroines of postwar horror. At the same time, postwar horror movies also capture the anxiety that many women felt after the war ended and the veterans returned, expecting to resume their old jobs while women resumed their former place in the home. The male monsters in postwar horror represent the threat of women losing everything they had achieved during the war years and being forcibly restored to the domestic sphere; indeed, the home and women’s traditional place in it are the primary source of horror in these films.

The fact that horror films made between 1946 and 1956 dwell on female protagonists menaced by the monstrous-masculine, then, is not astonishing.

What is more remarkable is the fact that rather than asking us to endorse the restoration of traditional gender roles, postwar horror cinema invites us to contemplate, even celebrate, their collapse.

To a certain extent, the postwar horror movies under discussion in this chapter resemble movies belonging to another genre popular during the same period: the “woman’s film.” As defined by Maria LaPlace, the woman’s film

“is distinguished by its female protagonist, female point of view and its narrative which most often revolves around the traditional realism of women’s experience: the familial, the domestic, the romantic—those arenas where love, emotion and relationships take precedence over action and events” (1987: 139). Women’s films of the era run the gamut from maternal melodramas like

Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937) and Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945)

to career woman comedies like His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940) and

Adam’s Rib (George Cukor, 1949). The type of woman’s film most similar
to postwar horror cinema, however, is the “paranoid woman’s film.” Movies
such as Suspicion (Alfred Hitchcock, 1941) and Gaslight (George Cukor,

1944) feature “victimized, mad, or terrified women, and [are] usually set in ornate, claustrophobic interiors . . . express[ing] paranoia and distrust in love and family relationships” (Walsh, 1984: 170); here, “the threat is close to
home and usually male” (Walsh, 1984: 170). Like postwar horror movies,
they revolve around women struggling against male authority figures (typically husbands) who mean them harm; moreover, like postwar horror movies, they align us with the heroine’s perspective using cinematic devices like point-of-view editing and voice-over narration. They were even motivated by the same cultural and historical forces, allowing:

undercurrents of hostility toward individual men and patriarchal society [to]

surface in the safety of a darkened theater. Movies like Gaslight and A Letter to Three Wives provided outlets for female anger rooted in the demobilization of Rosie the Riveter, the multiple strains of wartime separation, and a broader historical oppression of women, manifesting itself in the overcommitment of

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women and the undercommitment of men to heterosexual relationships. (Walsh,

1984: 190)

Clearly, there is a significant overlap between the paranoid woman’s film and the postwar horror film. Critics have noted that the paranoid woman’s
film exhibits “a special kinship with . . . the genre of the horror film” (Doane,

1987a: 140–41). Indeed, some of the movies I have offered as examples of
postwar horror—most notably The Spiral Staircase and Secret Beyond the Door—have been discussed elsewhere as examples of the paranoid woman’s film, which would seem to indicate that they belong as much to one genre as they do to the other.

For all their similarities, though, there are important differences between the postwar horror film and the paranoid woman’s film. To begin with, the paranoid woman’s film lacks the genuinely gothic trappings of horror cinema. While it does focus, like horror, on fear, suspense, and even murder, it does not feature many of the key elements associated with horror: ghosts, monsters, graveyards, old dark houses, shock cuts, gruesome makeup effects, spooky music, and so on. There is nothing particularly “horrific” about the paranoid woman’s film other than the fact that the heroine’s husband may be trying to drive her crazy or do her in.

More importantly, the paranoid woman’s film ultimately treats gender in a more conventional manner than the postwar horror movie. In the paranoid woman’s film, as Mary Ann Doane writes, “The woman’s exercise of an
active investigating gaze can only be simultaneous with her own victimisa-tion” (1987b: 288). To put it another way, while the heroine may be granted agency in the story, she is often contained and recuperated by the dominant social order at its conclusion. This is typically accomplished through a process
of pathologization and treatment. In movies like Possessed (Curtis Bernhardt,

1947) and Caught (Max Ophüls, 1949), the heroine’s active gaze—triggered
by her paranoia about the opposite sex—is diagnosed by a doctor in the film as the symptom of an illness that must be cured. Thus her agency is pathologized, becoming “an element in the discourse of medicine, a manuscript to be
read for the symptoms which betray her story, her identity” (Doane, 1987b:

290), and the heroine undergoes treatment that demands the renunciation of
her gaze and the resumption of her “normal” place in the patriarchal order.

In the final analysis, then, the paranoid woman’s film frequently serves as a cultural safety valve, a genre that “encourage[es] women to express their anger while containing that rage (at least temporarily) within the confines of
culture” (Walsh, 1984: 190).

Postwar horror cinema, on the other hand, valorizes female agency instead of demonizing it. Here, the heroine’s paranoia is justified, not pathologized:

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the man in her life is a monster (sometimes literally) and must be stopped by any means necessary. Not only is she granted an “active investigating gaze”

(which we are invited to share), she is ultimately allowed to retain it. She is not reincorporated by the dominant social order in the end; instead, her gaze transforms the dominant social order. Interestingly, studies of the paranoid woman’s film have distinguished between it and the horror film by arguing that in horror, “what the woman actually sees, after a sustained and fearful process of looking, is a sign or representation of herself displaced to the level
of the nonhuman” (Doane, 1987a: 142): the monstrous-feminine. While that
may be true of classical horror movies, as noted earlier, it is not generally true of postwar horror. 2 In the pages that remain, I would like to examine more closely how two postwar horror movies, Robert Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase and William Cameron Menzies’s The Maze, work to re-gender the genre, essentially inventing a new kind of “women’s horror cinema”—one whose feminist dimensions are clearer than those of the classical horror film and the paranoid woman’s film alike.

Based on the 1933 novel Some Must Watch by Ethel Lina White, The Spiral Staircase was directed by Robert Siodmak for RKO in 1945 and released by the studio in 1946. Like many postwar horror films, it revolves around the confrontation between a female protagonist and a monstrous male antagonist. Here, the heroine is Helen (Dorothy McGuire), a young mute woman who works as a servant for a wealthy family in a small New England village at the turn of the century. Unable to speak since witnessing the tragic death of her parents in a fire as a girl, she has nevertheless formed close relationships both with her employers—especially the widowed matriarch of the family, Mrs. Warren (Ethel Barrymore), for whom she helps care—and with the young, idealistic Dr. Parry (Kent Smith), who is in love with her and determined to find a cure for her muteness. Her life is in danger, however, from a serial killer on the loose in the area who has murdered a string of young women with deformities or disabilities. It is ultimately revealed that the killer is Mrs. Warren’s stepson, Professor Albert Warren (George Brent), a seemingly benevolent, paternalistic scientist driven by a secret compulsion to rid the world of the kind of imperfection represented for him by his female victims. In the film’s climactic scenes, Helen uncovers Albert’s identity as the killer after becoming trapped in the isolated Warren home on a dark and stormy night. She is able to defeat him with the help of Mrs. Warren, who shoots her stepson after he corners Helen on the titular staircase. The movie ends with the heroine finally regaining her powers of speech as she telephones Dr. Parry with news of the murderer’s demise: “It’s I,” she says, surprised by the sound of her own voice, “Helen.”

Siodmak’s film is, at its heart, an indictment of patriarchy. This is clear, in the first place, from its depiction of its male killer. The movie’s monster,

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Professor Warren, is explicitly shown to be the product of a sick and twisted male power structure. We learn that his dead father, a “gun-toting, hard-drinking, tough-living, God-fearing citizen” whose motto was “the strong survive, the weak die,” disapproved of both him and his stepbrother, the peri-patetic playboy Steve (Gordon Oliver), for their lack of interest in masculine pursuits. As Steve tells Albert at one point: “I’m inclined to think that father was disappointed in both of us. Neither of us fitted his concept of what a real man should be.” Since his father’s death, Albert has become obsessed with making himself into the man his father wanted him to be. This obsession has led him to murder women who symbolize for him the kind of weakness and imperfection his father saw in him and his stepbrother. “There’s no room in the whole world for imperfection,” he tells Helen after revealing that he is the killer and she will be his next victim, “What a pity my father didn’t live to see me become strong. He would have admired me for what I’m going to do.”

Although the nominal reason for Albert’s murders is his hatred of his victims’

disabilities and deformities—their physical “imperfections”—it is important to note that he kills only women. This suggests that he perceives femininity itself as an imperfection. Having fallen short as a child of his father’s definition of what a “real man” should be, he has come to associate weakness with femininity and to project his own “female” imperfections onto his victims.

By murdering them, he hopes to purge any trace of the feminine in himself.

His monstrousness, then, can be read as a product of his father’s patriarchal legacy; the sins of the father have been visited upon the son. (It is worth noting as well that although his upbringing has not made him a killer, Albert’s stepbrother Steve has not escaped its misogynizing effects, as is made clear in a scene where he cruelly taunts Albert’s assistant Blanche [Rhonda Fleming], whom he has seduced and abandoned: “I like to see women cry,” he says,

“Men like to see women cry. It makes them feel superior.”)

That The Spiral Staircase is meant as an indictment of patriarchy is also made clear, of course, through its valorization of its female protagonist.

Helen is the heroine of the film because she confronts and overcomes the monstrous-masculine. She does not do this alone, but she does do it, significantly, without the help of a man; her love interest, Dr. Parry, is conspicuously absent during the film’s climax. Instead, she defeats the male monster with the aid of another woman, Mrs. Warren, who, suspicious that Albert or Steve is the killer because of the mysterious death of a serving girl on the premises years earlier, takes on the role of Helen’s protector and ultimately saves her life by shooting Albert—an act of feminist solidarity foreshadowed early in the movie when, gesturing at a tiger-skin rug on the floor of her bedroom, Mrs. Warren tells Helen, “I got him before he got me. The tiger, I mean. I was as good as any man.” The film demonstrates, then, not only that patriarchal rule breeds a monstrous brand of masculinity, but also that women must band

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together to eradicate it. Only in collective feminist action is there hope for success; certainly men cannot be counted on to solve the problem. This is not to say that they play no role in the solution. Helen’s attraction to Dr. Parry is an important facet of The Spiral Staircase in that he represents a new, kinder and gentler, form of masculinity. His sensitivity and selflessness set him apart not only from Albert and Steve, but also from his older colleague Dr. Harvey (Erville Alderson), a cynical hack who, after examining the body of one of the killer’s victims, jokes that the murder might have been her way of getting out of a medical bill she owed Dr. Parry. In opting for Dr. Parry, Helen is opting for the future of masculinity rather than its past; she is opting for a world in which women are accepted as men’s equals rather than treated as their chattel. But before she can be with Dr. Parry, she must lay claim to her own subjectivity, which is exactly what she does at the end of the movie.

By vanquishing Albert with Mrs. Warren’s help, she asserts her own worth in the face of his insistence upon her weakness and imperfection. Her victory over him is symbolized by her recovery of her powers of speech in the final scene. The words she speaks—“It’s I, Helen”—are at once an affirmation of gender and self, and a rebuke to an iniquitous system that perpetuates itself by subordinating women and silencing their voices.

Siodmak’s film does not simply indict patriarchy at the level of narrative, though; it also condemns it at the level of form, critiquing the sadistic-voyeuristic male gaze fostered by the dominant patriarchal order and sometimes associated with horror cinema. The killer’s presence is signaled in The Spiral Staircase by the extreme close-up of his wide, maddened eye, which reflects the image of his victim as he watches her from a hidden vantage point. This gaze is both sadistic and voyeuristic, taking pleasure in observing its female object unawares and in anticipating her punishment. It manifests the misogynistic outlook of its bearer, as well as the broader ideology and imperatives of the dominant patriarchal order. Rather than being empowered the way it often is in horror movies, however, it is here the subject of a feminist critique. To begin with, it is shown to be destructive, as it almost invariably serves as a preamble to the vicious murder of a woman. It is also shown to be flawed. It does not see women as they are, but as the deranged killer imagines them to be. Here we find the inverse of the treatment of the scientific male gaze often encountered in the paranoid woman’s film: rather than being granted unquestioned authority, it is pathologized like the female gaze is in movies like Caught and Possessed. In one notable scene, for example, when Albert is spying on Helen as she gazes at her own reflection in a mirror, we are presented with a shot from his point of view, in which Helen appears to have no mouth (for him, a symbol of her muteness, her imperfection), and then a shot of her view in the mirror, in which her appearance is completely normal. This scene demonstrates that, objectively speaking, there

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is something wrong with the sadistic-voyeuristic male gaze; it is rooted not in reality, but in patriarchal fantasies of male superiority and female lack. 3

To further throw the destructiveness and deficiency of the sadistic-
voyeuristic male gaze into relief—and to offer viewers an alternate way of looking—the film constructs a female gaze that is both empathetic and partic-ipatory. This gaze is associated first and foremost with the female protagonist, who is shown exercising it from the very beginning of the movie. The Spiral Staircase opens with a scene in which Helen is watching an early silent film entitled The Kiss at a makeshift theater housed in the village hotel. The film, seemingly a melodrama about a young woman who drowns herself after an altercation with her father over an affair of the heart, captivates Helen. In a series of shots and reverse shots, we cut between the screen and Helen, seated in the audience, eyes wide and filled with tears, hands clasped in front of her, completely invested in the plight of the heroine. At the same time, we cross-cut between the theater and a room upstairs where the killer, about to claim another victim, watches the woman from inside her closet. This sequence succinctly contrasts and comments on the difference between Helen’s gaze and Albert’s. The sadistic and voyeuristic nature of the male gaze wielded by the killer marks him as the movie’s monster, its antagonist. Meanwhile, Helen’s female gaze, demonstrating her empathy with the heroine suffering on screen, her participation in the woman’s dilemma, identifies her as the film’s protagonist. 4 This is an interesting, self-reflexive move on Siodmak’s part, one that involves him addressing at the outset of his movie the role that looking plays in the oppression of women, and providing a female alternative to the male gaze sometimes privileged in horror cinema. He extends the motif in subsequent scenes, including the one discussed above, in which Albert’s warped view of Helen’s face is contrasted with her undistorted perception of herself in the mirror. The idea of a female look is also important in the scenes between Helen and Mrs. Warren, where the warm meeting of their gazes, indicative of their mutual admiration and solicitousness, functions as a visual metaphor for the feminist solidarity between them. Thus in the final analysis, The Spiral Staircase offers not only a representational, but also a presentational indictment of patriarchy, utilizing both film narrative and film form to challenge its oppressiveness and imagine an alternative to its rule.

The same could be said of The Maze. Shot by famed production designer-turned-director William Cameron Menzies in 1953, The Maze was released by Allied Artists Pictures, the new incarnation of Monogram Pictures, as part of a bid on behalf of the former “poverty row” studio to reinvent itself as a major Hollywood player. Unfortunately, the movie, photographed in 3-D on a sizable budget, did not do particularly well at the box office and is difficult to see even today, as it has never been available commercially on home video in North America. Based on a 1945 novel of the same title by Maurice

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Sandoz, it is a Lovecraftian re-imagining of the legend of the “Monster of Glamis,” a nineteenth-century Scottish nobleman who, born badly deformed, was allegedly kept hidden by his family in Glamis Castle. The story focuses on an engaged couple, Gerald MacTeam (Richard Carlson) and Kitty Murray (Veronica Hurst), who, as the film opens, are vacationing in Cannes with Kitty’s aunt and chaperone, Edith (Katherine Emery), on the eve of their wedding. Gerald receives a cable urgently requesting his presence at Craven Castle, his family’s ancestral home in Scotland. He goes reluctantly, promis-ing Kitty that he will return in time for the wedding. He does not come back, however; instead, Kitty receives a mysterious letter from him in which he breaks off his engagement to her without explanation. Determined to find out what has happened, Kitty and Edith travel to Craven. They are received with bewildering hostility by Gerald, who demands that they leave immediately.

They contrive to stay on, though, and eventually discover the reason for his seemingly inexplicable behavior: after his uncle, the previous custodian of the castle, died, Gerald became keeper not only of the estate but also of an awful family secret. Craven Castle belongs not to him, but to the freakish, frog-like patriarch of his clan, Sir Roger Philip MacTeam, who for two hundred years has lived in seclusion in the tower, tended to by a succession of nephews and emerging only at night to swim in the pool at the center of the castle’s labyrinth. Required by tradition to devote himself to his monstrous forefather and believing that Kitty would revile him if she knew the truth, Gerald has attempted to keep all of this hidden from her. But Kitty’s discovery of his secret only strengthens her commitment to him, and when Sir Roger leaps from the tower in despair after being seen by a terrified Kitty, she is free to marry Gerald and usher in a new era at Craven.

Its current obscurity is regrettable because The Maze is a fascinating film, especially with regard to its treatment of gender. Like The Spiral Staircase, it revolves around the conflict between a female protagonist and a monstrous male authority figure. In this case, though, the antagonist, Sir Roger, is actually a monster, and instead of actively threatening the heroine, constitutes a passive obstacle to her happiness. Ensconced in his ancient castle—a crumbling edifice “with no electricity, no telephones, no modern improvements of any kind” that calls to mind both the Xanadu of Citizen Kane (Orson Welles,

1941) (the opening shot of a “Keep Out” sign posted on the gate to the maze
pays explicit homage to the beginning of Welles’s film) and the Overlook Hotel of The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) (one wonders whether the image of a sinister old manor with a labyrinth inspired Kubrick)—Sir Roger symbolizes the suffocating weight of patriarchal tradition. Although he is ultimately more pathetic than frightening, the grotesque relic of a bygone era, his legacy clearly remains a destructive one. It is particularly inimical where women are concerned. Female inhabitants of Craven Castle have

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invariably met a tragic end, as we hear in the film: both the last woman to marry a MacTeam (some two hundred years earlier) and, more recently, an inquisitive cleaning lady who ventured into the maze at night were literally scared to death by Sir Roger. Patriarchy has also proven devastating for the men of Craven, however. It has made a monster of Sir Roger and drained the life from his male descendants, who, forced to serve as his caretakers and the custodians of his legacy, are unable to marry or maintain normal relationships outside the family. Patriarchy has robbed the MacTeams of any chance at happiness they might otherwise have had.

It is thus with patriarchy itself that the female protagonist, Kitty, does battle. Her goal is to disrupt the legacy, to smash the tradition that has taken Gerald away from her. To this purpose, she wields the kind of active investigating gaze typically associated with heroines of postwar horror cinema.

Rather than accepting Gerald’s mysterious letter breaking off their engagement, she insists upon traveling to Scotland with Edith to confront him. Once there, she refuses his demands that she and her aunt leave. She parlays a cold caught by Edith on their first night at the castle into an excuse to stay on, and, despite being locked in her room at night, remains determined to discover the reason for Gerald’s strange behavior and to help him. She contrives to mail a letter to a family friend, Dr. Bert Dilling (John Dodsworth), asking him to visit Craven and examine Gerald under the pretense of making a social call.

And finally, of course, she learns the nature of the MacTeam family secret, confronts it, and frees Gerald from its terrible hold. In a neat reversal of the standard fairy tale formula, she is the knight who defeats the dragon, releasing the princess trapped in the castle from its spell. It is important to note that, like Helen in The Spiral Staircase, Kitty has help from another woman. Aunt Edith plays a crucial role in The Maze. She is Kitty’s counselor, comforter, and protector throughout the film. She also helps to solve its central mystery. It is she who first witnesses Sir Roger after sneaking out of her room at night and it is she who enables Kitty to confront him in the movie’s climax by stealing the key to her room for her. Demonstrating the kind of feminist solidarity exhibited by Helen and Mrs. Warren in Siodmak’s film, Kitty and Edith work together to clear away archaic, monstrous modes of masculinity and make room for a newer, more modern type of man. In the end, the riddle they solve, the maze they navigate, is that of patriarchy.

As in The Spiral Staircase, the critique of patriarchy carried out at the level of narrative in The Maze is supported at the level of form. Given the active investigating gaze adopted by Kitty in the film, it is no surprise that Menzies utilizes point-of-view editing to encourage the audience’s identification with her in several key scenes. Most involve her gathering pieces to the puzzle of Gerald’s behavior: when she sees a mysterious light passing outside her door in the middle of the night, for example, or when she discovers a secret passage

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in her bedroom that leads to a window offering an aerial view of the forbidden maze. By putting us directly in Kitty’s shoes in these scenes, Menzies helps ensure not only that we identify primarily with her as the heroine of the movie, but also that we are as invested in saving Gerald from his patrimony as she is. Point-of-view editing is also utilized effectively in the film’s climax when Kitty comes face-to-face with Sir Roger in the labyrinth. Cutting from her shocked face to a point-of-view shot of the amphibious patriarch lunging out of the shadows at the camera, Menzies invites us to share the heroine’s fear and revulsion at the sight of the monstrous-masculine. The montage here also serves to underscore that it is the power of the female gaze that ends the male monster’s unnatural reign, as it is Kitty’s glimpse of him that prompts his suicide. Point-of-view editing is by no means the only cinematic device used in the film to motivate our identification with Kitty and our sympathy with her quest. Narration also plays a vital role, highlighting the importance of the female voice. After a brief prologue, the movie begins with a shot of Katherine Emery, as Aunt Edith, speaking directly to the audience about the events we are to witness—events, she says, which happened the year before. As the movie unfolds, she acts as our guide within the tale, breaking in occasionally, on camera, to offer insight or reflection from her present-day perspective. Her voice serves as the narrative through-line, again inviting us to see the film as a story not simply about women, but told from a woman’s point of view. It also reminds us what the movie is about. In the closing scene, we return to Edith, who underscores that this has been the account of a woman who found happiness with a man by confronting and overcoming
the patriarchal past: “Kitty and Gerald are married now. They live in the old castle very happily. Everything has been changed and modernized except one place: the grave of Sir Roger.”

It is significant that both The Spiral Staircase and The Maze end with the heroine’s overthrow of a monstrous patriarch and embrace of a modern, progressive man. We find this movement toward a redefinition of traditional gender roles and the conventional heterosexual relationship at the conclusion of many postwar horror movies. The Red House ends, for example, with Meg’s young beau Nath Storm (Lon McCallister), who has burned down the titular house where Pete murdered her mother and father, telling her, “Looking forward is much better than looking back.” Similarly, The Amazing Mr. X
culminates with a dying, repentant Alexis advising Christine, “Don’t you go clinging to the past. I live by feeding people’s desire to escape the present.”

These films link the past with outmoded attitudes toward gender and imagine a future in which men and women coexist as equals, in which an active female life outside the home is not only accepted, but celebrated. In so doing, they captured the hopes and dreams of many women living in Great Britain and the United States following World War II. It might seem like a stretch to call

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them feminist movies; however, as Walsh argues: “The absence of organized feminist protest on a mass scale and the persistence of traditional values and roles [in the postwar era] should not blind us to the manifestations of female anger and discontent and its potential for future articulation as a full-blown feminist ideology” (1984: 197). Like other women’s films of the period, postwar horror movies “embody a nascent or emergent feminism, expressing the positive aspects of female power, bonding, and autonomy without the coherence of a feminist ideology or the organizing power of a women’s movement”

(Walsh, 1984: 197). Indeed, as we have seen, postwar horror actually supersedes the woman’s film in its valorization of female agency and subjectivity, earning it an important place as a feminist milestone not only in the history of the horror genre, but also in the history of popular cinema.

This is not to say that postwar horror movies like The Spiral Staircase and The Maze are the first women’s horror films in the history of the genre. There are some isolated classical horror movies that privilege female agency and the female gaze. Most prominent among them, perhaps, are the films produced
by Val Lewton at RKO during the first half of the 1940s. Pictures like The

Leopard Man (Jacques Tourneur, 1943) and Bedlam (Mark Robson, 1946)

feature women protagonists taking on monstrous male authority figures and, by proxy, patriarchy itself. These films are the exception rather than the rule in classical horror cinema, however. Postwar horror gave rise to the earliest cohesive cycle of women’s horror films. It can, therefore, be seen as a direct antecedent of—and perhaps an inspiration for—the wave of female-centric horror movies that appeared in the 1960s and 1970s, and continues to influ-
ence the genre today. Films such as Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski,

1968), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974), and Carrie

(Brian de Palma, 1976) have been lauded by feminist critics for facilitating

“the emergence of the girl hero” (Clover, 1992: 16), but they were preceded in
this, as we have seen, by horror movies made in the decade following World War II. Postwar horror can even be seen as a forerunner to what has arguably been the most popular form of horror in the last several decades: the slasher film. Isabel Cristina Pinedo, among others, argues that “the slasher film creates an opening for feminist discourse by restaging the relationship between women and violence as not only one of danger in which women are objects of violence but also a pleasurable one in which women retaliate to become the agents of violence and turn the tables on their aggressors” (1997: 6). Tudor maintains that these films have little precedent in horror, writing: “It is true, of course, that female protagonists are more significant in the modern genre, and that they are permitted more autonomy and resourcefulness than were the ‘heroines’ of earlier films . . . [and] afforded a degree of participation in the action all but unheard of prior to the seventies” (1989: 127). I hope it is obvious by now, however, that such heroines were not at all unheard of prior

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to the modern era of horror; indeed, the genre was filled with them between 1946 and 1956, the period that offers us our first real glimpse of what happens

“when the woman looks” in horror.

Clearly, postwar horror cinema is eminently worthy of study. These films deepen and enrich our understanding of the horror genre, especially where its treatment of gender is concerned. Why, then, have they been so consistently overlooked by critics? One answer, of course, is that critics have not been looking for them. According to the official history of horror outlined at the beginning of this chapter, these films do not exist. Another answer is that they have not been generally available for study. For years following their initial theatrical release, many postwar horror movies essentially dropped out of circulation. Unlike more prominent or popular American and British films of the era, they were rarely shown on television, revived by repertory theaters, or brought to home video. In fact, very few of them are available via mainstream channels even today. One typically must purchase them on the “gray market”—through mail-order catalogs or websites, like Sinister Cinema and Something Weird Video, that traffic in bootleg videocassettes and DVDs of movies in the public domain or not currently licensed for distribution. Prized by the hardcore genre fans and collectors familiar with such “unsacralized
cultural space[s]” (Hawkins, 2000: 11), postwar horror movies have remained
pretty much invisible to everyone else. But these are not the only explanations for their critical neglect. I would argue that they have been the victim of the same kind of prejudice that initially kept critics from giving due consideration to the woman’s film. As Walsh writes, for decades a “general lack of respect for women—their experience, work, and art—[was] mirrored in critical attitudes towards women’s films” (1984: 35); this critical disdain “contributed to the general lack of seriousness with which [women’s films] were treated in American culture” (1984: 36). A similar disdain has quite possibly played a role in the critical neglect of postwar horror cinema. Ironically, even as women’s horror films from the modern era have been analyzed and celebrated, their precursors—perhaps because of their close ties to the woman’s film—have been almost completely ignored. I hope this chapter has served to illustrate why such inattention is unfortunate. In their often radical treatment of gender, movies from the “lost decade” of horror cinema remind us that the genre is home not only to revolting bodies, but also to bodies in revolt.

noTes

1. More recently, critics have suggested that horror may have been partially absorbed by another emergent genre during this period: film noir. See, for example, Meehan (2011) and Goding (2011). Certainly the parallels between the two genres

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are suggestive: the shadowy atmosphere, the focus on murder and suspense, the recurring figure of the monstrous woman. I focus exclusively on science fiction here only because it has achieved canonical status as horror’s surrogate in the postwar era.

In any case, the argument that horror was subsumed by noir derives from the same basic premise as the argument that it was subsumed by science fiction: horror cinema had no life of its own in the decade following World War II.

2. The same could be said of the relationship between postwar horror and film noir. Movies like The Spiral Staircase and Secret Beyond the Door have also been discussed as examples of noir. I would argue, however, that postwar horror generally distinguishes itself from film noir by shifting its focus from the monstrous-feminine (embodied in noir by the figure of the femme fatale) to the monstrous-masculine.

3. In his chapter in this collection, Peter Marra situates the use of the subjective camera in The Spiral Staircase within a proto-slasher tradition that includes 1940s films such as Bluebeard (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1944), The Lodger (John Brahm, 1944), and Hangover Square (John Brahm, 1945).

4. See Anne Golden’s chapter in this collection for an extended analysis of the film’s employment of an avant-garde aesthetic, the film’s thematizing of the transition to sound from silent film, and the bodied, gestural performance by Dorothy McGuire.

ReFeRenCes

Butler, Ivan. 1970. Horror in the Cinema. New York: A.S. Barnes & Co.

Clarens, Carlos. 1997. An Illustrated History of Horror and Science-Fiction Films: The Classic Era, 1895–1967. New York: Da Capo Press.

Clover, Carol J. 1992. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Crane, Jonathan Lake. 1994. Terror and Everyday Life: Singular Moments in the History of the Horror Film. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Dixon, Wheeler Winston. 2010. A History of Horror. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Doane, Mary Ann. 1987a. The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s.

Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

———. 1987b. “The ‘Woman’s Film’: Possession and Address.” In Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, edited by Christine Gledhill, 283–298. London: BFI.

Goding, Dain. 2011. “Shadows and Nightmares: Lewton, Siodmak, and the Elusive Noirror Film.” Horror Studies 2:1 (May): 15–24.

Hawkins, Joan. 2000. Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde.

Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Hutchings, Peter. 2004. The Horror Film. Harlow, England: Pearson.

LaPlace, Maria. 1987. “Producing and Consuming the Woman’s Film: Discursive Struggle in Now, Voyager.” In Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, edited by Christine Gledhill, 138–166. London: BFI.

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Meehan, Paul. 2011. Horror Noir. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011.

Olney, Ian. 2013. Euro Horror: Classic European Horror Cinema in Contemporary American Culture. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Pinedo, Isabel Cristina. 1997. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Tudor, Andrew. 1989. Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Twitchell, James B. 1985. Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror.

New York: Oxford University Press.

Walsh, Andrea S. 1984. Women’s Film and Female Experience, 1940–1950.

New York: Praeger.

Williams, Linda. 1996. “When the Woman Looks.” In The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant, 15–34. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Worland, Rick. 2007. The Horror Film: An Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

FiLMogRApHy

Adam’s Rib. Directed by George Cukor. MGM, 1949. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2000. DVD.

The Amazing Mr. X. Directed by Bernard Vorhaus. Eagle-Lion Films, 1948. Narbeth, PA: Alpha Video, 2003. DVD.

Bedlam. Directed by Mark Robson. RKO, 1946. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2008. DVD.

Bond of Fear. Directed by Henry Cass. Mid Century Film Productions, 1956.

Medford, OR: Sinister Cinema, 1998. VHS.

Bride of the Gorilla. Directed by Curt Siodmak. Jack Broder Productions, 1951.

Narbeth, PA: Alpha Video, 2004. DVD.

Caged Fury. Directed by William Berke. Pine-Thomas Productions, 1948. Medford, OR: Sinister Cinema, 2008. DVD.

Carrie. Directed by Brian De Palma. United Artists, 1976. Los Angeles: Fox Search-light Pictures, 2001. DVD.

Caught. Directed by Max Ophüls. MGM, 1949. Chicago: Olive Films, 2014. DVD.

Citizen Kane. Directed by Orson Welles. RKO, 1941. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2011. DVD.

Creature from the Black Lagoon. Directed by Jack Arnold. Universal, 1954.

Los Angeles: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2007. DVD.

The Creeper. Directed by Jean Yarbrough. Twentieth Century Fox, 1948. Tulsa, OK: VCI Entertainment, 1998. VHS.

The Curse of Frankenstein. Directed by Terence Fisher. Hammer, 1957. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2002. DVD.

Daughter of Darkness. Directed by Lance Comfort. Victor Hanbury / Alliance Productions, 1948. London: Redemption USA, 2009. DVD.

Dementia. Directed by John J. Parker. HFK / JJ Parker Productions, 1955. New York: Kino Video, 2000. DVD.

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Dracula’s Daughter. Directed by Lambert Hillyer. Universal, 1936. Los Angeles: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2007. DVD.

The Face of Marble. Directed by William Beaudine. Monogram, 1946. Williamsville, NY: Teakwood Video, 2004. DVD.

Fright. Directed by W. Lee Wilder. Exploitation Productions, 1956. Narbeth, PA: Alpha Video, 2009. DVD.

Gaslight. Directed by George Cukor. MGM, 1944. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2011. DVD.

The Ghost of Rashmon Hall. Directed by Denis Kavanagh. British Animated Films, 1947. Citrus Heights, CA: Apprehensive Films, 2013. DVD.

Ghost Ship. Directed by Vernon Sewell. Vernon Sewell Productions, 1952. London: Studiocanal, 2008. DVD.

Gog. Directed by Herbert L. Strock. Ivan Tors Productions, 1954. Medford, OR: Sinister Cinema, 2010. DVD.

His Girl Friday. Directed by Howard Hawks. Columbia, 1940. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2006. DVD.

The Hitch-Hiker. Directed by Ida Lupino. RKO, 1953. New York: Kino Video, 1999.

DVD.

House of Darkness. Directed by Oswald Mitchell. Harry Reynolds Productions, 1948.

Medford, OR: Sinister Cinema, 2008. DVD.

House of Wax. Directed by André De Toth. Bryan Foy / Warner Bros., 1953.

Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2003. DVD.

Indestructible Man. Directed by Jack Pollexfen. CGK Productions, 1956. Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2006. DVD.

The Inheritance. Directed by Charles Frank. Two Cities Films, 1947. Medford, OR: Sinister Cinema, 2009. DVD.

King Kong. Directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper. RKO, 1933.

Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2005. DVD.

The Leopard Man. Directed by Jacques Tourneur. RKO, 1943. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2008. DVD.

The Lost Moment. Directed by Martin Gabel. Walter Wanger Productions, 1947.

Chicago: Olive Films, 2014. DVD.

Mad Love. Directed by Karl Freund. MGM, 1935. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2006. DVD.

Man Beast. Directed by Jerry Warren. Jerry Warren Productions, 1956. Tulsa, OK: VCI Entertainment, 2013. DVD.

Man in Black. Directed by Francis Searle. Hammer, 1949. Medford, OR: Sinister Cinema, 2008. DVD.

The Maze. Directed by William Cameron Menzies. Allied Artists, 1953. Barcelona: Absolute Distribution, 2012. DVD.

Mildred Pierce. Directed by Michael Curtiz. Warner Bros., 1945. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2005. DVD.

Possessed. Directed by Curtis Bernhardt. Warner Bros., 1947. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2005. DVD.

The Red House. Directed by Delmer Daves. Sol Lesser / United Artists, 1947.

Narbeth, PA: Alpha Video, 2003. DVD.

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Rosemary’s Baby. Directed by Roman Polanski. Paramount, 1968. Los Angeles: Paramount Home Entertainment, 2000. DVD.

Scared to Death. Directed by Christy Cabanne. Golden Gate Pictures, 1947. Narbeth, PA: Alpha Video, 2003. DVD.

Secret Beyond the Door. Directed by Fritz Lang. Diana Productions / Universal, 1947.

Chicago: Olive Films, 2012. DVD.

She. Directed by Irving Pichel. RKO, 1935. San Diego: Legend Films, 2008. DVD.

She-Wolf of London. Directed by Jean Yarbrough. Universal, 1946. Los Angeles: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2007. DVD.

The Shining. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Warner Bros., 1980. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2010. DVD.

Shock. Directed by Alfred L. Werker. Twentieth Century Fox, 1946. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2006. DVD.

The Snow Creature. Directed by W. Lee Wilder. United Artists, 1954. Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2005. DVD.

The Spiral Staircase. Directed by Robert Siodmak. RKO, 1946. Troy, MI: Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2000. DVD.

Stella Dallas. Directed by King Vidor. Samuel Goldwyn, 1937. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2013. DVD.

Stolen Face. Directed by Terence Fisher. Hammer, 1952. Tulsa, OK: VCI Entertainment, 2006. DVD.

Suspicion. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. RKO, 1941. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2004. DVD.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Directed by Tobe Hooper. Vortex, 1974. Orland Park, IL: Dark Sky Films, 2006. DVD.

Them! Directed by Gordon Douglas. Warner Bros., 1954. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2002. DVD.

The Thing from Another World. Directed by Christian Nyby. Winchester / RKO, 1951. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2003. DVD.

The Three Weird Sisters. Directed by Daniel Birt. British National Films, 1948.

Medford, OR: Sinister Cinema, 2008. DVD.

The Unknown. Directed by Henry Levin. Columbia, 1946. Williamsville, NY: Teakwood Video, 2004. DVD.

Valley of the Zombies. Directed by Philip Ford. Republic, 1946. Williamsville, NY: Teakwood Video, 2005. DVD.

Violated. Directed by Walter Strate. Panther Productions, 1953. Seattle: Something Weird Video, 2008. DVD.

Chapter 4
val Lewton, Mr. gross,
and the grand-guignol

Re-Staging the Corpse in The body snatcher

Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare

In 1945, Val Lewton co-wrote (as Carlos Keith) and produced a film, entitled The Body Snatcher (Robert Wise), which is a film riddled with corpses.

These corpses, I want to argue, have much in common with the plays of André de Lorde, the most important writer in the early period of the GrandGuignol stage in Paris. The Grand-Guignol is a place rarely discussed in association with the producer-auteur’s horror oeuvre. In fact, the eponyms

“Lewtonesque” and “grand-guignolesque” are made to occupy different ends of the spectrum in popular horror mythmaking: restraint and excess. Val Lewton’s films are often understood in the history of horror genre scholarship in opposition to the aesthetics of the Grand-Guignol Theatre. The GrandGuignol1 (1897–1962) was the infamous Paris theater popularly associated with voyeuristically graphic onstage gore and bodily sensation. Val Lewton’s films continue to be appreciated for the shadowy and hidden, leaving violence to occur only in the audience’s imagination. In line with this designation, Val Lewton’s films have come to be understood as the redeeming and sophisticated side of the 1940s horror cinema because, these critics argue, his films prioritized the psychological over the attractions-based horror from Universal Studios and Poverty Row.

In this chapter, I examine The Body Snatcher as constituting an example of Grand-Guignol cinema, which seemingly contradicts dominant myths for which Lewton’s oeuvre is cherished within the context of 1940s horror. As Rick Worland suggests, “[f]orties horror is usually disparaged in standard historical accounts of the genre” (2007: 176). Hence, Lewton’s RKO films are often championed in horror scholarship as beacons of creativity2 in a decade that is often understood as degrading into “formulaic repetition”

(Jancovich, 2008a: 17), corruption, and parody.3 For example, Lewton’s films are described, in the words of one of the pioneers of horror scholarship, 67

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Carlos Clarens, as “chamber music against the seedy bombast of the claw-and-fangs epics of the day” (1967: 111). S. S. Prawer asserts this position very clearly by ascribing to Lewton a colonizing mission, namely, to “civilize” the horror genre of the day:

[t]he next wave [of horror] comes on, against the dark sky of the Second World War and what led up to it, with a curiously muted roar. The dominant figure is the producer Val Lewton, whose modestly budgeted films, from Cat People (1942) to Bedlam (1946), tried to civilize the horror-movie into subtler evocations of terror—evocations that made the audience supply a good deal of what the screen only suggests. (1980: 10)

By linking his productions to the traditions of the Grand-Guignol stage, I am reading Lewton against the grain here so that his films, as Worland asserts,

“become far less anomalous in the evolution of the horror genre than they have sometimes been considered” (2007: 178). The plays of the GrandGuignol and the films of Val Lewton are related to a set of Manichean oppositions, such as body vs. mind, horror vs. terror, blood-letting vs. the unseen, the visible vs. the shadowy, disgust vs. suspense, voyeurism vs. restraint, as well as the above-mentioned colonial opposition of civilized vs. primitive.

These oppositions have critically relegated the Grand-Guignol horror traditions, those that highlight visible and bodily horrors rather than hint at them, as within the purview of the tasteless and “uncivilized.” The films of Val Lewton, on the other hand, continue to enjoy the distinction of occupying the high end of the genre, encouraging the audience to use their mindful imagina-tions rather than synesthetically experience graphic spectacle. I will argue that The Body Snatcher is constituted by a Grand-Guignol aesthetic, especially as the film leaves us with what Walter Benjamin calls corpses “stripped naked”

([1925] 1998: 185). While these corpses speak to the reality of WWII and the Holocaust, they are also intimately linked to the corpse-ridden melodramatic tradition of playwright André de Lorde. The Body Snatcher also reflects the best of the Grand-Guignol tradition through its rootedness in the naturalist critique of modern power formations, especially the scientific establishment, for which de Lorde’s plays are well known.

LewTon(esque) vs. gRoss(ness)

An often-repeated incident in Val Lewton’s life relates how unhappy he was that horror icon Boris Karloff had been signed on by producer Jack Gross to be in his last three films. Gross had come to RKO in 1944 from Universal
where he had produced the iconic and influential film, The Wolf Man

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69

(George Waggner, 1941). 4 Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942) was made as
a B programmer to cash in on the success of The Wolf Man, and it was hugely successful. It screened “a record thirteen weeks at the Hawaii, where Citizen Kane’s5 first run lasted only twelve weeks” (Siegel, 1973: 38). Lewton and his
screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen also self-reflexively poked fun at the werewolf picture in Cat People, when the psychiatrist, Dr. Judd (Tom Conway), says:

“You want me to carry some means of protection—a gun, perhaps, with a silver bullet?” According to Siegel, Lewton loathed6 Gross, “and prided him-
self upon managing to indicate his contempt by always referring to his superior as ‘Mr. Gross,’ a typically intricate, Lewtonesque manner of conveying disrespect” (1973: 66). When told by Gross about the three-picture contract with Karloff, Siegel writes that Lewton “was not pleased” (1973: 71). According to Martha P. Nochimson, “Lewton who associated Karloff with the kind of Grand Guignol horror he despised, left the office with smoke pouring out of his ears” (2006: 9). The Grand-Guignol is used specifically by Nochimson to embody the attractions-based horror films that Lewton despised. This iconic incident, and particularly the way it is recounted by Siegel and Nochimson, summarizes the deep divide that permeates the Lewtonesque and grand-guignolesque traditions. For Siegel, Lewton’s whole personality is permeated by “indirectness.” Nochimson’s use of the metaphor “smoke pouring out of his ears” suggests a man trying to control his temper. In Siegel’s terms, the Lewtonesque is boiled down to the indirect and restraint. And the grand-guignolesque embodies its opposite: directness and excess. But ironically, there is nothing indirect about Lewton’s strategy in calling him “Mr. Gross,”

for it speaks rather directly to what Lewton felt for the man to those listening.

I do not want to argue that Val Lewton’s late films were directly influenced by a Grand-Guignol aesthetic. I have not come across any indication that Lewton was even aware of the theatre. Maybe he was, and would have never set foot in such a “crass” place! I am, however, interested in tracing a trajectory in the history of horror cinema in the twentieth century that can be linked to the Grand-Guignol theatre. In her 1995 article, entitled “Horror and the Carnivalesque,” Barbara Creed cites four other possible artistic traditions alongside the carnival for studying the emergence of cinematic horror: the gothic novel, the shilling shockers (or sensation fiction), dada and surrealism, and the Grand-Guignol theatre in Paris (1995: 131). All are appropriate, if intertwined, areas of research for the emergence of cinematic horror, but the Gothic tradition has clearly been the most influential. Many genre histories of cinematic horror somewhat apologetically trace its roots to the Gothic liter-
ary tradition (Pirie, 2009; Hutchings, 2004; Jankovich, 1992). Here the genre
is given pedigree by being rooted in a “serious”7 literary tradition that safe-
guards it against attacks that it is a base form of entertainment. On the other hand, the Grand-Guignol has been associated with the very opposite view:

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the lurid and gory, even pornographic, traditions of the genre often despised by horror genre historians. Hence, the Grand-Guignol has been marginalized in histories of the genre, expect for brief, but important, mentions in some
studies (Skal, 2001; Wells, 2000; Worland, 2007).

The Body Snatcher has often been perceived in reviews and scholarship paradoxically, as both literate and crass. In part, the film has been praised for its literariness, because it is based on the short story by Robert Louis Stevenson of the same name. It is described by Clarens as “handsomely wrought” (1967: 115). David J. Skal contends that it features “Boris Karloff in his finest role as a resurrection man in the best Burke and Hare tradition”

(2001: 221). S. S. Prawer describes the film as a “restrained exercise in terror” (1980: 11). Siegel writes that when it was released in 1945, “every New York newspaper review was a rave” (1973: 77). Ironically, the film was also dismissed for the very literariness for which it was championed. For example, it was critiqued by an early champion of Lewton’s work, James Agee, for its

“dangerous literariness” (Siegel, 1973: 78), which undermined, according to
him, its raison-d’être as a horror film. On the other side of the literate coin, however, the film has also been perceived as crass and “non-Lewtonesque.” A good example of this approach is Siegel’ s estimation that The Body Snatcher lacks the poetry of I Walked with a Zombie and the Seventh Victim. The delicacy and suggestiveness of Lewton’s work have been diminished, the ambiguities of character and action have been hardened into sharp but conventional ironies.

Perhaps this is a result of the presence on the film, of Jack J. Gross, an executive producer for whom Lewton had little respect. (1973: 154)

Siegel laments the loss of suggestiveness and ambiguity in the film, and ascribes this lack of poetry to the influence of Jack Gross. This crassness is defined in relation to Lewton’s earlier films under Charles Koerner, the head of production at RKO before Gross, whom Siegel depicts as supporting Lewton’s creativity as a producer-auteur (1973: 35). I want to move this discussion beyond the binaries of the literate auteur of terror (Lewtonesque) vs.

the crass horror programmer (Gross-ness), in order to defend Grand-Guignol forms as cohesive traditions within the history of the horror genre. What does The Body Snatcher look like when read through the centrality of its corpses?

The Grand-Guignol has much to reveal in this regard.

Le gRAnD-guignoL: THéâTRe De L’iMpAsse

De CHApTAL8

The Grand-Guignol (G-G)9 is never one thing. It is at once a “place and a genre,”

making it difficult to categorize (Pierron, 1995: ii). However, I want to delineate

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71
four aspects to take into consideration when attempting to define Grand-Guignol form: (1) the G-G was a theatre deeply rooted in the naturalism of the late nineteenth century and the melodramatic tradition of the butte Montmartre; (2) the G-G was a theatre often taking place, and negotiating themes relating the oppressive nature of modernity and modern institutions; (3) the physical venue was small and claustrophobic, and because it was a house of trickery a host of techniques were used to realistically pull off the “moment of violence,” such as signposting, pacing, off-stage violence, and so forth; (4) located in the red-light district of Paris, the G-G experience was voyeuristically focused on bodily sensations, often mingling the erotic with violence. Because of length consider-ations, I will examine the first two only, but some aspects of number three, the notion of “signposting,” will come up briefly in my analysis.

naturalism and the Comédies Rosses

Oscar Méténier, the founder of the G-G in 1897, was schooled in the Théâtre Libre, which was a very popular stage in Paris’ Montmartre district at the end of the nineteenth century, as it catered to those who frequented this area: artists, bohemians, sex-workers, burlesque dancers, thrill-seekers, and so forth.

The Théâtre Libre was opened by André Antoine in 1887. At the theatre’s core was a political interest in the life of the popular classes: petty thieves, sex-workers, and factory workers, for example. A important influence on the Théâtre Libre was the naturalism of Émile Zola, which was politically motivated by a desire to depict the everyday lives of ordinary people in harsh and realistic ways. Naturalist tales tended to be gritty and realistic, with bodies often straining under the weight of oppressive modernity. Often, the violence in these tales was highlighted, and usually depicted in an everyday setting.

The naturalist tale was influenced by the dominant scientific worldview at the end of the nineteenth century. Under the influence of Charles Darwin, a

“naturalist” is someone who has a materialist conception of the world without God. Hence, naturalist tales were presented as objective and documentary-like representations of everyday life, constituted by a scientific worldview.

The death of Zola in 1902, whose Thérèse Raquin (1867) is considered by some scholars to be a quintessential naturalist text, signaled the end of
the naturalist movement (Bénévent, 2003: 101). The fantastique tale, such as Guy de Maupassant’s Le Horla (1887), would in the words of Tzvetan Todorov, bring about a “hesitation” with respect to the certainty of the scientific worldview ([1973] 2000: 15). However, de Maupassant’s naturalist tale, Mademoiselle Fifi (1882), which was first presented at the Théâtre Libre10 and
then on opening night at the G-G, was more easily adaptable to the stage than his subjective fantastique tales. The more objective narrative presentation, together with a claustrophobic everyday setting and a surprising dénouement, made the naturalist tale important source material for the G-G stage.

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Méténier was Antoine’s collaborator at the Théâtre Libre, and because of his experience as a police secretary, he provided the theatre with short plays called comédies rosses: short, crass dramatic plays inspired by naturalism, which looked at the life and culture of the Parisian working classes. The comédies rosses were often inspired by the faits divers of the Parisian popular press. This tradition is quite similar to what has been called “sensation novels” or “sensation fiction” in Anglo-Saxon culture (Hughes). The emergence in the late-half of the nineteenth century of melodramatic narratives was based on “shocking” and “sensational” subject matter, such as murder, adultery, theft, insanity, and, of course, tales of seduction. These novels distinguished themselves from the sensational Gothic tradition by being set in the everyday spaces of the present instead of a preoccupation with the past.

In the comédies rosses, Méténier experimented with naturalism, but he never lost touch of the tradition of melodrama that was a staple of Montmartre stage. Hand and Wilson argue that Méténier’s G-G was never divorced from the great popular theatrical development of the nineteenth century, melodrama.

Montmartre was home to the “blood and thunder” theatres of the boulevard du crime, and the Grand-Guignol would, in its own time, become “le theatre de Monmartre” . . . Implicit [in this statement is] an acknowledgement that the Grand-Guignol remained inside, rather than outside, the area’s melodramatic traditions. (2002: 7–8)

What naturalism brought to the stage is a more radical social critique of power relations, especially of the bourgeois classes. If in melodrama, the righteous suffered unfairly, naturalism brought to the fore the often crushing effect of bourgeois modernity on the working-classes. But it was only when Méténier turned the G-G over to Max Maury in 1899 that naturalism was taken over by melodrama. As Hand and Wilson recount,

Méténier continued his investigations into the comédie rosse and naturalism and he opened the Grand-Guignol in 1897 with the Théatre Libre model in mind

[; . . .] the theatre that Max Maurey [1899–1915] inherited was not a theatre of horror per se, but a successful house of naturalism, dedicated to the true-to-life representation of a society dehumanized by capitalism and bourgeois morality.

(2002: 4–5)

While G-G scholar Mel Gordon distinguishes the “horror” repertoire from

“comedies and farces” and “dramatic plays,” Agnès Pierron makes no such distinction between horror and dramatic plays. Though she acknowledges a shift with the advent of Maury, the naturalist plays of Méténier are understood to be part of what she calls the “fears of the Belle Époque” (1995: xvii).

Hence, one must be cautious about making narrow divisions between the

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Méténier and Maury years as they constitute a continuous thread within the Grand-Guignol horror tradition.

Corpse-Centered Melodramas

The G-G was a stage littered with corpses. Whether it was the corpse of a German officer stabbed by a sex-worker in Mademoiselle Fifi (1897), “one of the most popular plays of the Grand Guignol,” 11 or an unknowing victim caught in impossible circumstances in one of André de Lorde’s “surgical plays,” the corpse found a home in the melodramatic tradition of the G-G

(Gordon, 1997: 101). Tom Gunning calls the “sensation plays” of André de

Lorde an “assault on the senses of the audience” (1994: 52), and argues for a serious reconsideration of the G-G within the history of melodrama. According to Peter Brooks’s study on melodrama, “melodrama reaches its climax less by the triumph of truth of virtue than by ‘making the world more legible’ as truth shines through all repression” (quoted in Gunning, 1994: 50).

However, for Gunning, the melodramas of de Lorde, and other G-G plays, move in the opposite direction, ending in death and frisson. In other words, Gunning argues that the dead-end is the dominant characteristic of de Lorde’s melodrama, where Brooks’s definition of classic melodrama highlights the revelation of virtue as more legible. The G-G’s naturalist roots, with its firm critique of bourgeois power, often finds a voice in horror melodrama, not through a return to virtuous truth, but to Sadean vice: “Grand Guignol often inverts the melodramatic traditions, returning to a Sadean universe in which
vice is rewarded and virtue suffers horribly” (Gunning, 1994: 53).

For Gunning, the universe of de Lorde freezes and ends on the contemplation of a corpse, where sensation overwhelms significance (1994: 59). In his examination of de Lorde and Alfred Binet’s L’Horrible expérience (1909), Gunning argues that the corpses littering its finale find no transcendence, no point beyond themselves, “but rather affirm [themselves] as a terminus, a barrier with no beyond” (1994: 59). For a play staged at the Théâtre de l’impasse de Chaptal, Gunning’s wording is quite appropriate; he argues that this play leaves its audience with an overwhelming sense of death as an ultimate dead-end. I am arguing, however, that the G-G corpses of de Lorde’s plays, rooted as they are in naturalist realism and the faits divers of the Parisian press, are not simply dead-end corpses, as in Gunning’s understanding, but corpses that

“re-stage” politically charged affect for audiences.

In his study of national trauma in the horror film, entitled Shocking Representation, Adam Lowenstein utilizes Walter Benjamin’s work on the eighteenth-century German Trauerspiel, or mourning play, which highlights how the image of the corpse is used allegorically to literalize cruelty, anguish, and horror. According to Lowenstein, Benjamin wants to distinguish baroque

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allegory from the romantic symbol. For Benjamin, the allegorical image is not fixed, but between being and appearance, between subject and object, between life and death (2005: 13). The Baroque allegory is, in Benjamin’s terms Jetztzeit, where an image of the past triggers a moment of unexpected recognition in the present. It is when “the eternal is separated from the events of the story of salvation, and what is left is a living image open to all kinds of
revision by the interpretative artist” (Benjamin, [1925] 1998: 183). Benjamin
continues, “[t]he function of baroque iconography is not so much to unveil material objects as to strip them naked” ([1925] 1998: 185). Benjamin’s notion of “stripping naked” takes us beyond Gunning’s notion of dead-end corpses. While there is no “unveiling of truth” in Benjamin’s perspective, there is a way in which the corpse stripped bare can affectively shock audiences into recognition of traumatic events through bodily sensation. 12

Lowenstein argues for what he fittingly calls a “Grand Guignol approach to history” where
the horror of this spectacle, rather than being a dramatic dead end terminating only in sensation—the kind of event subjected to the widespread exposure that threatens to overwhelm any meaningful response [. . . .] Spectators [. . .] can reconnect their aroused senses and political sensibilities to a scandal anesthe-tized by overwhelming hype in its public incarnation. (2005: 47)

Lowenstein refers to de Lorde’s play L’Acquittée (1909), which was based on the highly publicized case of Jeanne Weber, who was acquitted twice for strangling children in 1905 and 1906. In this play, the naturalist rootedness in the faits divers of the French press intermingles with the melodramatic impulse for truth. At the end of the play, the acquitted Mme Ménard literally acts out her recent murders before a doctor and an examining magistrate, after they have put her in a trance to get the “truth” from her. They watch in horror as she re-stages the strangling of the children in front of them. But they are powerless within the mechanism of the modern institutions they represent.

She is released. The two stand immobile and speechless as she leaves the building leaving the audience with her “re-staged” corpses of dead children.

Following Benjamin, there is no revelation here that takes us beyond death, no unveiling of a universal truth, only a moment stripped naked, like the copses of dead children “re-staged” during Ménard’s trance. The allegorical image of the dead children is not fixed, but liminally existing somewhere between life and death, present and past, between re-staging and actuality.

Lowenstein argues that in “some plays of the Grand Guignol, cultural trauma viscerally reenters personal and political consciousness reinvested with an immediacy that may have slipped away from it through abstractions of public dissemination” (2005: 47). We have in this ending, the naturalist roots of the

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G-G being spun through the horror melodrama of de Lorde, leaving the audience with (“re-staged”) corpses, madness, speechlessness, death. De Lorde’s plays are “sensation” melodramas as Gunning describes them, but because they are rooted in the naturalist tradition of the faits divers and comédies rosses, they leave traces, or residues, that link up to contemporary traumas.

According to Lowenstein, the dead corpse of the G-G stage may touch visceral traumas otherwise forgotten, or even over-hyped in the sensational press. The stripping naked of the allegorical corpse of the G-G stage can lead to “the restoration of visceral yet politically engaged affect to public historical trauma”

(Lowenstein, 2005: 47). Naturalism and melodrama found a home in the G-G
under Max Maury in the early years of the twentieth century. To separate naturalism from melodrama is to misconstrue what Lowenstein calls “Grand Guignol history”: namely, the volatile enactment of political affect through the stripping naked of corpses on its stage. Even if Méténier accentuated nautralism, and de Lorde (under Maury) melodrama, together both traditions informed the “re-staging” of G-G corpses on the butte Montmartre at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. It is not a coincidence that the G-G will experience its “Golden Age” 13 in a post–World War

I context, and on a continent strewn with corpses. Neither is it a coincidence that Val Lewton wrote and produced The Body Snatcher as World War II was coming to an end, another time and place strewn with corpses.

THe boDy snATCHeR AnD THe gRAnD-guignoLesque

The idea of corpses being allegorically “stripped naked” propels us to the last scene of The Body Snatcher where the pale gaunt corpse of Cabmen John Gray (Boris Karloff) seems to explode, with every lightning strike, into the life of a nineteenth-century surgeon. In this scene, a small carriage careens through a stormy night. Inside are Dr. Toddy MacFarlane (Henry Daniell) and his student assistant Donald Fettes (Russell Wade), who are transporting the freshly disinterred body of a woman between them. They have “snatched” her body from its tomb for MacFarlane’s medical school.

But to MacFarlane’s eyes, the woman’s body looks like the corpse of Gray, a man MacFarlane killed earlier in the film because he had become a threat to MacFarlane’s reputation and livelihood. The “spectral” corpse of Gray forces MacFarlane to drive the carriage off a cliff, and he is killed. Fettes who had gotten off the carriage at MacFarlane’s behest to check the corpse more closely, runs down to find MacFarlane’s dead body and the woman’s corpse next to the overturned carriage. Fettes walks away in the stormy night as the bodies continue to be pummeled by the downpour. Like the G-G stage, this finale is strewn with corpses.

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“burked” Corpses in The Body Snatcher

In the tradition of G-G naturalism and faits divers, these corpses are

“re-staged” from the infamous Burke and Hare murders, serial murders perpetrated in Edinburgh between 1827 and 1828. The film is based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story of the same name (published in 1884), “which was based upon news stories of the so-called ‘Resurrectionists’ of Edinburgh in the 1830s, [sic] whose trade was digging up reasonably fresh corpses and
selling then to medical schools” (Siegel, 1973: 75). In the film, Gray is por-
trayed as having shielded MacFarlane from involvement with the Burke and Hare murders, as a protégé to Dr. Knox, the surgeon who was buying the cadavers. Gray served prison time for his silence, and in turn manipulates MacFarlane with this information. Because laws severely restricted access to cadavers, MacFarlane continues to count on Gray to supply him with corpses.

But like the serial murderers before him, Gray begins to murder rather than simply steal bodies from graves. In the words of the popular press of the time, Gray “Burked” his victims. The Burke and Hare story does not only appear as a backdrop to the film, but is often at the forefront, especially in the scene where Gray kills MacFarlane’s servant, Joseph (Bela Lugosi). Just before he kills Joseph, Gray sings a folk song he heard in the streets by the “ped-dlars of verse” about “Burking” to Joseph. Because he is a new immigrant to Scotland, Joseph does not understand the verses, but Gray’s song is in fact

“signposting” in verse what is about to happen to Joseph. The song describes in detail how “Burking” was actually carried out by the infamous duo. And as he sings the song, Gray slowly circles in on Joseph and “Burks” him by suffocation (as Burke and Hare did).

“Signposting” was an oft-used device in the G-G that created tension and anxiety as a play moved towards its moment of violence. Often, a play would

“signpost” violence in act 1 verbally, only to carry it out in act 2 as body-centered and attraction-based spectacle. According to Hand and Wilson,

“what is interesting is that every action is preceded by an announcement of what is going to happen . . . In de Lorde’s words: ‘Murder, suicide and torment seen on stage are less frightening that the anticipation of that torture,
suicide, or murder’” (Hand and Wilson, 2002: 50–51). The “Burking” of

Joseph scene also operates on the assumption that the audience knows the story of Burke and Hare. Like the G-G tradition of basing plays on popular events taken from the Parisian press, the scene escalates a sense of anticipatory anxiety and disquiet about the “Burking” of victims. This anticipatory anxiety is the language more often than not associated with “Radcliffean terror” (of the mind) and not the horrific disgust (of the body) often associated with the G-G, but it was a staple technique. Hence, de Lorde’s words associate him with the terror tradition that emphasizes anticipation (the

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unseen) over the graphic spectacle (the seen). De Lorde was never so Lewtonesque than in his insistence on the unseen!

Joseph will literally re-surface as a corpse later when MacFarlane and Fettes discover that it was dumped by Gray in a washing barrel, where corpses are prepped for dissection. Joseph’s corpse will be stripped beyond naked in the act of dissection with the medical students. Additionally, the re-surfacing of Joseph’s corpse reconnects not only with the scandal and trauma of the Burke and Hare mythology, but also other more contemporary corpses. The literal re-surfacing of such a corpse cannot be isolated from the real-life corpses being witnessed when the film was released in May of 1945: the corpses of World War II concentration camps. Alexander Nemerov writes that “The Body Snatcher was shown during the very weeks in which American audiences first saw newsreel footage of the concentration camps, beholding the carnage in ‘stunned silence’” (2005: 35). Nemerov highlights how some characters represent “icons of grief” in Lewton’s horror output in order to examine what they reveal about the U.S. home front experiences during World War II.

In The Body Snatcher, the street singer (Donna Lee), who is “Burked”

by Gray in one of the film’s most chilling scenes, is an “icon of grief” for Nemerov. Discussing Lewton’s Russian ancestry, Nemerov argues that Lee is like a Russian icon, the grieving virgin, whose “lament incarnates something more directly and emotionally related to the war” (2005: 35). We never see her corpse after she is “Burked” by Gray. In fact, she is killed in a most Lewtonesque way, in the shadows, leaving the audience to hear only her singing voice as it is abruptly cut off. A G-G reading of The Body Snatcher would insist that it is not the street singer, but Joseph’s re-surfacing body in the washing barrel, and the bodies that litter the end of the film, which “incarnate,” to render bodily, the bodies seen in newsreel footage of concentration camps. In this way, The Body Snatcher does not reveal a “truth” about war and genocide through the “grieving virgin”; however, corpses stripped bare, can possibly lead audiences to meaning through affect and bodily sensation, or in the words of Lowenstein, “the restoration of visceral yet politically engaged affect to public historical trauma” (2005: 47).

Critiquing bourgeois power

A film that is deeply class-conscious, The Body Snatcher can also be understood to play out like naturalist plays, which were critical of bourgeois power. MacFarlane is a highly skilled upper-class doctor, who feels trapped by laws that inhibit his career as a surgeon. Nochimson says that MacFarlane comes from a working-class background, a place to which he does not want to return. She argues that his association with the infamous Dr. Knox of

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Burke and Hare fame was purely instrumental: “Dr. Knox, whom he served, not to advance science but in order to break out of working-class hopelessness” (2006: 13). While MacFarlane now occupies a place on the top of the class hierarchy in the modern world of the nineteenth century, the cabman Gray is the opposite: poor and struggling to survive. To MacFarlane, Gray is nothing more than a “crawling graveyard rat.” Gray’s class resentment can be understood to occupy an important place in the story. At the beginning of the scene where MacFarlane kills Gray, he offers Gray a substantive monetary bribe, because in the words of MacFarlane, Gray has “become a cancer, a malignant evil cancer rotting my mind . . . and the only cure is to cut it out”! Class resentment spills out of Gray when rejects the bribe saying that he takes pleasure in seeing MacFarlane grovel. Gray says, “you are a pleasure to me . . . a pride to know that I can force you to my will.” Then Gray continues:

I am a small man, a humble man. Being poor I have had to do much that I did not want to do. But so long as the great Dr. McFarlane comes to my whistle, that long am I a man. If I have not that, then I have nothing. Then I am only a cabman and a grave robber. You’ll never get rid of me, Toddy.

Gray attempts to secure some entitlement in the strict class hierarchy of the nineteenth century, by having control over one of the most prestigious men in Edinburgh society. Gray’s class resentment pushes him to continue supplying bodies to MacFarlane rather than disappear to Leith with money and a secure future. Moreover, Gray enjoys having the things that MacFarlane has; he is constantly measuring himself up to MacFarlane. For example, Gray boasts about the quality of his brandy to Joseph comes to see him:

“Have some more brandy, I’ll wager that it’s better than the Doctor’s.” Class struggle is the main conflict in the film, and MacFarlane fears Gray because he sees in him the potential of returning to where he started: working-class hopelessness.

Set in 1831, the crushing effects of the working-classes under bourgeois dominance is very prominent in the film. The oppressive effects of medical science, a growing and powerful institution, is front and center. MacFarlane’s status as a medical doctor is challenged by Gray in a scene where they meet for drink at an inn. In this scene, Gray forces MacFarlane look at himself in a mirror with Gray looking at him over his shoulder. The image of them in the mirror is quite revealing, as far apart as they are in class and status, they are actually uncanny doubles. They need each other to survive. Gray challenges MacFarlane’s ability as a healer, insinuating that his hands have delved too much in death to be the hands of a healing man. Gray says to him, “there is a lot of knowledge in those eyes, but no understanding.” Gray is voicing

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his opinion, on how the work of MacFarlane has become instrumental,
losing touch with compassionate healing. While MacFarlane embodies the idea of instrumental reason (knowledge), Gray is a prophetic challenge to him. The voice of compassionate wisdom (healing) is embodied by Donald Fettes who steps down as his student, because he becomes disenchanted with MacFarlane’s instrumental ways. Later in the film, after Fettes has left MacFarlane, he tells Mrs. Marsh (Rita Corday), the mother of the young girl on whom MacFarlane had performed spinal surgery, that “[MacFarlane]

taught me the mathematics of anatomy, but he couldn’t teach me the poetry of medicine . . . a road that leads to knowledge, but not healing.” The critique of prevailing modern scientific knowledge could not be more pointed. It is interesting to note here that The Body Snatcher is the first film where Lewton used a screen credit under the pseudonym of Carlos Keith, and his signature interest for the life of ordinary working-class people and the marginalized is
central to the framework of the film.14

A Landscape strewn with Corpses

Ironically, the little girl Georgina (Sharyn Moffett) begins to walk when she thinks she hears the clapping of the Gray’s horse. She had met Gray’s horse in the opening scene and spoke of wanting to see it again throughout the film.

The clapping of the hooves on the pavement, which is used to signal death in most of the scenes of the film, sparks Georgina’s healing. The film seems to champion, in the style of dominant melodrama, the victory of virtuous compassion over oppression. Unlike the G-G, there does not seem to be a return to Sadean vice in the end. There is a happy ending of sorts: virtue is rewarded as Fettes lives on, MacFarlane and Gray are both dead, and most importantly, Georgina can walk. The Christian idea of resurrectional new life is rather obvious in the metaphor of the disabled girl who gets up from her wheelchair after the operation. But The Body Snatcher does not end with Fettes’s resignation and Georgina’s healing. The last scene is plagued by corpses, corpses that are the literal embodiment of the effects of instrumental science; the result of MacFarlane’s death-dealing hands, as Gray has suggested earlier in the film. But the last scene also dramatizes a serious shift in Fettes position vis-à-vis MacFarlane. Even after he has resigned, MacFarlane convinces Fettes to assist him to dig up a grave in a neighboring town.

MacFarlane had gone there to sell Gray’s coach and horses after killing him.

MacFarlane lies to Fettes, saying that Gray has left town for good. Then MacFarlane says this: “now that [Gray’s] gone I will be a new man Fettes, and a better teacher.” Fettes agrees to assist MacFarlane in “snatching” the body of a woman from a grave and start back for Edinburgh. This choice is rather ambiguous for a person moved by virtue. Fettes has succumbed to the same

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instrumental (and careerist) logic as MacFarlane. And while Fettes does not have the “specter” of Gray haunting him, he nonetheless quietly renounces his previous decision to leave the medical school.

This act leaves a trace of ambiguity about Fettes’s actual aspirations.

Lewton’s films have often been championed for their ambiguity. But the ambiguity that I am discussing does not lie in the haunting specter of Gray’s corpse. The film is quite clear that Gray’s “ghastly white, almost luminous”

(Siegel, 1973: 159) corpse is only a product of MacFarlane’s imagination.

The close-up of Fettes uncovering the face of a dead woman is without ambiguity. There is nothing indirect in this moment, that character trait for which Lewton has been so often championed. This is quite different from the closing ambiguity for which I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1942) is often discussed. In that film, it is impossible to tell if the characters are under a Vodou spell, or simply acting out family trauma. Like most G-G
material, The Body Snatcher never veers into other-worldly or supernatural frontiers. The Body Snatcher is ambiguous, but its ambiguity lies in the excess of corpses that affectively interrupt a seemingly clear-cut ending. For example, Lewton’s “late” films have been critiqued for being the opposite of ambiguous: too literal or straightforward. Siegel says that the ending of The Body Snatcher is “one of the most horrifying moments in all cinema,” but then writes there is “very little of the worldless, imaginative suspense which Lewton, at his best, was able to achieve” (1973: 159). James Agee found The Body Snatcher too “pedagogical and verbal,” writing that “much of the picture is more literary than lively and [the film] neglects its crass possibilities
as melodrama” (Siegel, 1973: 78).

The ambiguity that I am discussing is not linked to any spectral bodies, but dead ones that litter the screen. I am not arguing that The Body Snatcher is a better film because it upholds ambiguity, which is usually the argument championing art-house cinema over the “Hollywood Dream Factory”

(Bordwell, [1979] 2004: 775). However, I am insisting that reading the film
through its corpses (Gray, the “snatched” woman, and MacFarlane) rather than its survivors (Fettes and Georgina) does bring out its darkly grand-
guignolesque flavor. Even the closing title of the film15 seems to register the rewarding of virtue, but the excess of horrifying corpses strips the quote of any meaning. The lingering oppressive power of instrumental science, those death-dealing hands as Gray suggested, leaves residual traces much too unwieldy to contain. Read through the copses that are, in the words of Walter Benjamin, stripped naked, no resurrectional truth (Georgina and Fettes walking) is unveiled here. As Fettes walks away in the dark rain-soaked Scottish countryside, leaving behind him an entanglement with corpses that will not so easily wash away, are we to believe that darkness only leads to light, as the end credit would seem to suggest? In the last shot, one can perceive a small

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flickering flame from Fettes’s lantern within a desolate landscape that seems to moan under the weight of corpses. This image “re-stages” a landscape strewn with the corpses of WWII in 1945, rather than suggesting the revelation of light within darkness.

The Body Snatcher can be understood as embodying important aspects of the G-G theatre: a rootedness in the naturalist critique of modern power formations, and to the corpse-ridden melodramatic tradition of André de Lorde.

Reading the film through the corpse-ridden traditions of the G-G, one can perceive the permeability of strict boundaries that separate the Lewtonesque from the grand-guignolesque. Without an emphasis on its corpses, The Body Snatcher risks being read by some as “the kind of Grand Guignol horror

[Lewton] despised” under the tyrannical stewardship of “Mr. Gross” at RKO

Studios. Without an honest appraisal of the grand-guignolesque influences on his productions, Lewton will continue to be understood by some as the sophisticate of the unseen in 1940s horror, a decade characterized by “formulaic repetition.” The Body Snatcher affectively shocks through its accent on corpses, thereby rooting Lewton’s work in the experience of bodily sensation, often associated with the despised Théâtre de l’impasse Chaptal. Val Lewton was never so grand-guignolesque than in his “re-staging” of World War II corpses in The Body Snatcher!

noTes

1. I use capital letters to refer to the theatre and the non-capitalized spelling for the adjectival use. I also prefer the hyphenated spelling used by Agnès Pierron in her research.

2. This perception that Lewton’s films tower over the rest of 1940s horror output is still widespread. In a 2008 review of the documentary, Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows (Kent Jones, 2007) in Rue Morgue Magazine, Sean Plummer writes

“[Lewton] delivered low-budget but high-quality entertainment, which competed favourably with the increasingly shoddy spook shows cranked out by the studio’s biggest competitor, Universal. That Lewton did so despite his own dissatisfaction with his lot speaks to both his talent and tenacity” (44).

3. While Jancovich has been at the forefront in re-appraising horror in the 1940s (see 2008a, 2008b), his 1992 book, Horror, upholds the dominant myth of the 1940s as a second-rate decade compared to the 1930s. In a chapter entitled, “The Contribution of Val Lewton,” Jancovich states that “[b]y the 1940s, Universal’s films had become largely moribund and relied on poor rehashes of the 1930s formula or direct self-parody” (1992: 59).

4. Jack Gross also produced The Phantom of the Opera (Arthur Lubin, 1943), and Son of Dracula (Robert Siodmak, 1943).

5. Cat People is often referred to as the B film that saved RKO from bank-ruptcy, because of the expensive experiments that were Citizen Kane (1941) and

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The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) by Orson Welles (Siegel, 1973: 38). Cat People was made for a third of the cost of Citizen Kane.

6. From Lewton’s letter to his mother and sister, dated August 20, 1944: “At the studio everything seemed to go wrong . . . I now find myself working for an abysmally ignorant and stupid gentleman called Jack Gross . . . But Jack Gross is the man who has been making those Universal horror films and so had a particular grudge against me, as our pictures had shown up his films not only from an artistic viewpoint, but also from a standpoint of profits” (Siegel, 1973: 66).

7. Studies on the Gothic seriously question the idea that Gothic literature was indeed perceived as serious in its own time. See Botting (1996).

8. “The Theatre of the Chaptal street dead end.” The theatre is situated on a dead-end street.

9. I will hereafter use G-G when referring to the Grand-Guignol Theatre.

10. Oscar Méténier’s adaptation of Mademoiselle Fifi was first staged at the Théâtre Libre, before the opening of the G-G in 1897.

11. See my paper, “Val Lewton and the Grand-Guignol: Mademoiselle Fifi and Horror Canonicity” (2014), in Horror Studies. 5(1): 3–30.

12. See Kristopher Woofter’s chapter in this book for his application of Benjaminian shock to the notion of “Gothic Realism.”

13. According to Hand and Wilson: “the post-war [I] period saw the GG, in the words of Maxa, become ‘the most fashionable theatre in Paris’ and one of the three main theatrical tourist attractions alongside the Comédie Française and the Folies Bergères” (17).

14. See Martha P. Nochimson’s “Val Lawton at RKO: The Social Dimensions of Horror” (2006) for a good reading of Lewton’s interest in social justice.

15. “It is through error that man tries and rises. It is through tragedy he learns.

All the roads of learning begin in darkness and go out into the light” (Hippocrates of Cos).

ReFeRenCes

Association of Motion Picture Producers, Inc., and Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc. 1934. “Code to Govern the Making of Talking Syn-chronized and Silent Motion Pictures and the Reason Supporting it.” Hollywood: AMPP and MPPDA.

Bansak, Edmund G. 2003. Fearing the Dark: The Val Lewton Career. New York: McFarland & Company.

Bénévent, Christine. Ed. 2003. Le Horla: Texte integral des trois versions. Paris: Gallimard.

Benjamin, Walter. [1925] 1998. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. London: Verso.

Bordwell, David. [1979] 2004. “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice.” Film Theory and Criticism. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press. 774–782.

Botting, Fred. 1996. Gothic. New York, NY: Routledge.

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Braudy, Leo, and Marshall Cohen. Eds. 2004. Film Theory and Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Brosnan, John. 1976. The Horror People. London: Macdonald and Jane’s.

Butler, Ivan. [1967] 1970. Horror in the Cinema: Second Revised Edition. New York: A. S. Barnes and Co.

Carroll, Noël. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge.

Clarens, Carlos. 1967. An Illustrated History of the Horror Film. New York: Capricorn Books.

Clover, Carol. 1992. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. London: BFI Publishing.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 1996. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 3–25.

Corvin, Michel. 1998. “Une dramaturgie de la parole? ” Europe (835–836): 150–156.

Creed, Barbara. 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge.

———. 1995. “Horror and the Carnivalesque: The Body-Monstrous.” Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Photography. Eds.

Leslie Deveraux and Roger Hillman. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

127–159.

Davenport-Hines, Richard. 1998. Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin. New York: North Point Press.

DeGiglio-Bellemare, Mario. 2014. “Val Lewton and the Grand-Guignol: Mademoiselle Fifi and Horror Canonicity in the 1940s.” Horror Studies 5 (1): 3–29.

de Lorde, André. 1923. Théâtre d’ épouvante. Paris: Librairie Théâtrale, Artistique

& Littéraire.

de Maupassant, Guy. 1977. Mademoiselle Fifi et autres nouvelles. Paris: Gallimard.

———. 1997. Boule de Suif. Paris: Albin michel.

———. 2003. Le Horla: Texte integral des trois versions. Paris: Gallimard.

Doane, Mary Ann. 1984. “The ‘Woman’s Film’: Possession and Address.” Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism. Eds. M. Doane, P. Mellencamp, L. Williams.

Frederick, MD: University Publications of America and the American Film Institute. 67–82.

Flint, Peter B. 1980. “Alfred Hitchcock Dies; A Master of Suspense.” The New York Times (New York) 30 April. Online source: http://www.nytimes.com/learning/
general/onthisday/bday/0813.html. Last accessed 3 August, 2012.

Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books.

Frank, Alan G. 1974. Horror Movies: Tales of Terror in the Cinema. Secaucus, NJ: Derbibooks.

Freeland, Cynthia A. 2000. The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Gelder, Ken. Ed. 2000. The Horror Reader. New York: Routledge.

Gifford, Dennis. 1973. A Pictorial History of Horror Movies. London: The Hamlyn Publishing Group.

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Gordon, Mel. 1997. The Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and Terror—Revised Edition. New York: De Capo Press.

Grant, Barry Keith. Ed. 1996. The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film.

Austin: University of Texas Press.

———. 2007. Film Genre: From Iconography to Ideology. London: Wallflower Press.

Gunning, Tom. 1989. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.” Early Film. Eds. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker. London: British Film Institute. 1–10.

———. 1994. “The Horror of Opacity: The Melodrama of Sensation in the Plays of André de Lorde.” Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen. Eds. Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill. London, UK: British Film Institute. 50–61.

Hand, Richard J., and Michael Wilson. 2002. “Part One: An Introduction to the Grand Guignol.” Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror. Eds. Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson. London: University of Exeter Press. 1–78.

Haskell, Molly. 1987. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Harvey, Sylvia. 1980. “Woman’s Place: The Absent Family of Film Noir.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: BFI Publishing. 35–46.

Hawkins, Joan. 2000. Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hills, Matt. 2003. “An Event-Based Definition of Art-Horror.” Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror. Eds. Steven Jay Schneider and Daniel Shaw. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. 138–157.

———. 2005. The Pleasures of Horror. New York: Continuum.

Hobsbawm, Eric. 1994. Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century. London: Abacus Press.

Hughes, Winifred. 1981 . The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Humphries, Reynold. 2006. The Hollywood Horror Film, 1931–1941: Madness in a Social Landscape. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press.

Hunter, Jack. 2012. Chapel of Gore & Psychosis: The Grand Guignol Theatre.

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Hutchings, Peter. 2004. The Horror Film. London: Pearson Longman.

Jancovich, Mark. 1992. Horror. London: B.T. Batsford.

———. Ed. 2002. Horror, The Film Reader. London: Routledge.

———. 2008a. “Pale Shadows: Narrative Hierarchies in the Historiography of 1940s Horror.” Shifting Definitions of Genre. Eds. Lincoln Geraghty and Mark Jancovich.

Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland. 15–32.

———. 2008b. “Female Monsters: Horror, the ‘Femme Fatale’ and World War II.”

European Journal of American Culture 27 (2): 133–149.

Krakovitch, Odile. 1998. “Avant le Grand-Guignol: la cruauté sur le Boulevard du Crime,” Europe (835–836): 123–137.

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Lovecraft, H. P. 1927. Supernatural Horror in Literature. Online source: http://
www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.asp. Last accessed 25 May, 2012.

Lowenstein, Adam. 2005 . Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National-Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film. New York: Columbia University Press.

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McCarthy, John. 1981. Splatter Movies: Breaking the Last Taboo. Albany, NY: FantaCo Enterprises, Inc.

Nemerov, Alexander. 2005. Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures.

Berkeley: University of California Press.

Newitz, Annalee. 2006. Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Nochimson, Martha P. 2006. “Val Lawton at RKO: The Social Dimensions of Horror.” Cineaste, Fall 31 (4): 9–17.

Pierron, Agnès. Ed. 1995. “Préface,” Le Grand-Guignol ou le théatre des peurs de la Belle Époque. Ed. Agnès Pierron. Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont. i–lxv.

———. 1996. “House of Horrors.” Online source: http://www.grandguignol.com/
history.htm. (accessed May 29, 2012).

———. 1998. “Avorter, vomir, ou s’énanouir.” Europe (No 835–836): 101–107.

———. 2002. Les nuits blanches du Grand-Guignol. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

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(January).

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Radcliffe, Ann. 1826. “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” Online source: http://www

.litgothic.com/texts/radcliffe_sup.pdf (accessed May 25, 2012).

Rebello, Stephen. 1990. Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Ressler, Robert K., and Thomas Schachtman (1993). Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI. New York: Macmillan/St. Martin’s.

Rivière, François, and Gabrielle Wittkop. 1979. Grand-Guignol. Paris: Henti Veyrier.

Schwartz, Vanessa R. 1997. “Cinematic Spectatorship before the Apparatus: The Public Taste for Reality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris.” Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film. Ed. Linda Williams. New Brunwick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 87–113.

———. 1999. Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris.

Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sennwald, Andre. 1935. “Peter Lorre in His First American Photoplay, ‘Mad Love,’

on View at the Roxy Theatre,” New York Times (New York). 5 August.

Siegel, Joel E. 1973. Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror. New York: Viking Press.

Skal, David. 2001. The Monster Show: Revised Edition. New York: Faber and Faber.

Thrillpeddlers. 2012. GrandGuigonol.com: The Most Complete Source of Grand Guignol Information on the Net. Online source: http://www.grandguignol.com/.

Last accessed 1 June, 2012).

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Todorov, Tzvetan. [1973] 2000. “Definition of the Fantastic.” The Horror Reader.

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Tudor, Andrew. 1989. Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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Wells, Paul. 2000. The Horror Genre: From Beelzebub to Blair Witch. London: Wallflower Press.

Williams, Anne. 1995. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Williams, Linda. 1989. “Power, Pleasure, and Perversion: Sadomasochistic Film Pornography.” Representations 2 7 (1): 37–65.

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———. [1995] 2002. “Learning to Scream.” Horror, The Film Reader. Ed. Mark Jancovich. 163–168.

———. [1991] 2004. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Theory and Criticism. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press. 727–741.

Wood, Robin, and Richard Lippe. Eds. 1979. American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film. Toronto, ON: Festival of Festivals.

———. 1986. Hollywood: From Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia University Press.

Worland, Rick. 1997. “OWI Meets the Monsters: Hollywood Horror Films and War Propaganda, 1942 to 1945.” Cinema Journal. 37 (1) (Autumn): 47–65.

———. 2007. The Horror Film: An Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

FiLMogRApHy

The Body Snatcher. Directed by Robert Wise. RKO, 1945. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2008. DVD.

Cat People. Directed by Jacques Tourneur. RKO, 1943. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2008. DVD.

The Wolf Man. Directed by George Waggner. Universal, 1941. Universal City, CA: Universal Home Video, 1999. DVD.

Part II

HybRiDiTy

Chapter 5

Robert siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase

Horror Genre Hybridity, Vertical Alterity,
and the Avant-Garde

Anne Golden

Robert Siodmak’s gothic horror film The Spiral Staircase (1945) is a much-
loved if somewhat overlooked film in scholarship on 1940s horror cinema. It is a film that contests strict genre boundaries, while also anticipating trends that will appear much later in horror cinema. In the film, Dorothy McGuire plays Helen, a mute woman and orphan who has lost her voice due to a
traumatic episode in her past. Twentieth-century American Gothic tropes abound. Helen has established a fragile sense of home, tucked away from society in the grand, ornate and isolated mansion where she cares for the sickly matriarch, Mrs. Warren (Ethel Barrymore). Helen will be stalked by a serial killer preying on “unfortunates,” women with some form of disability that the killer identifies as physical and/or mental imperfections that must be erased. The diseased mind of the killer, Professor Warren (George Brent), renders the world a psychic projection of his own victimization by a hegemonic masculinity that figures sensitivity and disability as weakness. And, in the female Gothic tradition of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), Helen’s release is dependent on her securing a voice to ensure her agency in the outcome of her plight. These elements, along with the film’s particular psychosexual focus on weak men fearing the potential power of strong, suspicious women, all serve to anchor this kinetic film to a multiplicity of genres and cycles flourishing in the 1940s: film noir, the paranoid woman’s film, the gothic film, the horror film.

Genre lines are blurred constantly in Siodmak’s film, which engages with the malaise of World War II via the dread of 1940s films noir, where America’s rural and urban spaces are moral and psychological labyrinths, and paranoid woman’s films such as Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940) and Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944), where women find domestic spaces not only oppressive, but also threatened by the men they marry and are therefore expected 89

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to trust. Most contemporary commentary on the film tended to skirt Spiral’s straightforward horror elements. Bosley Crowther, for example, indicated another long-standing tradition linked to the horror film, writing that The Spiral Staircase was “a creepy melodrama” (1946) and a “shocker” (1946) in his review of the film. Likewise, reviews in The Hollywood Reporter and Motion Picture Herald both called the film a “melodrama” (Moak, 1946;

W.R.W., 1946), readings the film at least partly supports with its focus on
the plight of a young woman struggling to navigate a morally murky world.

But the film also fits squarely into the larger horror tradition in its borrowing of imagery from works in avant-garde cinema, 1 and in its explicit situating of voyeurism as dangerous. P. Adams Sitney finds the term “avant-garde”

“unfortunate” but ultimately the most apt to describe such films, which are formally and thematically diverse (Sitney 2002, viii). He writes that “the precise relationship of the avant-garde cinema to American mainstream film
is one of radical otherness” (Sitney, 2002: viii), a “radical otherness” that

Siodmak and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca ( Cat People [1942], Out of the Past [1947]) build into The Spiral Staircase with the introduction of forced perspective point of view shots to associate viewers with the murderer’s skewed vision, while also highlighting the hostility of that gaze by featuring it glaring back at viewers in tight, extreme close-up.

My intention here is to uncover some of the rich and intricate tropes that place The Spiral Staircase within a vibrant 1940s horror tradition. This chapter highlights a number of my own obsessions with the film that reveal The Spiral Staircase as an intricate horror hybrid. 2 These include the film’s links to the surrealist tradition, and to Maya Deren and the avant-garde horror of the 1940s, as well as the film’s intense focus on sight, sound, movement, and embodiment. There are images in The Spiral Staircase that recall canonical
experimental films such as Luis Buñuel’s surrealist masterpiece, Un chien
andalou (1929), and Maya Deren’s iconic Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). The
film’s dreamlike quality, along with its thematizing of the terror and power of looking, further highlight links between horror and the avant-garde. The film’s prescient use of point of view shots to invite the viewer into a limited, diseased subjectivity prefigure future uses of the technique in later twentieth-century horror cinema. Direct references to silent cinema in the film’s opening scene are followed by a thematic parallel that links Helen’s muteness—and a sense that she must overcome it to survive—to the notion of sound-as-technological

“progress” in the development of cinematic art. 3 At the center of the film is McGuire’s dynamic, layered performance, which gestures in its kinetic qualities to horror cinema’s maintenance of some of the histrionic performance styles and direct mode of address of early silent film. These are fixations that reward cinephilic viewing and that, I would argue, call for a reevaluation of The Spiral Staircase as a quintessential example of 1940s horror .

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In many of his films, such as The Suspect and Phantom Lady (both 1944),

Robert Siodmak conjures sublime cinematic moments by creating astonishing sequences that reference the materiality of film and filmmaking. Certain moments in Siodmak’s body of work boast a sense of verticality sprung from profoundly filmic moments, sections that exceed the requirements of the narrative even as they serve to enhance the affective and thematic elements of the story. The opening sequence of The Spiral Staircase offers evidence of the film’s vertical alterity, and is a quintessential example of Siodmak’s commitment to both thematizing and experimenting with the more “attractions”-
based possibilities that horror cinema and the avant-garde maintain from the silent tradition, as Tom Gunning (1986; 2004) has argued. The scene takes place in the hotel of a small town and features a tour de force homage to film and film history, voyeurism, the gaze, and spectatorship. After a long tracking shot along a small-town street, we enter the hotel. A silent film is being presented in the lodge. The hotel manager moves in a continuous shot from the front desk of the hotel to thick drapes that separate the lobby from a makeshift cinema. The manager shoos away a young boy, who immediately finds another spot to peek in at the screening. The idea that we are spying on something is adroitly rendered. Above the curtains for the cinema is a sign advertising, “Motion Pictures, the Wonder of the Age,” and a film with the alluring title of, The Kiss. Inside, the projectionist hand cranks the projector.

A pianist accompanies the screening with a live score. We are soon watching Helen watch the movie, her own silent facial cues mirroring the emotions on screen. She is rapt. A brief low-angle medium shot frames the shifting emotions that play out on her face. The film “speaks” to Helen because, like her, it is silent. Siodmak deftly links Helen to silent film and establishes voyeurism as a central theme in this scene. We watch as Helen watches and is watched/
monitored by other characters.

Calling The Spiral Staircase “[o]ne of the eeriest and most disquieting films ever made,” Denis Grunes argues that the film “is in fact a masked allegory of the passage of silent cinema into sound: a momentous theme elu-sively linked to America’s taking stock of itself after the Second World War”

(2007). Indeed, this scene alone enacts a nostalgic paean to the silent cinema, linking its heroine directly to the silent era, and the medium. The next shot of Helen is a medium-long shot. A woman is in the foreground and Helen is at the center surrounded by spectators. The camera tilts up from this medium long shot of Helen to settle on the chandelier above her head. As the camera tilts, the projectionist becomes a focus again as he is directly behind Helen in the background. Siodmak constantly highlights the mechanics of cinema with such moves. Here also, the film begins its stylistic interplay of horizontal and vertical spatial and camera movements. There is a dissolve to the shot of a woman in the room above, beyond the chandelier. She is presented in low

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angle, as if the floor has dissipated in order for us to see her. The woman has an obvious limp.

The piano music from the movie screening continues uninterrupted, though muted, reminding us of the silent drama occurring below this one. The sound of the wind leads the woman to the open window, which she looks out of, then closes. A storm is coming. She walks to a closet, opens the door and takes out a garment. She moves out of the shot to the right. The camera dollies in to the closet and settles on dresses that stir in the breeze. The following shot is a close-up of the murderer’s staring eye framed between two dresses.

We see only one of his eyes and his forehead. The next shot is a closer shot of his wide-open eye, emphasizing the spiral pattern found there. Superimposed on the close up is what this eye “sees”: the woman putting on her garment with her arms stretched up above her head, the garment itself blocking her own vision. The woman’s death is presented in low angle. We see only her arms and hands up above her head crossing as she is being assaulted. In a parallel moment below, the manager has pulled apart drapes to peer at the silent film being projected, just as the killer above has peered through drapes/
clothes to stare silently at his victim. Siodmak connects the killer and Helen, both of them participating in the act of viewing. The murderer’s gaze is covert and private (though, of course, we gaze with him); Helen’s cinephilic gaze is
public and overt, an acceptable activity and entertainment.4 Siodmak’s cross-
cutting here thus brings into play the more “lurid” aspects of genre cinema, or what Linda Williams calls “body genres,” such as horror, pornography, and melodrama ([1991] 2004). We return to the film screening. The woman with the limp has died above, and below The Kiss features a long shot of a young woman melodramatically being carried from the water, presumably drowned.

And while the film is not Thomas Edison’s fifteen-second The Kiss (1896), the first film to showcase a kiss on screen, the scene brings together the elements of body genres in an evocative tapestry of genre-centered cinephilia.

Siodmak cuts to a shot of Helen, hands joined at her chest clutching a hand-kerchief, wide eyed. The next shot is of the projectionist in the foreground and the screen in the background, displaying “The End.” The hotel manager, still at the curtains separating the lobby from the screening room, reacts to a sound from above and looks up. The spectators also react to a crash and look to the ceiling. The two films, silent and sound, The Kiss and The Spiral Staircase, have now been spliced. Like Helen and the film that has just been projected, the murder sequence is entirely without dialogue. While Helen is sometimes offered up as another potential victim of the killer, continually

“othered” by the attitudes of other characters towards her, she is the film’s core. The film also suggests here that Helen belongs to the silent era, as she is voiceless. She is of silent film. Helen is barely a verbal participant in the story. She is something of a phantom both in terms of her role (a servant)

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and in terms of her (almost) non-speaking role. McGuire thus must give her performance as film actresses of the silent era did. The film that she views is actually a D. W. Griffith film, The Sands of Dee (1912); and the fact that Siodmak here references Griffith, hailed as one of the innovators of film language, is telling. The Spiral Staircase announces itself in its opening scene as a movie about film technique and spectatorship, and it is here that the film most clearly engages with the traditions of both horror and the avant-garde.

As an experimental videomaker and video/film program curator myself,

I often look for associations that help me to link works that are often var-iegated in their themes, aesthetics and modes of production. Were I to program The Spiral Staircase for a screening of avant-garde works, I would pair it with Maya Deren’s avant-garde film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943).

Deren’s most celebrated work can be read as a horror film. The avant-garde cinema shares many of the tenets of horror and the monstrous, especially in its tendency to rupture, to disturb, and to shock. The avant-garde is consistently figured as horrific, and the figures “avant-garde” and “monster”

connote ugliness, otherness, rupture, liminality, and incomprehensibility.

The sheer amount of wounds, literal and figurative, evident in avant-garde films underscores an intense physicality that is mirrored by how what Laura Marks calls “the skin of the film” (2000) is, in avant-garde films, subjected to “cuts” and “blows.” The avant-garde engagement with this membrane,
the film skin, places such works within the horror tradition (Rees, 2002: 4).

Avant-garde films often punish the gaze. Some of the images in Deren’s film are hallmarks of surrealism and also bracket horror: a mannequin arm lowers a flower to the ground, a black robed figure turns to reveal a mirror in lieu of a face, Deren wields a knife. The appearance of the knife instills an atmosphere of dread made more palpable by the fact that Deren (herself) is performing a destabilizing role as both victim and aggressor. The mysterious world of Meshes features a “possessed quester” (Sitney, 2002: 328) and
a structure of repetitive actions that have the quality of a disturbing dream.

The mise-en-scène of Deren’s short film cuts a swath through a Southern California landscape of palm trees, lush gardens, and stucco houses with insistent themes of sexuality, violence, death and split personalities. Meshe s of the Afternoon is a celebration of oneiric ambiguity. Deren’s film presents a dreamscape and/or a nightmare. It is difficult to settle on a meaning because Deren is privileging what she called “vertical” moments, ones that do not propose the possibility of a firm interpretation. Siodmak occasionally embraces verticality so that this movement/axis stands out from the majority of the film, edging the more horrific sections of Spiral into the realm of attractions-based spectacle that ruptures narrative causality. Meshes of the Afternoon and The Spiral Staircase both feature characters trapped within houses and spiral patterns. This parallel between the two films is strengthened by the fact that both

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protagonists are essentially voiceless. Here, both Deren’s avant-garde film and the Siodmak’s Hollywood production undertake to illuminate key elements in the paranoid women’s films of the 1940s. Each film boasts a killer, though the one depicted in Meshes of the Afternoon may be symbolic and/or a figure in a fantasy/nightmare. The killer in The Spiral Staircase is a threat to Helen’s dynamic motion. The killer has no need to silence her. He intends to stop her, to erase her. All the women in the house are beyond him, threatening, resisting or defying his authority. The intriguing parallels regarding the use of avant-garde verticality between Maya Deren and The Spiral Staircase comes in Deren’s own words. On October 28, 1953, Cinema 16 held two sessions of a symposium with Maya Deren, Parker Tyler, Dylan Thomas, and Arthur Miller. 5 Filmmaker Willard Maas acted as chairman. Maas had asked
the participants to reflect on “the aesthetic principals of poetic film” (Maas,

1963: 55). Maya Deren had this to say:

The distinction of poetry is its construction (what I mean by “a poetic structure”), and the poetic construct arises from the fact, if you will, that it is a

“vertical” investigation of a situation, in that it probes the ramifications of the moment, and is concerned with its qualities and its depth, so that you have poetry concerned in a sense not with what is occurring, but with what it feels like or what it means. A poem, to my mind, creates visible or auditory forms for something which is invisible, which is the feeling, or the emotion, or the metaphysical content of the movement. Now it also may include action, but its attack is what I could call the “vertical” attack, and this may be a little bit clearer if you will contrast it to what I would call the “horizontal” attack of a drama, which is concerned with the development, let’s say, within a very small situation from feeling to feeling. Perhaps it would be made most clear if you take a Shakespearean work which combines the two movements. In Shakespeare you have the drama moving forward on a “horizontal” plane of development, of one circumstance—one action—leading to another, and this delineates the character. Every once and a while, however, he arrives at a point of action where he wants to illuminate the meaning to this moment of drama, and at that moment he builds a pyramid or investigates it “vertically,” if you will, so that you have a

“horizontal” development with periodic “vertical” investigations which are the
poems, which are the monologues. (Maas, 1963: 56)

Renowned poet Dylan Thomas scoffed at Deren’s remarks—he found the
idea of “vertical” and “horizontal” ridiculous—but her ideas remain persuasive. Deren endeavors here to theorize/account for sensations that viewers might experience “vertically” while seeing/following a text’s “horizontal”

progression. Her formula is comparable to an analysis of paradigmatic and syntagmatic elements. Deren’s insistence on “verticality” allows for a reading of a film that is less tied to narrative flow. The vertical/paradigmatic is the place and space of exploration, interpretation, emotion, feeling. What

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does not make sense within a “horizontal” flow may reveal new meanings, or push thematic and affective implications to their extremes. Deren provides her own template for the cumulative associative impressions by allowing for the potential of affect. Maya Deren wrote: “This film [. . .] is still based on a strong literary-dramatic line as a core and rests heavily upon the symbolic
value of objects and situations” (Deren, 1960: 154–55). In “verticality,” there
is feeling, personal experience, poetry, and more. In a sense, Deren is propos-ing a way of reading and appreciating her own poetic films and those of her contemporaries.

Deren’s idea of the vertical and horizontal is particularly useful and appealing when applied to The Spiral Staircase, a film that continually disrupts narrative causality to emphasize affect . The Spiral Staircase is an example of the crosspollination of avant-garde and horror films, alerting us to Gunning’s (1986) assertion that the cinema of attractions survives in both avant-garde and horror films, binding these genres to a shared affective history. Each genre provides moments of spectacle where logic and narrative flow break down and a sense of the dream or “trance” takes the proceedings vertical. The Spiral Staircase also literalizes the vertical and horizontal as an organizing principle within its diegesis. In such setpieces as Helen’s nightmarish walk from town to mansion, which I will look at shortly, the film asks viewers to experience Helen’s plight in two ways: through the logic of narrative, and through the more expansive vertical spectacle that encourages the viewer’s emotional engagement. Siodmak marks his “vertical” avant-garde influenced images as formally dissimilar from the greater part of his film. The film features camera and characters moving horizontally in the film prior to an excess of vertical movement in the Warren mansion, the film’s main setting, where Helen’s movements are often vertical, up and down the main and titular staircases.

Staircases in horror films are often staging grounds for passages from “real”

to surreal and actual to fantastic. Helen’s otherness is continually associated with this type of liminality. Her characteristic haunting of in-between spaces is signaled at the film’s outset, where she travels through a nightmare space separating the town to the Warren house. Here, again, Siodmak’s film picks up the determined dream logic of a nightmare world like Deren’s in Meshes of the Afternoon. P. Adams Sitney identifies Meshes of the Afternoon as a

“trance film” (2002: 11). According to Sitney, “the trance film was predicated upon the transparency of the somnambulistic protagonist within the dream landscape” (2002: 64). We first meet Helen entranced by the “dream world”

of cinema, but many other aspects of Helen’s narrative are marked by a sense of the fantastic. Helen’s journey from town to country after the film screening and murder at the hotel begins as a carriage ride with Dr. Parry (Kent Smith).

This modern means of transportation conveys her for a while, but when Parry

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is asked by a young boy to tend to his sick father, Helen’s passage must be continued on foot. The elements combine to enhance the sense that Helen is about to enter a world of oneiric chaos: she has left the company of a progressive medical doctor, one who has just sparred with the conservative older town physician. In a sense, Helen is forced to abandon civilization, a modern means of transportation, technology (the moving images that so enthralled her), and medical science on her solitary walk home.

During Helen’s walk the atmosphere changes dramatically. A storm that will rage for the remainder of the film begins in earnest as she treads the wooded passages before reaching the Warren house. I perceive this sequence as the narrative equivalent to a trance film, which shares with the Gothic a tendency to render physical space as a psychic projection of the somnambulist-quester. Within the trance film as described by Sitney, the protagonist is a somnabule in a largely psychic space. The trance often involves a journey of initiation or individuation: “The trance film as it emerged in America has fairly strict boundaries,” explains Sitney. “It deals with visionary experience.

Its protagonists are somnambulists, priests, initiates of rituals, and the possessed, whose stylized movements the camera, with its slow and fast motions, can re-create so aptly. The protagonist wanders through a potent environment
toward a climactic scene of self-realization” (Sitney, 2002: 21). Helen is
not sleepwalking, but Siodmak depicts her walk as one that begins after she has shed important symbols of modernity. She cannot access a key form of expression: speech. In “pure” trance films of the kind Sitney discusses, protagonists are silent, too. The dominant sense is sight.

The surreal nature of Helen’s transitory walk is further highlighted by a combination of studio sets and real locations, typical of 1940s films.

Siodmak generates a charged atmosphere. Helen moves from a space of
civilization (the hotel) and wonder (the movies) to a home where mental and physical illness and sedition dominate. There is an almost totalizing alterity to Helen’s transitional walk. She is, in a sense, cut off from civilization, and the wilderness encroaches upon her. This entire sequence is without dialogue, psychically mirroring Helen’s muteness. She works at the Warren mansion as a servant, the legacy her “nameless” orphan status has left her. From her carriage ride with Dr. Parry, we learn that she has aspirations of being a nurse or teacher, professions suitable for those with no claim to elite status. On her way to the Warrens’ she moves through a transitional space, the countryside, during which she symbolically steps into a space where no technology is in evidence. Additionally, this liminal space is divided by a fence, along which Helen walks for a time, acting as a sort of border for the nightmare space of the place she calls home. Classically Gothic, the Warren house is representative of a confluence of both past and present. There are modern machines such as a telephone and typewriter. But there is also a bedridden matriarch whose

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upstairs room is full of animal trophies and rugs and surrounded by death and decay, making Mrs. Warren a Gothic “phantom lady” akin to those found in modernist literature, such as William Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury (1929) Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and “A Rose for Emily” (1930), along with later films inspired by Faulkner, such as Alfred Hithcock’s Psycho (1960). Helen’s walk precedes her arrival at a house that is not her home (recalling Jane Eyre and other key Gothic texts), one set far apart from the small town.

Here, as in the hotel, Siodmak continues his marking of verticality as a harbinger of alterity. Helen enters the Warren grounds as the rain has begun to pour in silver sheets. The murderer lies in wait in a nearby bank of shrubs. After the killer’s point of view shot of Helen, which I will discuss in a moment, Siodmak features a vertical camera movement from a long shot of the heroine’s back down to the main floor of the house. Helen is on the landing of the main staircase, gazing into a mirror. The shot is slightly out of focus. The camera travels from her image down the staircase into a pool of darkness. The eye/iris of the killer is superimposed on this vertical shot, suggesting this new space of the film to be at least partly a projection of his psyche. Siodmak here marks the fact that the killer’s vision is altered, diseased, in that Helen is depicted without a mouth. The moment ends with a vertical plunge into blackness.

In keeping with its tendency to rupture the narrative with moments of vertical alterity, The Spiral Staircase features a number of such point of view shots to reinforce the idea that the originator of these images, the killer, is seeing an altered version of “reality.” This type of gaze is crucial in horror films and situates the film firmly within the genre’s epistemological preoccupations with witnessing, with seeing-as-knowing. The subjective camera voyeurism of The Spiral Staircase serves as a template for later horror films that boast a higher profile in horror scholarship’s own narratives—significantly, Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960), Psycho (1960), and the Italian Giallo tradition, especially Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace (1964). 6 Like The Spiral Staircase, these films bring viewers into a complex relationship with the sadistic, voyeuristic gaze, occasionally inviting viewers to share it, but just as often redirecting it at the viewer.

Siodmak’s use of point of view shots is strikingly reminiscent of imagery associated with canonical avant-garde films. In the 1933 film Lot in Sodom by James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber, there are shots that are suggestive of those in The Spiral Staircase. Lot has been visited by an angel who means to clean up Sodom and Gomorrha. When Lot is confronted by the hedonistic townspeople, he is shown in a medium close-up listening to their threats. The next shot is a medium long shot of two men. The figure on the right seems to be in pain. The two men are depicted as distorted and stretched, as if by an anamorphic lens. There are three point of view shots in The Spiral

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Staircase, all from the killer’s perspective. Watching and waiting with him in the dark (of the film’s diegesis and the cinema), we occasionally “see” what the killer sees. The opening silent film sequence in the hotel features the first point of view shot, when the killer is hidden in the hotel room closet spying on the woman with a limp. We later learn that the woman has an artificial leg, a disability that marks her as an “unfortunate” and therefore of significance to the killer. A medium-long shot of the nameless hotel victim is superimposed on an extreme close-up of the killer’s eye. On the edges of the shot, we can make out eyelashes, and the iris is slightly visible at the center.

Point of view shots grant us vantage points that imply we are “sharing”

vision with a character. Horror films that employ point of view shots make viewers captive to anticipatory or actual violence. We are made to witness/
participate in horror. What Siodmak does with his use of point of view shots is to link the murderer and victim by using superimposition. As viewers, we are both simultaneously “seeing” the victim and the murderer, for an extreme close-up of his eye frames the first victim, Helen and Blanche. The implication is that we are witnessing not pure point of view shots, but juxtapositions of images of the seer and that which he sees.

The image of the woman putting on a dressing gown in the film’s first murder scene is entirely played upon the murderer’s eye, as if the eye were a screen, looking back at her, and us. I am reminded here of perhaps the most famous of such iterations in avant-garde film, Un chien andalou (1929) with
its punishing confrontation of the viewer by the razor-slicing of an eye that gazes outward from the screen. Carrying forward this avant-garde impulse, Spiral directs at the viewer a gaze that reminds us of the violence of voyeuristic looking. The nameless woman in the hotel stands up and moves her hands up above her head to tease on the garment. The shot is slightly distorted and somewhat out of focus, perhaps to emphasize the curvature of the eyeball that borders it. The woman’s body is also depicted as slightly elongated, as if exaggerated by a funhouse mirror. As with the camera movement that has directly preceded this moment, up and through the floor, the emphasis is on the vertical axis. By joining the two shots—the eye and the woman—Siodmak and cinematographer Musuraca trap the woman within the killer’s eye/gaze.

The murderer’s twisted perspective on “reality” also gives way to another of the film’s moments of spectacular excess: the aforementioned famous shot of Dorothy McGuire depicted with her mouth smudged out—a literalized
image of the killer’s pathological obsession with her muteness. Helen finally arrives “home” amidst the storm, mounting the central staircase of the Great House and gazing into a floor-length mirror on a landing to arrange her hair.

She essays a few words, moving her lips and then putting her hands to her throat. The next shot is a high-angle left-to-right tracking shot, a horizontal movement. The camera is situated above her in the top floor hallway. Helen

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and the mirror are shown in the lower screen, left background. The camera glides into augmenting shadow until it stops at a man’s feet and legs. The following shot is a medium close-up of an eye surrounded by darkness.

There is a zoom in followed by a long shot of Helen with her back to the camera, looking in the mirror. The next shot zooms in until the killer’s eye is in extreme close up. A close-up of Helen, unmoving, is superimposed upon the eye, her mouth now erased by the killer’s all-but-dominating subjectivity. Here, Siodmak’s film is comparable to a scene featuring Pierre Batcheff
near the end of Un chien andalou (1929). Batcheff makes a gesture as if to
wipe his mouth. In the next shot, his gesture seems to have actually obliter-ated his lips when he moves his hand away from his mouth. The mouth-less shot of Helen is another shocking moment of vertical alterity in the film. The character is perceived this way by the murderer, thus placing her in a kind of perpendicular axis, outside the horizontal logic of the film, captured in a kind of demented freeze-frame. The murderer’s vision prevails temporarily, for here viewers “see” as he does, but Helen will not long be trapped by this damning impression. 7

Key here is the idea of the tableau (Pearson, 2004: 59)—a technique of
early silent film in which the actors pause in mid-motion during a scene of some heightened emotion. Derived from the tableau vivant of the melodra-
matic stage tradition,8 the tableau is meant to highlight moments of allegorical or didactic portent. In Spiral, the murderer’s gaze occasionally freezes his victims in a corrupted tableau. While the killer sees Helen as motionless, set in his vision as an altered figure without a mouth and therefore linking her disability to lack of agency and action, she proves to be the opposite.

Throughout the film, she mimes, writes, runs, and ascends/descends the stairs. She hurls a lamp through a closed window to try to get the attention of the deputy investigating the murders. McGuire’s performance is exceptionally physical. She is not fixed. In fact, Helen’s dynamic body is the core of the film and this is reflected in the way Siodmak shoots, positions and frames her. When the killer observes her as inert, the film belies his assessment, featuring Helen/McGuire as a dynamic and highly bodied force moving through the film. Peter Hutchings (2004) has argued that performance in horror—of both victimhood and monstrosity—relies on a balanced combination of action and stasis. In horror, the actor’s body is often the site of dramatic physical or psychological change. In fact, it might be said that horror, in its presentational performances of abject terror, cringing, shrinking, and loss of control, is the one major genre that maintains—even depends upon—the histrionic acting traditions from the silent film onward. In The Spiral Staircase, the sheer mobility of Helen’s face and body, however constricted by the demands of the domestic, mark her as a force of agency and change even before she regains her voice.

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Dorothy McGuire’s performance as Helen is a remarkable turn, often communicating several complex emotions at once. Helen is the unwavering material center of the film. Her body is never at rest, even in the rare moments during which she is sitting or standing in one place. McGuire creates an immense gestural vocabulary, another reference to the histrionic code developed for the stage by François Delsarte (1811–1871) and used as semiotic shorthand by the silent cinema. Helen’s hands move ceaselessly. They clasp and unclasp, reach out, fix strands of her hair, pick lint off her skirt, and deftly accomplish various work tasks. When Professor Warren reveals to her that he is the killer, Helen’s hands are held up defensively, reminiscent of a classic boxing stance.

Her eyes, gestures, and posture all contribute to the sense of Helen as a forthright, resourceful, and sometimes playful young woman. The killer marks her as prey, but Helen is no passive, preordained victim. She is careful and aware of her surroundings. During her walk home, she hears a sound and picks up a branch for self-defense. The source of the sound turns out to be a rabbit, but Helen will transform the branch from potential weapon into an instrument that she rakes along the iron fence surrounding the Warren house.

Upon entering the house, soaking wet from the storm, Helen briefly puts her purse down on a table, then immediately lifts it up and checks for water stains on the wood surface. This brief action suggests she is precise, earnest, and conscientious.

Helen enters the kitchen, joining Mrs. Oates, the head housekeeper. Of the woman murdered at the hotel, Mrs. Oates says: “For a while, I thought it might have been you.” McGuire assumes an attitude of deference, showing that Helen listens, but the actress also arranges her hair and picks up a chair, bringing it near the fire so she can hang her coat to dry on it. She moves constantly, a body in flight, though confined within the house. McGuire performs Helen as efficient, alert, and good-natured. We don’t know what her vocabulary would be like, but Helen has a vast series of physical expressions that suggest a certain wisdom about the world. Mrs. Oates provides us with essential information in this scene, but also highlights the fact that this is a speaking world, and Helen is an outsider: “First there was the girl with the scar on her face, then that poor simple minded creature and now this cripple . . . it seems like,” she pauses, realizing her own implication. “I guess you’ve had enough for one afternoon.” Helen’s constant movement in this scene is a kind of talking back to Mrs. Oates, a subtle but determined form of resistance. Helen is spoken to constantly in the film. She is told what to do by almost every other character in the film, most of them male characters, who are either inept (the constable, Steven Warren), largely absent (Mr.

Oates, Dr. Parry), or dangerous (Professor Warren). Helen is seen or treated as “unwhole” by those around her, but Siodmak undermines this by making her the nexus of his film.

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McGuire establishes a physical language for Helen that shows her to be in constant dialogue with her surroundings. She moves through space actively, often doing two things at once. When she first enters Mrs. Warren’s upstairs sickroom after her return to the house, she ascertains that her employer is pretending to sleep. Helen selects lumps of coal from a bin and begins to launch these into the fireplace. She throws quickly and looks over at Mrs. Warren.

Helen moves back farther from the fireplace, making more and more noise.

Unable to speak, she finds a way to make a din while also performing an essential household chore. When Mrs. Warren opens her eyes, Helen almost trips on the head of the tiger rug. As Mrs. Warren describes how she killed the tiger, Helen places her foot on the dead animal’s head as if to reflect the older woman’s words and, mischievously, mime a big game hunter. McGuire’s
performance whirls the character away from descriptions like “innocent”

or “ingénue.” Helen possesses a sly sense of humor. McGuire’s continuous evolving actions as she renders Helen give the character spark. For someone who is forced to do a great deal of listening and almost no talking, Helen communicates constantly through the minutiae of her gestures.

Helen places her hands to her throat several times in the film. The motion becomes one of her familiar gestures, but is never the same twice. During the film screening, her hands are clutched just above her chest. She is overcome with emotion. Before her muteness is revealed in the plot, the position of her hands over her vocal chords is a clue. Later, when she gazes at herself in the mirror on the landing prior to the killer’s point of view shot, her hands hover delicately at her throat, as if willing words to emerge. Later, in a clumsy attempt to shock Helen into talking, Doctor Parry recounts the trauma that robbed Helen of her voice. Her parents were killed in a fire. She was a witness. During part of his speech, Helen is in close-up. As Parry says, “she wanted to scream herself but somehow she couldn’t,” her lips part slightly as if she is reliving the moment and actually trying to yell. Her expression changes constantly: apprehension, fear, grief, and panic. As Parry continues narrating her story, referring to her as “she,” Helen actually utters a strangled cry, her hands reaching up to cover her entire face. This recurring gesture—
hands on or near her throat/mouth—can be read as one of protection, but I suspect, also one that symbolically thrusts her voice back down. Helen is framed as someone who can be cured. Her words are trapped. If she were to speak, what would she say to all the people who are telling her what she is, or what to do? As Parry apologizes for his tactic, Helen moves her extended hands down from her forehead to cover first her eyes, then her nose and mouth and finally her ears. There is more than one peril. The man she loves, Doctor Parry, bullies and exhorts Helen to relive her trauma. Mrs. Oates—
always talking—treats her like an inferior. The nurse uses her as a sounding board. Professor Warren is condescending. Mrs. Warren refers to her as a

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“little girl.” At the end of the film, with her potential “protectors,” Parry and Oates, absent, Helen speaks. Women have dispatched the murderer by out-smarting and shooting him. Helen speaks her first word, “no” as the sickly body of the matriarch falls. This release comes after the sacrifice of the ill son by the sick matriarch on the titular staircase. Siodmak’s film is a good example of the triumphant survival of a female character in a horror film thanks to a combination of her own resourcefulness and the actions of another woman. In the final frames of the film, Helen releases her arms and hands from their predominant hovering, protective stance and drops them onto her lap for the first time. Helen’s body in the film is the corporeal spiral, unfixed and ever-moving. In the last seconds of the film, Helen’s dynamic body is at rest. Her voice has moved out of her mouth into space, and it seems that this fact has at least temporarily stilled her kinetic body.

On one level, The Spiral Staircase is about restoring Helen to normalcy.

Re-establishing her voice, while a joyous occasion, is also about making Helen “whole” and acceptable. If our reading is informed by post–World War II suspicions about the changing role of women, the film has a more sinister subtext. Helen is not only being hunted. She is being molded, made suitable. She is forced to adapt to the modern era, progress from silence to sound.

Siodmak’s film is a significant critique of class and the positions available to women, a thematic which it enacts through constant spatial and filmic metaphors. Whether they are mistress of the house, servant, secretary or nurse, the women in The Spiral Staircase are ensnared and have little agency. As a servant in a great house, Helen is boxed in by social mores. While circumstances and attitudes about women and servants will begin to change after WWI, Helen is still mired in the decorum and passivity associated with her role as a domestic worker prior to 1920. The movements of female characters are severely restricted in the film. The violent storm keeps them within the house.

Only Helen’s kinetic body connects the three levels of the home. Mrs. Warren (Ethel Barrymore) appears only upstairs. Blanche moves through all three levels, but does not return from her trip to the basement. Mrs. Oates goes to the basement but never upstairs. The nurse never descends to the cellar. Helen is the only character who consistently overlaps/joins above and below. She is also the only character who spends significant time in an in-between zone, the landing of the main staircase. Her movements most resemble a spiral, for she follows the twisting pattern of staircases repeatedly.

The Warren house is the setting for the majority of the film, a stable location vis-à-vis the camera and Helen. Once inside the house, the camera movements become more varied and complex, often the case in the horror genre.

In this way, Siodmak does, as Carol Clover observes about the horror genre,

“rub our noses in camera work” (1992: 10). Prior to the house setting, camera movements are horizontal with a few exceptions and left to right movements

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dominate. During the sequences set in the Warren home, we can identify parallel and backwards tracking shots, dollies, pans, tilts, and crane shots.

There are slight divergences, but the main direction of camera movements near the beginning of the film during the hotel sequence up until the first murder is from screen left to right. Siodmak’s overall camera movements are, in a sense, efficient and functional in that they most often follow or anticipate characters’ movements. A slight increase in the number of shots occurs during the murder sequences. Long takes dominate in this film. The murders are stylistically distinct from other sequences because they feature more shots.

The only zooms in the film are the three that magnify the killer’s eye.

During the climax, after Helen has discovered Blanche’s body in the cellar and realizes that she is now in imminent danger, her movements throughout the house on all three levels—cellar, main floor, and upstairs—consist briefly of circles, twists, and half-turns that propose spiral patterns. In this way, Siodmak causes his heroine to mimic the fundamental symbol of the film. She is a dynamic spiral. The director first links her to the very structure of the film through silence/silent cinema and again through movement, hers and that of the camera.

Helen is at first trapped in a horizontal flow at the hotel and then on her walk to the house. After an abundance of vertical movements in which she ascends and descends stairs, she recovers the ability to speak. The last shot of the film is a backwards-tracking shot from a medium long shot of Helen making her phone call. Towards the end of the backward movement, the camera also begins to rise upwards, taking in a chandelier in the foreground and the main staircase in the background. The predominant camera movements found in the film are horizontal tracking shots and pans. This final camera movement is significant as it both releases Helen from established patterns (left to right or right to left) and it records her dawning comprehension that she has spoken. Siodmak’s camera retreats from close observation and constant following of Helen. In this shot, she is stationary, a contrast to preceding shots in which both she and the camera were in movement. In this sense, her stillness signals the dissolution of the symbolic spiral. Helen is complete and whole, free from the prevailing pattern of camera movements used in The Spiral Staircase. The release of her voice happens as she is released from the predominant camera movements. The final movement ends on a vertical axis, deserting the horizontal/narrative current. The camera abandons her at last in a dramatic upsweeping movement, proving that her release is the end.

Her words—“It is I, Helen.”—are simple but signify a different kind of future movement, one that may see her rise from domestic worker to a career of her choice. The camera breaks pattern because Helen does, too. Siodmak makes his subversive point. The director presents Helen’s triumph over the killer and susbsequent cure as an emancipatory camera movement, a vertical lift.

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ConCLusion

As a director, Robert Siodmak is often referred to as sturdy, but puzzling

(Hoberman, 2012). He is praised for some of his films; however, in articles written about his work, he comes across as a paradox, a phantom. One of the evaluations repeated with frequency is that Siodmak is hard to pin down. Was Siodmak born in Germany or the USA? How can his work best be described?

Did he forge a style or merely reflect the legacy of German Expressionism?

The last question is a semi-lazy evaluation of many directors and other film professionals of German origin working in the 1930s and 1940s in Hollywood. The phonetic pronunciation of his name comes up constantly, as if this is one fact that all can agree upon: “Cynical chameleon or rootless cosmopolite? Siodmak (pronounced See-ODD-mak) is, as the film historian Jean-Paul Coursodon put it, ‘one of the puzzling paradoxes of the American
cinema’” (Hoberman, 2012). Why such a paradox? It seems that these ques-
tions have lead to a persistent sense that Siodmak himself is unknowable and, consequently, that his style is not easily analyzed.

The Spiral Staircase brackets film noir and horror, and straddles the women’s picture and melodrama. With its deft use of deep focus, the film also recalls the visual eloquence of Orson Welles’s masterpieces (especially The Magnificent Ambersons), and its beautiful shadows, courtesy of cinematographer Nicholas Musuruca, are nothing less than stunning . Aside from The Spiral Staircase being the work of a “phantom” director, I believe that some of the continued confusion around the status of the film comes from the various genres with which it intersects and the lasting ill-defined reputation of its director. Anti-genre elitism is also to blame. The film boasts a connection with avant-garde cinema through imagery that may have been inspired by canonical experimental films. These associations make The Spiral Staircase difficult to pin down as belonging to one film genre, but also extremely important in showing the interweaving influences between 1940s Hollywood filmmaking and the avant-garde. Forties horror films are exceptionally hybridic, ranging from Hitchcock’s decade-opening prestige picture Rebecca (1940), to Val Lewton’s evocative contributions (such as Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie) to the so-called “monster rally” ( House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula) films that seem to have stamped the decade as inferior for horror offerings. The Spiral Staircase serves as one place where we can begin to explore such horror genre hybridity in the 1940s.

noTes

1. I am using the term avant-garde cinema to indicate those artist-driven films that have variously been called “poetic,” “experimental,” and “independent.”

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2. Even the release date of this hybrid film is difficult to pin down. It was released in December 1945 in Los Angeles and in February 1946 in New York City.

3. I am grateful to Linda A. Robinson, who allowed me to read chapter 2 of her unpublished doctoral thesis, “Looking Backward to Look Forward to Today: Hollywood’s Post-War Turn-of-the-Century Small Town” in which an analysis of The Spiral Staircase and technology figures prominently.

4. The film is set during 1906. Cinema was certainly not regarded as art during this epoch. However, in The Spiral Staircase, the film screening sequence presents diverse people gathered together, enjoying the entertainment.

5. Cinema 16 was a New York City based film society founded by Amos Vogel.

6. Other later horror films will pick up on The Spiral Staircase’s significance by citing the film. Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby, Kill (1966) features not only a spiral staircase but a circular chase through a ruined mansion in which the main character, Dr. Paul Eswai (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart), pursues his quarry through the same room repeatedly.

Siodmak’s film is also referenced by A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), in which Freddie Kruger rakes his claw-hands on a fence. On her walk through the oneiric woods that separate town from “home,” Helen picks up a branch and runs it along a fence as she moves hurriedly in the gathering storm. The monster (Kruger) and the

“unfortunate” (Helen) are vertically linked by this gesture: one makes noise to terrify and the other to reassure herself.

7. An extreme close-up of the killer’s iris also precedes the final point of view shot.

A close-up of Blanche (Rhonda Fleming) is superimposed on the image of the eye.

Blanche’s image is distorted, stretched, and wavering. Her head is elongated. This vertical elongation, though brief, suggests that the killer’s vision is skewed by his attitude to those he considers “imperfect.” Blanche reacts in horror when she understands what is about to happen to her. She has no physical disability. Blanche’s imperfection is of a moral nature. Professor Warren loves her and she has betrayed him with his half-brother, Steven (Gordon Oliver). This imperfection, her perceived moral flaw, is rendered as a deformation of her entire face. Again, Siodmak insists on verticality, linking it specifically to the killer’s distorted vision.

8. See Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (1976: Yale University Press) for more on the melodramatic tradition.

ReFeRenCes

Clover, Carol J. 1992. Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Crowther, Bosley. 1946. “At the Palace: The Spiral Staircase.” The New York Times.

7 February. Online source: http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9503EED

D163FEE3ABC4F53DFB466838D659EDE. Last accessed online November 24,

2013.

Deren, Maya. Winter 1960. “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality.” Daeda-lus. 89 (1): 150–167.

Greco, J. 1995. The File on Robert Siodmak in Hollywood: 1941–1951. Dissertation.

State University of New York at Stony Brook.

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Grunes, Dennis. 2007. The Spiral Staircase. Dennis Grunes. 18 June. Online source: http://grunes.wordpress.com/2007/06/18/the-spiral-staircase-robert-siod-
mak-1946/. Last accessed online October 15, 2012.

Gunning, Tom. 2004. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credu-lous Spectator.” Film Theory and Criticism. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen.

Oxford: Oxford University Press. 862–876.

———. 1986. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.” Wide Angle. 8 (3–4): 63–70.

Hoberman, J. 2012. “Globe-Hopping With a Fatalistic Lens, Robert Siodmak Retrospective at Film Forum.” The New York Times. 6 July. Online source: http://
mobile.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/movies/robert-siodmak-retrospective-at-film

-forum.html?from=movies&_r=0. Last accessed online January 4, 2013.

Hutchings, Peter. 2004. “Performing Horror.” The Horror Film. Harlow, England: Longman. 148–168.

Jancovich, Mark. 2008. “Female Monsters: Horror, the ‘Femme Fatale’ and World War II.” European Journal of American Culture. 27 (2): 133–149.

———. 2012. “‘A Former Director of German Horror Film’: Horror, European Cinema and the Critical Reception of Robert Siodmak’s Hollywood Career.” European Nightmares: Horror Cinema in Europe Since 1945. Ed. Patricia Almer, Emily Brick, and David Huxley. London and New York: Wallflower Press.

Justice, Chris. October 2003. “Robert Siodmak: The Brightest Shade of Noir.” Senses of Cinema. Online source: http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/great-directors/siod-
mak/. Last accessed online October 11, 2012.

Maas, Willard. 1963. “Poetry and the Film: A Symposium.” Film Culture. 29: 55–63.

Marks, Laura. 2002. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

McLellan, Denis. 2001. “Dorothy McGuire, 85; Favorite Leading Lady.” Los Angeles Times. 15 September. Online source: http://articles.latimes.com/2001/sep/15/local/
me-46012. Last accessed online August 8, 2012.

Moak, Bob. 1946. “The Spiral Staircase.” Hollywood Reporter. 3. (January).

Pearson, Roberta. 2004. “The Histrionic and Verisimilar Codes in the Biograph Films.” Movie Acting: The Film Reader. Ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik. New York: Routledge. 59–68.

Rees, A. L. 2002. A History of Experimental Film and Video. London: British Film Institute.

Robinson, Linda A. 2004. “Looking Backward to Look Forward to Today: Hollywood’s Post-War Turn-of-the-Century Small Town.” Dissertation. Northwestern University.

Sarris, Andrew J . 1968. The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968.

University of Michigan: Dutton.

Shipman, David. 1982. The Story of Cinema. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Sitney, P. Adams. 2002. Visionary Film the American Avant-garde, 1943–2000.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Telotte, J. P. 1987. “Siodmak’s Phantom Women and Noir Narrative.” Film Criticism.

11 (3) (Spring): 1–10.

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Williams, Linda. [1991] 2004. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Theory and Criticism. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press. 727–741.

W. R. W. January 1946. “The Spiral Staircase.” Motion Picture Herald Digest. 2785.

FiLMogRApHy

Lot in Sodom. Directed by James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber. 1933.

New York: Kino International, 2005. DVD.

Meshes of the Afternoon. Directed by Maya Deren. 1943. New York: Mystic Fire Video, 2002. DVD.

Phantom Lady. Directed by Robert Siodmak. Universal, 1944. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2012. DVD.

Son of Dracula. Directed by Robert Siodmak. Universal, 1943. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2004. DVD.

The Spiral Staircase. Directed by Robert Siodmak. RKO, 1946. Troy, MI: Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2000. DVD.

The Suspect. Directed by Robert Siodmak. Universal, 1944. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2008. DVD.

Un chien andalou. Directed by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali. 1929. Los Angeles, CA: Transflux Films, 2004. DVD.

Chapter 6

The Child witness

Peril and Empowerment in 1940s Horror,
from The East Side Kids to The window

Kier-La Janisse

Concurrent with the popular misconception of 1940s horror cinema as a period of decline in quality and inspiration is the notion that the era’s horror cinema was marked only by spoofs and imitations. This is especially the way scholars have viewed the films made on decreasing budgets in the latter half of the decade and by the independent Poverty Row studios. Forties sequels, parodies, and other variations on a now-canonized 1930s horror are characteristically seen as examples of generic degeneration (aesthetically and morally) rather than as part of a period during which genre filmmakers carried on a dialogue with prior genre films and worked within and against their tropes to crystallize certain formulas and expand upon others. Interesting hybrids such as the “weird western” (e.g., Wild Horse Phantom [1944, Sam Newfield]) and the “monster rally” film (e.g., House of Dracula [1945, Erle C. Kenton]) were the result. In this chapter, I consider one of the most maligned combinations—that of horror and comedy—as a starting point in an investigation of the representation of child empowerment on screen. From the perspective of a child, the 1940s was an especially rich and inspiring period of cinema, one that helped them navigate a world where they were often left to their own devices. I examine the agency of children in the 1940s through their viewing habits concerning the slapstick horror outings of The East End Kids and the Bowery Boys, and I link this experience to the grim world of the horror-film noir hybrid via Ted Tetzlaff’s The Window (19491). In the process, I also open up a much-needed line of inquiry into the reception of 1940s cinema related specifically to young audiences and wartime youth culture.

Rather than looking at the decade’s horror efforts as aping the canonically accepted 1930s horror associated with Universal, I will show how the comedy-horror films of the 1940s—especially those coming from the metaphorical “slums” of the Poverty Row studios—were evoking, and expanding 109

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upon, a tradition of horror that predates the “classic” Universal era. A world of old dark houses and diabolical supervillains in films such as The Cat and
the Canary (Paul Leni, 1927) would inspire generations of Monster Kids to
come; some of these films were already comically tinged efforts, and their format and aesthetic can be easily recognized as influences on the zany, low-budget films of Ray Dennis Steckler and Jack Hill, Hanna-Barbera’s Scooby Doo, Where Are You? (1969), the spoofs of Mel Brooks, and 1980s kid-power adventure stories like Fred Dekker’s The Monster Squad (1987).

In a large number of 1940s films, young audiences had their fears validated and their problem-solving abilities empowered by what they saw on screen.

I discuss how horror and social realism intersected at the onset of film noir, a world typically devoid of children but host to a few stunning examples of child ingenuity in the face of very palpable danger. In examining these facets of the child’s relation to 1940s horror cinema, I offer two primary case studies: the gang of kids known variously as The East Side Kids and The Bowery Boys, and the lone child at the center of Ted Tetzlaff’s horror-film noir hybrid, The Window. What all these films have in common—whether or not one considers the upbeat antics of The East End Kids and the bleak cynicism of horror-noir to be polar opposites—was the centrality of a child who had to face and overcome danger, often without the help of established authority figures. This reflected the reality of those children that came of age and attended the cinema during wartime, and often had to fend for themselves. These
audiences were the first generation of American “latch-key kids” (Khatkar:

2010), a term coined in an American TV documentary in the 1940s to refer
to children who would spend long periods of time unsupervised due to their mothers working to support the war effort. 2

THe HAys CoDe, THe sATuRDAy MATinee,

AnD THe DeAD enD kiDs

In examining the development of 1940s horror, specifically as it relates to child audiences, it is important to first go over the history and mandate of the Hollywood Production Code—otherwise known as “the Hays Code”—
that became compulsory in 1934 (Brown, 2010: 13). The code, named after

Will H. Hays, the head of Hollywood trade office the MPPDA (The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America) was intended to make all films universally acceptable in an attempt to pacify the conservative religious watchdogs that were clamouring for the clean-up of Hollywood following
the Fatty Arbuckle/Virginia Rappe scandal.3 The Hays Code cemented the
burgeoning concept of the “family film”—which did not imply, or require, that the films were made for children, but that they were safe for children.

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At the time, there was pressure to make motion pictures acceptable for all audiences because in the absence of a ratings system (which would not come into place in the United States until 1968), children were identified as being exposed to salacious and violent content on a regular basis. Children formed a large percentage of the cinematic audience, and then—as now—acted as unknowing pawns for conservative watchdog groups in creating politically motivated moral panics.

In his dissertation, Hollywood, The Family Audience and the Family Film, 1930–2010 (2010), Noel Brown points out that the stirrings of the family film had already begun as early as 1910, and that in 1915 the Supreme Court ruled that films were not protected by the First Amendment, because, unlike the press, they could not prove to exist for any reason other than financial gain. This meant that filmmakers had no legal recourse on the grounds of artistry should any censorial agency wish to exert its authority over their content, thus leaving them at the mercy of moral watchdogs. “The ruling was a landmark,” Brown says, and it would hold until 1952, when it would finally be overturned by the Supreme Court in the case surrounding Roberto Rossellini’s 1948 film The Miracle, which had been deemed sacrilegious by the National Legion of Decency (Bromonswn, 2010: 49). In the early cinema, while the threat of censorship merely loomed, Hollywood producers still went into the 1920s favouring films that glamorized violent and licentious behavior, and the box office numbers showed that audiences supported this, which made it hard for Will Hays and his religious supporters—as influential as they were—to gain a foothold in terms of moral reform. Hollywood was not interested in producing sanitized films for a youth market. That is, until the end of the decade, when it suddenly felt competition coming from the educational sector. When the first 16mm projectors were introduced in 1912

(Alexander, 2010: 15), they were quickly adopted by churches and schools
as educational aids, and by the late 1920s their manufacturers were offering subsidization programs to schools that wanted the equipment, thereby creating a demand for more child-friendly content. Originally Hollywood studios responded by trying to cull “safe” content from their existing films to repackage them for the educational market, but eventually the demands created by this market bolstered Hays’ support for the establishment of the Hollywood Production Code in 1930. The code would become mandatory in 1934, aimed at upholding “a higher level of wholesome entertainment for all the people.”4

The children’s matinee movement started as early as 1913, with screenings usually organized by local community groups, but Alice Miller’s 1929 study Children and Movies indicated that they were not only unpopular with chil-
dren but also “a sloppy, semi amateur industry” (Brown, 2010, 54). By 1925
the Hays Office was heavily pushing a national Saturday Matinee Program through advertising in schools and garnering considerable grassroots support

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from community organizations, which Richard DeCordova’s 2007 study—in contrast to Miller’s assertion—claims was inaugurated on April 25, 1925, with “great success” (2007: 236). But regardless of whether or not the Saturday Matinee program was popular with children, it is important to remember that at the time, kids could get into pretty much any film they wanted to attend, and they exercised that right. As DeCordova points out:

In an era which increasingly worked to separate children from adults through institutions such as children’s hospitals, juvenile court systems, and reform schools, the cinema mixed ages indiscriminately, providing the same entertainment for adults and children alike. The ideal of preserving childhood by maintaining a childhood culture distinct from adult culture was disrupted by the cinema as the boundaries between children’s films and adult films became blurred. (2007: 234)

While the different states varied on the rules surrounding child attendance at cinemas, in all cases children had to navigate through an adult world to see films. In some states there were restricted hours for children, and others prohibited entry to unaccompanied children. But as Sarah J. Smith notes in her book Children and Censorship (which, it must be noted, focuses on 1930s audiences) underage audience members would circumvent regulations by having strangers accompany them into the theater. They would bargain with their parents, they would get odd jobs to save money to see films, and they would barter with the theatre owners, sometimes bringing food or other items in lieu of cash payment (2005: 43). Many kids would just sneak in through the alternate exits or bathroom windows. Although adults were supposed to police their entry into the theater, they rarely did, partially because kids formed a major part of the cinematic economy, with the neighbourhood
theatres or “nabes” especially relying on the younger demographic.5 Smith
goes on to assert that the cinema provided children a means of “ownership and control over a public space,” and that it “offered liberating escapism through films and a warm, dark, virtually adult-free environment for engaging in ‘wild’ and ‘subversive’ behaviour” (2005: 172). Youth participation in cinema culture also extended beyond the theater; they collected film magazines and trading cards, with some kids as young as twelve even making their own
films and running their own underground cinemas (Smith, 2005: 171).

The pre-code gangster and horror films were immensely popular with
children, who tended to go to the theater once or twice a week and served as one-third of the U.S. film audience. They went to neighborhood theaters—
distinct from the larger, more opulent picture palaces—which often showed B-movies and second-run films, which explains the Poverty Row studios’

interest in film cycles that would engage young audiences. Children idolized

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the hoodlums that were the anti-heroes of many gangster films, and their imitation of the streetwise dialogue (“OK,” “Youse guys”) was responsible
for bringing many expressions into the vernacular (Smith, 2010: 150). But
if movies like Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931) and The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931) made kids want to be tough guys when they
grew up, in 1937 they were given role models their own age that made the theoretical gateway that much more accessible: just as the squeaky-clean Shirley Temple was becoming Hollywood’s adopted daughter, Sidney King-sley’s popular 1935 stage play Dead End was adapted by William Wyler for the screen. The film was cleaned up slightly—references to syphilis were removed, among other things—but nonetheless the film still negotiated a number of censorial boundaries; it was overtly critical of social inequality and the juvenile reform system, as well as referencing both prostitution and police brutality against women. It was an underdog picture through and through.

And at the center of it all were a gang of juvenile delinquents who were about to become superstars: The Dead End Kids.

Wyler and Producer Sam Goldwyn rounded up six of the original fourteen kids from the theatrical production to appear in the film version, including Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, and Bobby Jordan, who would be the staples of the gang as they went through various incarnations (The East Side Kids, The Little Tough Guys, and The Bowery Boys) from the 1930s through the 1950s. According to David Hayes and Brent Walker’s 1984 book The Films of The Bowery Boys, the young actors were actual juvenile delinquents and destroyed enough property on set during the shoot that their two-year contract with United Artists was sold to Warner Bros., who made five more “Dead End Kids” films, including their most famous, Angels With Dirty Faces

(1938) alongside James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. When Warner Bros.

released them from their contracts—also due to shenanigans on set—Sam Katzman from Monogram Pictures picked them up and created the East

Side Kids series in 1940, with the first official film being Boys of the City. 6

Monogram was a Poverty Row studio and the budgets for these films were about $30,000 each, which often meant quick turnovers for scripts and shooting schedules in comparison to their bigger studio counterparts. They would make twenty East Side Kids pictures in all.

But while the Dead End Kids films were serious and hot-topic social dramas with a real grittiness, the boys were domesticated significantly at the height of their fame; by the time they moved over to Monogram in 1940, a lot of the hard-knock realism of their former roles had been stripped away, and they became more family-friendly, comedic caricatures of their earlier roles.

They were still portraying mostly orphans, foster kids, and at-risk youth, but were transformed from a hoodlum gang into a kind of mystery-solving gang. This allowed them to delve into more genre-heavy plotlines, including

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horror pictures very much modelled on the early “old dark house” films of
the late 1920s and early 1930s,7 which featured slapstick comedy, secret passageways, trap doors, and even horror icon Bela Lugosi as a sinister stranger
playing everything from a hiding-out Nazi scientist ( Ghosts on the Loose,

1943) to a suspected serial killer ( Spooks Run Wild, 1941). Ironically, the

1920s old dark house films have not been discredited to the degree of their 1940s counterparts.

kiDs AnD HoRRoR on poveRTy Row

In their first picture at Monogram, Boys of the City (Joseph H. Lewis, 1940),
after a brush with juvenile court the boys reluctantly agree to go to summer camp under the guardianship of Knuckles Dolan, the older, reformed criminal brother of Danny (Bobby Jordan). On the way there, the car breaks down and the gang ends up staying overnight at a gigantic manor house in the country, owned by a judge who’s currently being threatened by dangerous mobsters.

Once they arrive at the old house, the superficial conventions of gothic horror are clearly demarcated—characters ominously lit from below, doors that open and close by themselves, a secret bookcase door leading to underground tunnels, and the obligatory creepy housekeeper who is obsessed with the memory of the judge’s dead wife, a nod to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film adaptation of Daphne DuMaurier’s 1938 novel, Rebecca. Even the housekeeper’s physical appearance is remarkably similar to that of Mrs. Danvers as portrayed by Judith Anderson in Hitchcock’s film, released a few months
earlier.8 There’s even a spooky organ that plays the kind of tune associated
with horror radio plays that became popular in the 1930s, and direct mystery-film references in the dialogue:

Muggs: “You know this joint kinda reminds me of those old castles with their secret passageways and secret panels and all that junk. . .I’ll betcha there’s a secret panel!”

Danny: “You’re crazy. You been seein’ too many movies.”

Muggs: Movies! That’s it! Say, what’s The Thin Man got that I ain’t got?”

Danny: “Myrna Loy.”

Scruno, the sole African American character in the gang (played by Ernie

“Sunshine Sammy” Morrison, one of the original Our Gang cast) especially typifies the racist “old dark house” stereotype of black characters: he’s the first to notice impending danger and consequently acts out the scaredy-cat role complete with stutter and bulging eyes. “Man, I sure do miss that old

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plantation!” he exclaims after meeting the creepy housekeeper. When the other kids are served pie for dessert, Scruno relishes the fact that he alone is served watermelon. At one point, Muggs even bites Scruno’s hand, thinking it’s a piece of chocolate cake. This would be Scruno’s role throughout the entire series—while integrated into the gang he’s also coded as “other,”

clearly the lowest on the gang’s totem pole. In many ways Scruno’s character in The East Side Kids references those played by prolific African American actor Mantan Moreland, also a Monogram regular9 and a popular but critically disdained actor to whom British critic Peter Noble referred as “the accepted USA idea of the Negro clown supreme” (Means Coleman, 2011:

84). But both Morrison and Moreland’s habitual characters are throwbacks
to an earlier era of Black minstrelsy that was a key component of the earliest comedy-horror films.

Each of the kids had their own increasingly pronounced personality traits, with Gorcey modeled on James Cagney, Hall on Shemp Howard, and Jordan as the pure-hearted cutie-pie. Ernie Morrison was the most long-standing actor of the bunch, having appeared in films as early as 1916. His first horror-comedy role was as a child servant in Harold Lloyd’s 1920 comedy-horror Haunted Spooks (as a kid so terrified he dives into a vat of flour to hide from the ghosts, only to emerge “white”), directed by Our Gang’s Hal Roach. This

“knock-kneed scaredy-cat” character was one he would adopt in all of The East Side Kids/Bowery Boys horror-comedy efforts.

Just as the boys were undergoing their transition to The East Side Kids, a new comedy duo burst onto the scene that would reign throughout the 1940s and much of the 50s and prove a major influence: Abbott and Costello. In 1941
the duo did their first horror crossover picture, Hold That Ghost (Arthur

Lubin, 1941) which, like Boys of the City, referenced “old dark house” tropes.

They would go on to make seven horror crossover pictures in all—including The Time of their Lives (Charles Barton, 1946), Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (Charles Barton, 1948), Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff (Charles Barton, 1949), Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (Charles Lamont, 1951), Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde (Charles Lamont, 1953), and Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (Charles Lamont, 1955)—as well as adding scares or supernatural sequences into over a dozen more of their pictures, as producers recognized the appeal of such sequences in targeting crossover audiences. Still, while the Abbott and Costello brand of comedy would be incredibly influential on the trajectory of The East Side Kids and their evolution into The Bowery Boys in the latter half of the 1940s, The East Side Kids remained more popular with the youth market, not only because of youthful protagonists they could more readily identify with, but also because The East Side Kids films tended to
prioritize jokes and action over drawn-out musical numbers.10

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The East Side Kids’ Spooks Run Wild was released on October 24, 1941, only three months after the debut of Abbott and Costello’s Hold That Ghost the previous summer. In fact it started filming in early August, making it entirely plausible that it was a direct riff on the horror angle of the Abbott and Costello hit. The film brought together Monogram pictures’ two most popular assets—Bela Lugosi and The East Side Kids—again opening with
the gang busted for some petty crime and sentenced to summer camp under the guardianship of a young law student and his lady love, who is also the camp nurse. And again, the bus temporarily breaks down, long enough for the boys to stop at a malt shop and overhear news on the radio of a serial killer in the area. Later that night the classic East Side Kids triumvirate—Muggs, Bobby, and Glimpy (The Dead End Kids’ Huntz Hall in his first East Side Kids film)—leads the charge sneaking out of camp, and they end up at the creepy Billings Manor where a sinister magician (Lugosi) and his dwarf sidekick (Angelo Rossitto of Tod Browning’s Freaks [1932]) have recently taken up residence. From there the usual hijinx ensue: the boys bumble around the cobwebby mansion chasing after one of their sleepwalking cohorts, encountering spiders, skeletons, secret passageways, and a host who seems incredibly amused by how terrified they all are. While their guardians try to find them, going the usual route of seeking help from the police and the mayor, it’s Muggs himself who saves the day, managing to physically detain the killer until the police can arrest him.

Narrative continuity was not prioritized in the series—not only would the gang members (and their name spellings) change, but sometimes the former orphans would suddenly have family members, such as in the 1943 Ghosts on the Loose (William Beaudine) where Glimpy has a mother and sister, the latter played by a then-unknown Ava Gardner. In this story Muggs’s innate bossiness is put to use as wedding planner for Glimpy’s sis, and when she and her beau skip off to their honeymoon, Muggs sets the boys to work cleaning the couple’s newly purchased house. Of course, a mix-up causes them to go to the house next door, which is reputedly haunted. It is soon discovered that these rumours are proliferated to hide a den of Nazi spies (led by Bela Lugosi) who are printing propaganda in the basement. By this point, U.S. involvement in World War II was in full swing; thus, Nazi and Japanese villains were com-monplace in film, including several East Side Kids films, which were becoming increasingly patriotic in tone as a result of pressures from the Office for

War Information (OWI).11 As Amanda Ann Klein notes in her chapter on The Dead End Kids in her book American Film Cycles, “[t]hese spin-off cycles effectively tapped into the national project of rallying the population behind the war effort by transforming the unrecuperable social problem of the late 1930s—the urban juvenile delinquent—into a useful social product for the 1940s—the patriot or the soldier” (2011: 98). In the context of World War II it

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makes perfect sense that the anti-social aggression of the original Dead End’s

“smart aleck” street urchins would be redirected toward a common enemy, with their “heroic” acts meant to bolster the idea of wartime unity among all social classes. This is key to understanding the Dead End Kids’ transition to comedy as they were rechristened The East Side Kids and became role models to an increasingly young audience. In Ghosts on the Loose, the police are summoned, but it’s the boys themselves who incapacitate the Nazis, with Gorcey giving a Shemp-like flip, flopping on top of them all in a pile.

Gorcey didn’t flop over so easily in real life, however. In 1946 Monogram refused his request for a raise, and he left the series, taking Bobby Jordan and Huntz Hall with him to create the independently produced series, The Bowery Boys, which by the end of the decade would be much more blatantly modeled on the antics of Abbott and Costello. While the Bowery Boys films utilized many cast members from various Dead End Kids/East End Kids/

Little Tough Guys lineups, the focus was increasingly on Gorcey and Hall as a duo. Bobby Jordan left after eight films, while Gabriel Dell showed up intermittently in alternating character roles and Ernie Morrison turned the series down completely. With the new series came new names: Gorcey was renamed Slip Mahoney, Hall became Sach, and Bobby used his real-life first name. There would be nearly fifty Bowery Boys films in all.

Typical of Monogram production, shooting schedules were very short,
and the gang made five features in 1946 alone. Spook Busters (working title: Ghost Busters) was the fourth Bowery Boys film, directed by William Beaudine, a frequent East Side kids director who would also go on to helm a number of Bowery Boys pictures. By this point Gorcey’s trademark mala-propisms are rampant: “I was stirred up with commotion,” he narrates over the graduation ceremony that opens the film (the camera pulls back to reveal that said graduation is from the College of Insect Extermination, from which Sach is the only flunkee). Slip sets up his new exterminating business inside Louie’s ice cream shop (Louie is played by Bernard Gorcey, the even more diminutive father of Leo and David Gorcey) and his first big job comes via a realtor who needs him to exterminate a ghost at one of his properties. It turns out that the disturbance in the house isn’t caused by a ghost, but by a mad scientist doing biological experiments in the basement. After a succession of the same joke about falling through secret panels in the “haunted” house, the film culminates in a show-stopping scene wherein Sach is abducted by the creepy scientist, who is bent on swapping his brain with that of a gorilla. Slip gets drugged, making the climactic fight take place in hilarious slow motion, with Slip’s voice over operating as a sort of sports play-by-play.

The series (as with much 1940s horror cinema) has been criticized by film reviewers for recycling and repetition—even the seemingly unique plotline of Huntz Hall swapping brains with a gorilla would be recycled in 1949’s

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Master Minds—and a comparison between the critical reception of these horror-comedies and Val Lewton’s championed “terror films” is an example of the high art/low art binary that continues to trouble the genre. But as Mark Jankovich points out in his essay, “Pale Shadows: Narrative Hierarchies in the Historiography of 1940s Horror,” it is easy for critics to overlook what is “common” in favor of what is “special,” which allows for a misreading of larger historical trends (2008: 16). Not only did The East Side Kids deliberately turn their anti-heroes into juvenile patriots to coincide with the war effort, but the cycle was successful because it understood and catered to its core audience, which was largely made up of children—specifically with the emergence of “latchkey kids,” children who lived with limited adult supervi-sion due to fathers being away at war and mothers who took their place in the workforce on the homefront. The Dead End Kids’ transition to The East Side Kids and, later, The Bowery Boys, was a smart way to address the need for family entertainment necessitated by the Hays Code while cashing in on a franchise and on star power that kids recognized, as well as acknowledging the ways that kids responded to genre and exploitation cinema. Even if their role was to embody conservative representations of the juvenile patriot during World War II, the trajectory of these on screen representations of children is a sign of how horror filmmaking in the 1940s was creatively engaged with its sociological context, and not “asleep” as some critics have suggested.

One reason these particular cinematic kids remained so popular—more so than manufactured “role models” like Andy Hardy or Henry Aldrich (the latter had his own horror-comedy outing with the insipid Henry Aldrich Haunts a House in 1943)—is that they were troublemakers who made their own rules, got out of their own jams, and spoke their own lingo. Until the 1950s, when the juvenile delinquent would become popular enough to form its own massive genre, most writing for kid or teen characters was of the “Gee, golly!” variety; it condescended to its audience and didn’t reflect how kids really talked and felt. For young audiences in the 1940s, hanging out with The East Side Kids was like vicariously playing hooky and learning how to get away with it while ultimately still being seen as “good guys” who triumphed in the end.

posT–woRLD wAR ii: FRoM HoRRoR-CoMeDy

To HoRRoR-noiR

The horror explored in The Bowery Boys films—while always draped in
the trappings of old dark house shenanigans as their East Side counterparts were—was also one with an increasing tendency to feature monstrous mad
scientists ( Spook Busters [William Beaudine, 1946]; Master Minds [Jean

Yarbrough, 1949]; The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters [Edward Bernds,

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1954]), which coincided with the horrific revelations of the Nuremberg trials
starting in late 1945. 12 The American press had been reporting on Nazi atrocities as early as 1933, and were fully aware of the “Final Solution” by 1942

(United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), but playwright Arthur Miller, who was working in a Navy shipyard at the time, suggests that, as they were largely focused on the Pacific conflict, the average American did not grasp
the magnitude of it (Novick, 1999). Miller noted “the near absence among
the men I worked with . . . of any comprehension of what Nazism meant—we were fighting Germany essentially because she had allied herself with the

Japanese who had attacked us at Pearl Harbor” (Novick, 1999: 26). But the
evidence presented at the Nuremberg Trials could not be ignored: the tribunals revealed actual documentation of inhuman medical experimentation—as well as U.S.-shot footage of the discovery of the Dachau concentration camp by Allied forces. This footage was shot by a team headed up by George Stevens, then a member of the U.S. Signal Corps, but later to become the director of A Place in the Sun (1951), Giant (1956), and The Diary of Anne Frank

(1959), among others.13 While Stevens’s footage was not widely seen until
after his death in 1975 (Hartl, 2004), the murky aesthetic of the documentary
newsreels in rotation at cinemas combined with the traumatic experiences of returning vets14 would affect the trajectory of what we now know as film noir,
a darker, more morally ambiguous breed of film after the war.

Though the term “film noir” was coined in the late 1940s by French critics, it would not come into widespread use in the United States until the genre’s resurgence in the early 1970s. 15 While noir was emerging in the
early 1940s with films like Stranger on the Third Floor (Boris Ingster, 1940)

and The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941), late 1940s noir became much more influenced by the realism of documentary newsreels, as well as by the documentary-inspired aesthetic of Italian Neo Realist film (Luchino Vis-coni’s Ossessione, considered the first Neo Realist film in 1943, was itself an adaptation of James M. Cain’s pulp novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, whose 1946 adaptation directed by Tay Garnett would become a noir staple). The effects of wartime newsreel footage rippled out into the realm of seedy fiction, contributing to the paranoid tone of late 1940s noir. In a 1946
essay, Siegfried Kracauer writes of the increasing realism in Hollywood thrillers post-war: “Nightmares are seen in bright daylight, murderous traps are sprung just around the corner. . . . Thus, the weird, veiled insecurity of life under the Nazis is transferred to the American scene . . . that panic which in the anti-Nazi films was characterized as peculiar to life under Hitler now saturates the whole world” (1946: 105–6). Kracauer suggests that the war left the American cinema with “a sickness of the psyche” (1946: 108). This

“sickness” permeates the world of the film noir, with its chiaroscuro lighting, rain-slicked streets and characters, by turns anti-social, sociopathic and

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psychotic.16 In a 1971 essay, Paul Schrader writes that “never before had films dared to take such a harsh, uncomplimentary look at American life, and they would not dare to do so again for twenty years” (1971: 2). It is hardly surprising that the critical reappraisal of film noir coincides with another psyche-crushing overseas conflict, the Vietnam War. Despite being positioned as “liberators” in the arena of World War II, veterans of both conflicts shared a palpable post-war disillusionment, those of the latter returning to an especially volatile political climate in which America’s anger turned inward.

While The Bowery Boys would grab on to some of film noir’s more easily identifiable characteristics for parody in films like Spook Busters (William

Beaudine, 1946), Hard Boiled Mahoney (William Beaudine, 1947), and

Private Eyes (Edward Bernds, 1953), film noir was no place for kids. Those
rare instances where kids did play a part showed that the genre played no favorites; even children could meet their doom at the hands of a sweaty, unsmiling villain. Reflecting the grim realities of the war, the film noir was a world of dehumanization and determinism (Bould, 2005), where chances of survival were slim, and any kid unlucky enough to make it into the narrative would have to fend for themselves. But despite the noir world being almost completely devoid of children, the concept of “the child alone” was too tempting for some of the genre’s filmmakers to ignore, creating especially fertile ground for the horror-noir hybrid film. Fritz Lang’s M (1931) can be seen as a clear precursor to this admittedly tiny sub-strand of horror-noir (while its LA-set remake by Joseph Losey in 1951 comes in at the heyday of noir). Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) is related, though comparatively
sunny, and its teenager in peril—who fancies herself the spiritual “twin” of her serial-killer uncle—is positioned as a young woman more than a child.

Lew Landers’s 1948 Inner Sanctum (produced by the independent M.R.S.

pictures, and not to be confused with the Universal series, although based on
the same radio show)17 is a key horror-noir crossover that features child actor Dale Belding as Michael Bennett the sole witness to a murder. It takes the dopey kid half the movie to realize that the man staying in his mother’s small-town boardinghouse is the murderer. At first the kid takes a shine to the mysterious stranger, as he has no father-figure (the only men at the boardinghouse are the elderly local doctor and the town drunk), and even once he susses out the killer’s identity, he is reluctant to tattle since he witnessed the murder as a result of disobeying his mother’s orders to stay away from the railyard.

Immediately we can see a shift in how the child is presented; as with many noir protagonists, Michael is hesitant, unconfident, emasculated. Unlike his East Side Kids counterparts who negotiate their world with full agency, he is afraid of authority figures—so much so that he is more terrified of his own mother than he is of the murderer sleeping in the next bed. The child sees, but is marginalized by his size and age, forced to witness traumatic events and to live in fear of the encroaching danger to which he has been left vulnerable.

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In Ted Tetzlaff’s under-appreciated horror-noir The Window—a film that deserves a reappraisal by horror scholars—Bobby Driscoll’s character Tommy has this precise problem. It is not just that someone wants to kill him, but that, as a child, he has no credibility, a situation that is exacerbated by the fact that he’s a known teller of tall tales. “Noir, which is so often about powerlessness, is the perfect vehicle for this story” (2012: 42), writes Jake Hinkson in his article “Children of the Night: Noir and the Loss of Innocence.” Based on the story “The Boy Cried Murder” (1947; a.k.a., “Fire Escape”) by noir staple Cornell Woolrich—whose books were adapted for Jacques Tourneur’s The Leopard Man (1943), Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady (1944), and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), among others— The Window is incredibly bleak, and is one of several stories Woolrich wrote from a child’s perspective.18

Lead child actor Driscoll was becoming a hot youth property at the time, on loan here from Walt Disney Pictures, who had featured him in Song of the South in 1946. He would go on to be the model for Disney’s animated Peter Pan (1953), as well as providing the winsome character’s voice, which creates a poignant counterpoint for his terrorized turn in The Window. While horror-noir would not typically be targeted to young audiences, Driscoll’s presence ensured that certain kids would seek out the film, and The Film Noir Foundation has a letter posted on their website from a man who remembers seeing The Window in a small-town Kansas cinema as a child. “I idolized Bobby Driscoll,” he writes, “I identified with this child star as he avoided the killer’s schemes. I wondered what I would do in the same situation. My heart raced. My eyes were glued to the screen and [I] wanted somebody to believe
him before it was too late.”19

Like Peter Pan, Tommy (named Buddy in the original story) is a boy with a boundless imagination, and spends his days wandering through the rubble of crumbling tenements—filmed on location (a staple characteristic of noir, especially in the latter half of the 1940s) in New York’s Lower East Side, home of The Dead End Kids and their ilk—making up stories for a gaggle of unimpressed post-war waifs. As Woolrich writes in the original text:

He lived in two worlds at once. One of them was a small, drab, confined world; just two squalid rooms, in the rear of a 6-story tenement, 20 Holt Street; stifling in summer, freezing in winter . . . the other world had no boundaries, no limits.

You could do anything in it. You could go anywhere. All you had to do was sit still and think hard. Make it up as you went along. The world of the imagination.

He did a lot of that. But he was learning to keep it to himself. ([1947] 1984: 144) As the camera pans over the bleak urban landscape of his neighborhood in Ted Tetzlaff’s film adaptation, we can see why Tommy likes to tell stories.

Even before the film noir elements of the story set in, Tommy’s world is a

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dangerous one, which he navigates without trepidation precisely because he has that wild imagination to keep him safe. Thus, the grim horror-noir context is disempowering to children like Tommy only in a traditional sense. As Tyrus Miller asserts in his investigation into childhood memory and trauma in his essay, “The Burning Babe: Children, Film Narrative and the Figures of Historical Witness” (2013), there are different types of agency, and a retreat into imagination is itself a wilful act of self-preservation that cannot be discounted.

Miller writes that “the intensification of sensory experience that compensates for the loss of active agency and the dream-like indiscernibility of subjective and objective dimensions of the experience point beyond passive witnessing towards a new domain of agency residing in imaginative processes” (2003: 213). Tommy’s imagination frequently gets him into trouble perhaps because of the subversive potential that others realize in it. He doesn’t understand why his parents are no longer charmed by his stories, and instead call him a liar, shaming him. In other cases, his stories, true or not, carry potential for disruption and change. When he tells some neighborhood boys that his family will be moving away to their big ranch in the country, his parents are beset upon by other tenants wanting their soon-to-be vacated apartment.

The story of The Window takes place in the middle of a particularly sticky summer, and when Tommy goes out onto the fire escape to sleep in the cooler night air, he witnesses his upstairs neighbors murdering a man. Tommy frantically wakes his mother up and tells her everything. Convinced he is just overreacting to a nightmare, she tells him to stop it before she “takes a hairbrush to him.” As with Dale Belding’s character in Inner Sanctum, telling the truth holds the threat of punishment. And if physical punishment doesn’t work, there’s always guilt. “You don’t want me ever to be ashamed of you, do you?” his father asks. “People are gonna say that Ed Woodry’s son doesn’t know the difference between what’s real and what isn’t.” The unfair pressure these parents place on Tommy regarding their own social standing once again suggests fear of the potential power of the child as an agent of change.

Tommy goes through a series of attempts to report the crime—including a trip to the local police station—all of which are met with outright dismissal because of his age. Tommy’s is a world in which no adult is on his side: strangers, police, even his own parents. In fact these figures of official authority all seem to be corrupt allies against childhood itself. As his counterpart says in Woolrich’s text: “Wasn’t there anyone in the whole grown-up world believed you? Did you have to be grown up yourself before anyone would believe you, stop you from being murdered?” (([1947] 1984: 184). However, some people do believe the boy: those who have the most to lose if his story is believed. When his mother takes him upstairs to apologize to his neighbors, the Kellersons, for spreading malicious lies about them, Tommy’s cover is blown. That night, with his mother called away to visit a sick relative, and dad working the night shift, Tommy is locked in his room, left alone to wait

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out his own murder. In Cornell Woolrich: From Pulp Noir to Film Noir, author Thomas C. Renzi has pointed out that the Kellersons act as doubles to Tommy’s parents (2006: 312)—a point illustrated nicely when the Kellersons abduct Tommy and posit themselves as his parents to a probing policeman (2006: 312). One of the reasons the film’s suspense is so taut and unnerving is that the distinction between the “good” parents and the “bad” parents in such an analogy is shattered by the fact that both are equally horrid to Tommy. The Kellersons want to kill him, but his real parents may as well want the same thing for all the support they give him.

Tommy’s knack for make-believe momentarily saves him; while he pre-
tends to be asleep, his assailants let their guard down just long enough for him to dart up the fire escape to the abandoned tenement next door, where the Kellersons have stashed their previous victim’s body. As Tommy is pursued by the Kellersons through the ruined domestic spaces and corridors of the tenement (a dark double of his own building), the whole structure starts to crumble under him, which not only provides the film with a fantastic spectacle, but also offers up a great metaphor for all of Tommy’s fictions falling away, until he’s left on a single precariously creaking beam, hanging over a gaping precipice. If he makes the choice to jump into the safety net down below, where his parents await alongside the policemen and firemen, he will be making another kind of choice as well. Tommy’s big lesson is to give up his imagination. “I’ll never tell a story again!” he promises, to which his parents respond with pride and affection. After the resolve this brave and resourceful child has shown throughout the film, this is the most cynical and heartbreaking denouement possible. Just who owes who an apology here?

His neglectful parents are able to deny their guilt and convince the child that his imperilment was his own fault. The viewer is left only with the lingering memory of the release Tommy felt earlier in the film when escaping into his imagination. But this downbeat ending was only the beginning of the real Bobby Driscoll’s heartbreak.

Just as his character would find the murder victim’s body in an abandoned tenement, this is how Driscoll himself would be found years later. His body was discovered by two children playing in a dilapidated Greenwich Village tenement in 1968, dead from hardened arteries following nearly a decade of intravenous drug use. Attempts to identify him turned up nothing, and it wouldn’t be until two years later that his mother came searching for him, and a fingerprint match gave that John Doe a name. But it was too late; Driscoll had gone from being the voice of Peter Pan—the little boy who refuses to grow up—to his very own Neverland: an unmarked pauper’s grave on

New York’s Hart Island.

While it remains a little-known component of the horror-noir canon, The Window left an imprint: John Hough remade it in 1970 as Eyewitness, starring Oliver! ’s Mark Lester; and Australian director Richard Franklin remade it in

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1984 as Cloak and Dagger with E.T.’s Henry Thomas. In both cases the story’s claustrophobic domestic microcosm is given a makeover, strewn across a wider canvas to be reshaped into a tale of international intrigue. There would be a few subsequent examples of kid-noir in the 1950s (e.g., Shadow on the Wall [1950], Talk about a Stranger [1952]), but only Charles Laughton’s

Night of the Hunter (1955) compares to The Window for its atmospheric crossover with the horror genre. As Hinkson points out, both of these films hark back to much older stories, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” and “Hansel and Gretel,” respectively. “These origins point to a certain severity regarding childhood that existed prior to the Hollywood model of the cheerful American youngster,” he writes, “and it also points to the modern whitewashing of those gruesome old fairy tales” (2012: 43). Indeed, the film noir showed that things were rough all over, even—and sometimes especially—if you were a kid.

ConCLusion

As an era that was divided between wartime neglect and post-war trauma, the 1940s were daunting psychological terrain for kids. A key semantic element of The East Side Kids and Bowery Boys cycles, as well as those rare examples of kid-centric horror-noir, is the protagonists’ ability to master his or her environment on their own terms, even (and often) with adults acting as roadblocks.

The trajectory from the horror-comedy of Boys of the City to the devastating horror-noir of The Window can be likened to a coming-of-age, an intertextual map of obstacles and how to get around them, either with laughter or ingenuity.

Significantly, the horror-comedies of the 1940s—from The East Side Kids to Abbott and Costello and the “monster rally” films (those which pit several classic Universal monsters against each other)—would become staples of the Saturday matinees in the 1950s, kicking off the “monster kid” craze that was bolstered further by the release of the Universal horror back-catalog on television later that decade. Despite the dismissal of 1940s horror in much popular genre film criticism—criticism that is often specifically targeted at horror-comedy—these films were hugely influential, and the cinema culture surrounding them was a vibrant one that allowed children to investigate questions concerning identity, agency, and safety.

noTes

1. The Window was shot in 1947, but only released by RKO in 1949.

2. Latchkey kids were also prominent in the 1970s after second-wave feminism resulted in more mothers working outside of the home.

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3. Virginia Rappe was an emerging silent film actress who died following complications from an alleged violent sexual assault perpetrated by popular comedic actor Fatty Arbuckle at a party in 1921. It was a media sensation, and although Arbuckle was later exonerated, it effectively halted his career.

4. The Production Code of the Motion Picture Industry, 1930–1967. Accessed online March 1, 2014. http://productioncode.dhwritings.com/multipleframes_produc-tioncode.php.

5. Editor’s note: See also the chapter in this book by Gary Rhodes, which discusses late-1940s theatrical reception and promotion geared towards children, particularly through redistribution of “classic” films for children’s matinees.

6. Monogram’s 1939 film East Side Kids features a largely different cast and is thus not considered part of the canon, despite the title.

7. Early Old Dark House films include Haunted Spooks (1920), The Ghost Breaker (1922, now lost), Midnight Faces (1926), The Bat (1926), the aforementioned The Cat and the Canary (1927), The Phantom of Crestwood (1932), Murder at Dawn (1932), and The Secret of the Blue Room (1933), not to mention James Whale’s star-studded trope-naming film The Old Dark House (1932).

8. Rebecca was released April 12, 1940, Boys of the City was released July 15, 1940. Given Monogram’s tight shooting schedules of 5–7 days, it is quite possible that Boys of the City is directly referencing Hitchcock’s film.

9. Mantan Moreland’s most notable Monogram pictures were the horror comedies King of the Zombies (Jean Yarbrough, 1941) and its semi-sequel Revenge of the Zombies (Steve Sekely, 1944). His final role would be in Jack Hill’s Spider Baby (1968), a tribute to 1940s Poverty Row horror.

10. As audience reviews online tend to remark, and as Joe Dante admits in a Trailers From Hell commentary on the Hold That Ghost trailer.

11. The OWI was created by Theodore Roosevelt on June 13, 1942, and instructed the organization to “undertake campaigns to enhance under-standing of the war at home and abroad; to coordinate government information activities; and to handle liaison with the press, radio, and motion pictures” (Worland, 1997: 50).

12. See Paul Corupe’s chapter on the films of Paul Newfield in this book, which he says “directly reference real-life atrocities taking place behind Nazi lines, with recurring images of mad scientists torturing subjects.”

13. Billy Wilder, Sam Fuller, and Alfred Hitchcock also shot concentration camp footage, the latter’s film currently being restored for a 2015 release (Child, 2014).

14. Despite the propagation of “national pride” following World War II, the war left a psychological scar on its vets. A 1955 National Research Council study counted 1.2 million active-duty troops admitted to military hospitals during the war itself for psychiatric and neurological damage—compared with 680,000 for battle injuries—
resulting in thousands of lobotomies (Phillips, 2013).

15. Whether Film Noir is a genre, a style, a cycle or a theme is still debated (Copjec, 1993; Naremore, 1996: 12; Bould, 2005: 6, 12).

16. See Kristopher Woofter’s chapter in this book for a discussion of Kracauer’s commentary on 1940s realism in the context of the American Gothic tradition.

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17. See the chapter by Charlie Ellbé in this book for more on the Inner Sanctum series.

18. Others include If I Should Die before I Wake (1946, writing as William Irish) and Through a Dead Man’s Eye (1939) (See Renzi, 2006).

19. Joe Pierce, letter to the Film Noir Foundation, August 23, 2006: http://www

.filmnoirfoundation.org/thewindow.html Accessed March 1, 2014.

ReFeRenCes

Alexander, Geoff. 2010. Academic Films for the Classroom. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company.

Bould, Mark. 2005. Film Noir: From Berlin to Sin City. London and New York: Wallflower Press.

Brown, Noel. 2010. Hollywood, the Family Audience and the Family Film, 1930–2010. Doctoral Thesis, Newcastle University.

Child, Ben. 2014. “Unseen Alfred Hitchcock Holocaust Documentary to be Released.” The Guardian Online. Online source: http://www.theguardian.com/
film/2014/jan/10/unseen-alfred-hitchcock-holocaust-documentary-screening. Last accessed 10 January, 2014.

Copjec, Joan. Ed. 1993. Shades of Noir: A Reader. London: Verso.

DeCordova, Richard. 2007. “Ethnography and Exhibition: The Child Audience, The Hays Office and Saturday Matinees.” Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History and Method. Ed. Jon Lewis and Eric Smoodin. Duke University Press. 229–245.

Hallenbeck, Bruce G. 2009. Comedy-horror Films: A Chronological History, 1914–2008. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company.

Hartl, John. 2004. “D-Day Movies Were Late Arrivals.” msnbc.com. 2 June: Online source: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/4946947/ns/world_news-d_day_
anniversary/t/d-day-movies-were-late-arrivals/. Last accessed online July 6, 2014.

Hayes, David, and Brent Walker. 1984. The Films of The Bowery Boys. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press.

Hinkson, Jake. 2012. “Children of the Night: Noir and the Loss of Innocence.” Noir City. Film Noir Foundation. Fall.

Jancovich, Mark. 2008. “Pale Shadows: Narrative Hierarchies in the Historiography of 1940s Horror.” The Shifting Definitions of Genre: Essays on Labeling Films, Television Shows and Media. Eds. Lincoln Geraghty, Mark Jancovich. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. 15–32.

Jowett, Garth. 1976. Film—The Democratic Art: A Social History of American Film.

Boston: Little Brown, Focal Press.

Khatkar, Perminder. 2010. “What’s It Like to be a Latchkey Kid?” BBC News Magazine Online. 26 May: Online source: http://news.bbc.co.uka/2/hi/uk_news/
magazine/8704827.stm. Last accessed July 6, 2014.

Klein, Amanda Ann. 2011. American Film Cycles: Reframing Genres, Screening Social Problems, & Defining Subcultures. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, Austin.

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Kracauer, Siegfried. [1946] 2003. “Hollywood’s Terror Films: Do They Reflect an American State of Mind?” New German Critique. (89) (Spring/Summer).

105–111.

Maltin, Leonard, and Richard W. Bann. 1992. The Little Rascals: The Life and Times of Our Gang. New York: Three Rivers Press.

Means Coleman, Robin R. 2011. Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from 1890 to the Present. New York and London: Routledge.

Miller, Jeffrey S. 2000. The Horror Spoofs of Abbott and Costello: A Critical Assessment of the Comedy Team’s Monster Films. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company.

Miller, Tyrus. 2003. “The Burning Babe: Children, Film Narrative and the Figures of Historical Witness.” Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma. Eds. Ana Douglass and Thomas A. Vogler. New York and London: Routledge.

Naremore, James. 1996. “American Film Noir: The History of an Idea.” Film Quarterly. 49 (2) (Winter): 12–28.

Novick, Peter. 1999. The Holocaust in American Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Online source: http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/n/novick-holocaust

.html. Last accessed January 10, 2014.

Orgeron, Devin, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible, eds. 2012. Learning With the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Phillips, Michael M. 2013. “The Lobotomy Files.” Wall Street Journal Online.

11 December: Online source: http://projects.wsj.com/lobotomyfiles/. Last accessed July 6, 2014.

Price, Michael H., and George E. Turner. [1979] 2009. Forgotten Horrors. Baltimore, MD: Midnight Marquee Press.

———. 2001. Forgotten Horrors Vol. 2: Beyond the Horror Ban. Baltimore, MD: Midnight Marquee Press.

Price, Michael H., George E. Turner, and John Wooley. 2009. Forgotten Horrors Vol 3: Dr. Turner’s House of Horrors. Baltimore, MD: Midnight Marquee Press.

Price, Michael H., and John Wooley. 2007. Forgotten Horrors Vol. 4: Dreams That Only Money Can Buy. Baltimore, MD: Midnight Marquee Press.

Renzi, Thomas C. 2006. Cornell Woolrich: From Pulp Noir to Film Noir. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company.

Rhodes, Gary D. 2012. The Films of Joseph H. Lewis. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.

Schrader, Paul. 2014. “The Film Noir.” Filmex – 1971. Online source: http://www

.paulschrader.org/articles/1971-FilmNoir.html. Last accessed February 12, 2014.

Smith, Sarah J. 2005. Children, Cinema and Censorship: From Dracula to the Dead End Kids. London and New York: I.B. Tauris.

———. 2005. “A Riot at the Palace: Children’s Cinema-going in 1930s Britain.”

Journal of British Film and Television. 2 (2) (November): 275–289.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 2014. “The United States and the Holocaust.” Online source: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=

10005182. Last accessed March 1, 2014.

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Woolrich, Cornell. [1947] 1984. “Fire Escape” Child’s Ploy: An Anthology of Mystery and Suspense Stories. Ed. Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini. New York: MacMillan Publishing Company.

Worland, Rick. 1997. “OWI Meets the Monsters: Hollywood Horror Films and War Propaganda, 1942 to 1945.” Cinema Journal. 37 (1) (Autumn): 47–65.

FiLMogRApHy

Angels With Dirty Faces. Directed by Michael Curtiz. Warner Bros., 1938. Burbank, CA: Turner Entertainment Co., 2005. DVD.

The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters. Directed by Edward Bernds. Allied Artists Pictures, 1954. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., 2013. DVD.

Boys of the City. Directed by Joseph H. Lewis. Four Bells Pictures, 1940. Narberth, PA: Alpha Video, 2002. DVD.

The Cat and the Canary. Directed by Paul Leni. Universal Pictures, 1927. New York, NY: Kino International, 2007. DVD.

Dead End. Directed by William Wyler. Samuel Goldwyn Productions, 1937. Santa Monica, CA: MGM Home Entertainment, 2005. DVD.

Ghosts on the Loose. Directed by William Beaudine. Monogram Pictures, 1943.

New York, N.Y.: Goodtimes DVD, 2001. DVD.

Hard Boiled Mahoney. Directed by William Beaudine. Monogram Pictures, 1947.

Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., 2013. DVD.

Haunted Spooks. Directed by Alfred J. Goulding and Hal Roach. Rolin Films, 1920.

Burbank, CA: New Line Home Entertainment, 2005. DVD.

Hold That Ghost. Directed by Arthur Lubin. Universal Pictures, 1941. Universal City, CA: Universal, 2003. DVD.

Inner Sanctum. Directed by Lew Landers. M.R.S. Pictures Inc., 1948. Narberth, PA: Alpha Video, 2004. DVD.

Master Minds. Directed by Jean Yarbrough. Monogram Pictures, 1949. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2012. DVD.

Night of the Hunter. Directed by Charles Laughton. Paul Gregory Productions, 1955.

New York, NY: Criterion Collection, 2010. DVD.

Private Eyes. Directed by Edward Bernds. Monogram Pictures, 1953. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc, 2013. DVD.

Shadow of a Doubt. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Universal Pictures, 1943.

Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures, 2006. DVD.

Spook Busters. Directed by William Beaudine. Monogram Pictures, 1946. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., 2013. DVD.

Spooks Run Wild. Directed by Phil Rosen. Monogram Pictures, 1941. Narberth, Pa: Alpha Video Distributors, 2002. DVD.

The Window. Directed by Ted Tetzlaff. RKO Radio Pictures, 1949. Burbank, CA: Turner Entertainment Co., 2010. DVD.

Chapter 7

Making visible the sonic Threat

The inner sanctum Mysteries Radio Series
and Its Universal Studios Film Adaptations

Charlie Ellbé

In the prefatory scene of each of the six entries in Universal’s Inner Sanctum film series (1943–1945), a talking head inside a crystal ball announces in a resonating voice what the following hour of film will explore: “This is the Inner Sanctum: the strange, fantastic world, controlled by a mass of living, pulsating flesh: the mind. It destroys, distorts, creates monsters; commits murder. Yes, even you, without knowing, can commit murder.” The
form taken by the Inner Sanctum film series’ presenter—a disembodied head—suggests influences exterior to cinema; more specifically, it rather
performatively announces the status of the film as remediated1 directly from
radio, the medium arguably perceived as predisposed to the horror genre because of the ethereal presence it brought into the domestic sphere. If the connection between the opening scene and the influence of radio might have been obvious for audiences of the 1940s, as the Inner Sanctum films were adaptations of the popular radio program (which ran from 1941–1952), the formal and thematic influence of the radio medium on these films was—and still is—less understood. Audiences and critics of the time coldly received
the films, calling them “mildly interesting but not thrilling” (W.A., 1944) and

“dull” (Crowther, 1944), and contemporary academic research has practically
ignored them. Weaver and Brunas (2007) have acknowledged their place
among the “Universal Horror” films, but their descriptions and analyses of the films remain for the most part rather negative, condemning them for being

“feebly conceived melodramas with little to recommend beyond their camp qualities and the morose spectacle of seeing the badly miscast Chaney struggle his way through roles that were beyond his depth” (2007: 394). Grams has also granted them a section in his book on The Inner Sanctum Mysteries in all their forms (pulp, radio, television, and film), but similarly dismisses their value for not being as “creative,” “nightmarish,” and “goose-pimply” as 129

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the radio show and the pulps (2002: 68). Despite the general assessment of these films as having little to recommend them, they do sometimes cleverly incorporate themes from the radio series such as psychological disorders and unexpected twists of fate, which offered a counterpoint to the idea of the ideal domestic space. The films’ focus on the character’s mind, their unique use of voice-over, and their emphasis on a disembodied voice also reflected crucial elements of the radio show.

Recent scholars (Killmeier, 2012; Verma, 2010) have argued that, as the
first electronic medium to be experienced in the home, radio was from its early days seen to be an unearthly medium predisposed to horror. The wire-less aspect of radio marked the distinctiveness of the medium and announced the strange absence of materiality. A supernatural aura emerged from this
immateriality and invisibility of the frequencies emitted by radio (Killmeier,

2012: 75). Killmeier notes that “[t]he spectrum, popularly known as ‘the
ether,’ became a metaphor that aided comprehension of radio transmission and added to its mysteriousness” (2012: 75). Jeffrey Sconce places radio on a continuum of “spiritual” media beginning with the telegraph’s link to the Spiritualist movement in its relationship to the revelatory messages received by spiritual mediums (2000: 15). 2 From its beginnings, then, there was something essentially eerie about radio technology.

With this eeriness came an uncanny type of presence linked to disembodied voices. Radio was “a medium in which the body was invisible and uncertain”

(McCracken, 2002: 184), and its reliance on disembodied voices created a
constant mysterious bridging of the familiar and the unfamiliar. It brought to the home unknown, exterior voices that created a sense of unfamiliarity and the uncanny3 within the supposed comforts of the domestic sphere. It rendered the domestic sphere a liminal, in-between space, where boundaries between inside and outside broke down. Radio also developed its inherent link to horror by connecting the private and public, and the individual and the
social (Killmeier, 2010: 188) in ways that had not been imagined previously.

These aspects of radio were received as otherworldly by listeners, which, arguably, further enhanced its direct association with the uncanny. Sconce suggests a similar uncanny essence in the disorienting space of radio reception: “Abstract electricity in the ‘ether’ made for messages and audiences that were at once vast and communal, yet diffuse, isolated and atomized” (2000: 213). Radio’s “diffused” signal created a strange sense of connectedness and isolation—everybody’s living room was everybody else’s in this space of simultaneous reception, and yet a sense of being alone in one’s home inevitably remained. The potential reception of radio as uncanny is therefore related to the historical and cultural situation that rendered the technology fascinating and curious. However, radio’s ubiquity—its ability to surround the listener in the “ether” and to invade their homes—suggested something especially

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magical, and during radio’s golden age, this otherworldly aspect fed directly into the medium’s exploitation of the horror genre for its narratives.

HoRRoR RADio

The production of horror radio programs culminated in the 1940s and began to slow down with the decline of the popularity of the medium itself in the early 1950s. While daytime programming reinforced the importance of the home with soap operas largely targeting housewives, late-night schedules featured programs that disrupted this homely feeling and rendered it uncanny. Horror stories addressed the “average person” in the United States and focused on the same domestic environment as other dramas, yet their main ambition was to deconstruct any sense of comfortable or stable domesticity. Similar to the origins of cinematic horror in Hollywood, radio began by approaching horror through supernatural themes and adaptations of popular Gothic literature.

Only a few months after the release of Universal Studios’ film adaptation of

Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931), the landmark horror program The Witch’s Tale (1931–1938) began to air, exploiting similar Gothic themes such as isolated mansions, haunted graveyards, and dreadful natural worlds.

Throughout the 1930s, the principal technical focus of horror radio programs was to find ways to give the listener a sense of physical space through creative sound design. Horror programs like Lights Out! (1934–1947) significantly advanced the ways in which radio programming could translate the dimensions of physical space using numerous voices and an incredible variety of effects. Verma, writing about the evolution of sound throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, argues that during the 1930s, radio programs began to construct sonic spatial arrangements which differentiated between fore- and backgrounds, and that this allowed listeners to “move” through space, and also to develop intimacy with certain characters (2010). Moreover, this technique made it possible for a greater number of characters to be part of the story, while at the same time encouraging identification with one
particular voice (Verma, 2010). The 1940s mark a period in which horror
radio began to move away from ambient sounds and to explore more significantly the power of human voices, thus allowing broadcasters to develop a more intimate position in relation to the characters. Significantly, this shift is in keeping with the general trend of 1940s horror cinema, which turned to explorations of extreme sources of anxiety, and troubled psychological and emotional states that resulted from World War II. The dread resulting from the fear of a communist invasion, terrorism destroying the United States, as well as social anxieties and the questioning of how the war would alter the institutions of the family and marriage, fueled horror radio into the 1940s and

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led to the emergence of films that deeply explored these themes. The troubled male characters of what is today known as film noir, for instance, were arguably a result of these threats to domestic security and comfort that had entered with force into U.S. homes.

InnER SAnCTUm on THe AiR

The name “Inner Sanctum” was first introduced to the public in 1930 with a book series of the same name published by Simon and Schuster. The first three books were not originally associated with a specific genre or brand; it is only when the first novel of the series— I Am Jonathan Scrivener (written by Claude Houghton under the alias, Claude H. Oldfield)—was reprinted in

1935 that the name quickly became associated with murder stories (Grams,

2002: 3). The following year, two mystery novels were published as part of
the same series, and the number of publications continued to increase until the end of the golden age of mystery fiction in the mid-40s. The radio plays and films derived from them were not, however, adaptations of the novels, but rather explored similar themes that revolved around mystery and murder.

Despite the presence of “mystery” in the title of the show, the Inner Sanctum is today considered as horror. Although Nachman puts it in the

“radio noir” category, his description of the program highlights the series’

“sepulchral narrative[s] . . . riddled with macabre allusions and deadly puns”

and “eerie sound effects” (1998: 317). In his book on horror radio programs, Hand describes the horror radio tradition as made up of programs such as The Witch’s Tale, The Hermit’s Cave (1930–1944), Lights Out! , and Inner Sanctum Mysteries, arguing that: “as well as belonging to the obvious tradition of popular horror, radio also inhabited the same domain as film noir, and produced some of its greatest horror work in the ‘radio noir’ worlds of Suspense and countless other crime, detective and mystery series—tales abounding with escaped lunatics, cold-blooded murderers and brutal, eerie
mysteries” (Hand, 2006: 10). While they frequently crossed the line between

Gothic, science-fiction, mystery, thriller, or adventure, radio programs like Inner Sanctum Mysteries expressed horror in various ways from one episode to the other, usually by exploring social anxieties, by featuring mad scientists and terrorists, and/or by questioning the sanctity of the family and/or mar-
riage (Hand, 2006: 21). Jancovich, discussing the marketing and reception of
the Sherlock Holmes films, also makes a solid argument that what we today see as horror because of the evocation of fear, terror, and horror, was, in the 1940s, synonymous with “mystery” (2005: 44–45). Radio tended to go even further than film in terms of “ruthlessness” and “grisly inventiveness” (Hand,

2006: 21). The fact that radio counted on the imagination of the viewer rather

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than on an explicit depiction of horror allowed it to surpass the level of gruesomeness found in films, as the abstract suggestion of horror was more accepted than its visual representation.

Each dramatic radio thriller and horror program extended the thematic boundaries established by prior programs. For example, while Suspense (1942–1962) challenged the limits of gender definitions and gave ample space to women’s voices, Lights Out! (1934–1947) brought Gothic settings and subject matter into realms that questioned gender identities. The Inner Sanctum Mysteries unsettled domestic comfort by concentrating mostly on gruesome murder stories committed by “average” human beings who had
temporarily or permanently lost their sense of reason. The plays tended to stay away from the supernatural, and, as Hand suggests, instead focused on

“real (or at least possible) horror” (2006: 122), so that the listeners could identify with the story and experience the transformation of their familiar spaces into unfamiliar ones. In all three series, audiences experienced a disruption of their domestic equilibrium by inviting into their homes stories of the supernatural or insanity that disturb or destroy the characters’ lives.

Despite the supernatural elements that usually infused their stories, the conclusions of the Inner Sanctum radio plays returned their characters and events back to a rational world by the end. The supernatural was frequently used to disrupt the characters’ psychological equilibrium, often causing the destruction of marriage and inciting madness. The supernatural elements of these narratives were ultimately revealed to be a rationally explainable part of the characters’ reality, hence also suggesting the Gothic unreliability of human perception derived especially from the late eighteenth-century Gothic of Ann Radcliffe. In other words, regardless of their returning the listener to the relative comforts of their silent living rooms, the seemingly supernatural aspects of these stories created a lingering threat to stability and normalcy.

Though the threat is revealed to be irrational only in appearance, its effects on the lives of the characters (and possibly the listeners) remain tangible and irreversible. This threat lingered in the real space of the listener’s home, filling the space with sound until Raymond Johnson, host of the Inner Sanctum,
left his audience to their “pleasant dreams.”4

In keeping with the sonic format that prevailed in 1940s radio, each
radio play tended to have only two or three characters, and the soundtrack consisted largely of their voices. Ambient sounds were usually limited to a few effects that served to determine the space in which the events took place. The sound effects in Inner Sanctum worked entirely in service of placing particular emphasis on the subjective, psychological world of the play rather than to reproduce a realistic environment, and to convey the characters’ social anxieties, fears, and traumas. These anxieties, which were stimulated by the advent of World War II, were continuously addressed in

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radio fiction. The plays were generally built around one main character that commented on the narrative in an interior monologue narration as he became slowly more and more psychologically unstable. The minimal presence of background sounds and the strong presence of the narrating voice served to create a sense of intimacy with the main character, and this gave the listeners a highly subjective, interiorized account of the story, quite distinct from the authoritative voice of the show’s host. Host Raymond Johnson added another level of narration by welcoming the viewers to each episode and bringing a more explicitly direct address to the audience with his disembodied voice.

Every week, following the tradition kept by horror radio since The Witch’s Tale (1931–1938), the host introduced the base lines of the story, as well as the actors who would star in it. He reappeared halfway through the show, and again to announce the conclusion of the program, thus framing the entire story, giving an identity to the show, and encouraging the listeners, often in rather irreverent and humorous tones, to engage with the story. In keeping with the show’s other Gothic trappings, this “outside” host-presence also served to reflect on the often deeply embedded psychological narratives the series presented from week to week.

RADio AnD FiLM

There was a dialogic relationship between radio and film in the 1930s and 1940s that worked in various reciprocal ways: radio plays were turned into film scripts, films scripts were turned into radio plays, films were promoted on the air, and numerous actors and writers moved from one medium to
the other. Films such as The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935), Suspicion (Alfred Hitchcock, 1941), and My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936), were adapted for The Mercury Theatre on the Air (1938), The Campbell Play-house (1938–1940), and The Lux Radio Theatre (1934–1955), while radio plays like Sorry, Wrong Number (05-25-1943)5 were adapted to the screen.

This was a unique time period in which audiences often had the opportunity to either experience the story in its audio-visual format in public spaces, or to experience it in the comfort of their homes through sound waves. While many individual radio plays were translated to the screen, the episodic radio series format remained attached most specifically to the sound medium; and it is not until the arrival of television that those episodic programs were translated into an audio-visual format. Television used the main properties of
radio (episodes, use of hosts, direct transmission of airwaves, hypermediacy6)

and adapted them to a new medium rendering what was abstract concrete.

Although film did not share the sense of “liveness” provided by radio, and later by television—and although it was not created as a response to radio the

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way television was—it added a similarly embodied visual dimension to the stories, and thus formed a virtual reality that could be experienced through both audio and visual motifs.

It comes as no surprise that the rights for Inner Sanctum were sold to Hollywood in 1942, considering the immediate success of its radio programs in the United States. As the producers of the broadcast did with their source material; rather than purchasing the rights for an adaptation, the producers of the films acquired only the rights to use the Inner Sanctum name and, to some extent, its aura, creating their own stories based on similar themes, such as human madness and the intrusion of crime into the domestic sphere. Often addressing the possibility of a supernatural turn of events, most of the films concluded with a rational explanation, thus leaving the threat “believable,”

and lingering in the viewer’s mind. Although the first Inner Sanctum Mystery film, Calling Dr. Death (1943), was not originally planned to be the initia-
tor of a series, the formula proved to be successful enough to merit further installments. The films were marketed as horror, and they starred Universal Picture’s new iconic monster actor, Lon Chaney Jr. Despite being marketed as horror, the films intersected various genres, and as the series progressed, themes and styles beyond those touched upon by the radio series started to be explored. In another act of genre-remediation, the film series evolved to include new types of settings, going back to the Gothic style that had marked the first cycle of horror films at Universal, and some of the sequels of the monster classics.

Calling Dr. Death (Reginald Le borg, 1943)

Calling Dr. Death is an original story about a neurologist, Mark (Lon Chaney

Jr.), who performs hypnosis in a private office.7 Early in the film, Mark’s
wife is victim of a violent murder. The rest of the film, which all takes place in contemporary settings, attempts to explain the story behind the crime.

But while most of the story concerns the investigation, the film is far more invested in the internal dialogue that takes place in the neurologist’s head, as he has no memory of what happened that night and begins to suspect himself.

The film uses Mark’s inner voice to comment on the event and express his doubts about himself in relation to the crime. At first suspecting that he is responsible for the crime—“I killed Maria. It’s so clear now . . . Maria drove me to it. My subconscious had rebelled.”—Mark ends up using self-hypnosis to find the answers he is looking for. Directly reflecting 1940s radio’s voice-over techniques, Mark constantly explains what is going on in his mind and what troubles him. The voice-over monologues are designed to emphasize the focus on the dark side of the human psyche, and also to explore how the human voice can serve to control and manipulate the mind. Mark fears having

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been contaminated by a form of madness and having been possessed by some sort of exterior force which might have taken control over his mind and body.

The voice and the mind become the two major focuses of Calling Dr. Death, and this leads the film to not only recreate the themes of the radio show but also to reflect the influence of the formal and thematic characteristics of the radio medium of the 1940s itself as the human voice becomes the main controller of the events, and the main locus of the drama and conflict.

Mark’s voice-over serves to emphasize the different steps in his own psychological evolution, and to make his point as audible as it is visible through the subjective camera. These techniques lead the viewer to experience the world simultaneously with the protagonist from a restrained perspective strictly confined to that of a single protagonist, as one finds in radio programs of the era. Echoing the sound design of the radio program, the film’s audio conception brings to the forefront the human voice while keeping the use of sound effects to a minimum. An eerie organ sound highly reminiscent of the radio show serves to create a strange atmosphere throughout the film, without ever being as excessive and surprising. A form of psychological soundscape that alludes to radio’s interiorized voices is created through the film’s quasi-omnipresent narration, which is used to emphasize the narrator’s constant insecurity and to showcase his questioning of his own thoughts and actions.

In this sense, Mark becomes a sort of “paranoid male” to complement the so-called paranoid woman’s films of the period (e.g., Suspicion [Alfred Hitchcock, 1941]), where women’s skeptical voices take the foreground.

Weird Woman (Reginald Le borg, 1944)

Weird Woman, based on Fritz Leiber’s novel, Conjure Wife (1943), 8 focuses less on a single character, and explores the supernatural dimensions of Vodou rites and curses. In these variations, it proves to be more divergent from radio’s influences than the previous film in the series. During a trip to the South Seas, Professor Norman Reed (Chaney Jr.) meets his future wife, Paula (Anne Gwynne), an orphan raised by a Vodou priestess, and brings her back with him to the United States, hoping that a new home will help her detach herself from her ritualistic practices. But Norman’s home is filled with the uncanny presence of ritualistic objects, which constantly bring back the presence of Vodou. After the release of Norman’s new book on superstition, it is announced that a professor competing with him in his department has committed suicide. Norman begins to wonder whether the superstitions are true or if they are pure nonsense, and whether he and his wife are somehow related to the murder without wanting to be. This becomes the source for the interior questioning that troubles him. Subsequently, the Reeds begin to receive anonymous phone calls, and understand that someone is accusing them of

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being responsible for the murder. The widow (Elizabeth Russell) makes up a story about a dream in which her husband appeared to her to curse the one who led him to suicide. If the criminal does not confess in thirteen days, he or she will be choked to death. Norman’s colleague Ilona (Evelyn Ankers) confesses her crime a minute before her deadline, but she ends up accidentally killing herself by hanging. The film ends on this ambiguous note, where Ilona dies by accident, but in a way that corresponds to what the fake curse had announced, bringing an uncanny coincidence suggesting that some things are fated to happen.

Continuing the series’ focus on interiorized narratives, Weird Woman explores issues of guilt, remorse, and trust, and the ways in which humans deal with these issues psychologically. The film shows Paula playing the role of the colonial Gothic “other” who was brought up in a different culture and who now threatens to contaminate U.S. culture with her beliefs. Typical of the themes of the radio series, she is also seen as a threat in the way she menaces the stability of her marriage by refusing to let go of her ritualistic behavior and making it impossible for trust to be built between her and her husband. As in Calling Dr. Death, Chaney Jr.’s character in Weird Woman is confronted with problems that deeply challenge his understanding of himself and of the world around him, but this time, his torments are more directed toward others than toward himself. These problems lead him to withdraw into his own inner world, which the viewer can understand through hearing his internal voice—
here, also expressed in voice-over, as the same eerie organ sound fills the background of the soundtrack. But rather than focusing primarily on the inner world of the character, Weird Woman shows a more persistent interest in the external supernatural horrors of the unknown powers of curses and religious rites.

These were not the most common themes of the Inner Sanctum radio show, yet Vodou was present in the first year of the show. In “Island of Death” (aired on 07-12-1941), a group of people stuck on an island is slowly led to believe in the powers of black magic and the supernatural as a Vodou priest takes possession of a woman’s body. Unlike this radio episode, Weird Woman does not take place entirely within the Vodou territory in the South Seas, but rather brings the superstitions into a contemporary setting in the United States.

Vodou objects invade the contemporary U.S. home, highlighting the common fear of invasion found in the cultural landscape of World War II U.S. The film does show Vodou rituals, but is more concerned with how the characters deal domestically and psychologically with its potential superstitious threats.

The threat does not only result from the potential dangers of superstitious beliefs, but also from the possibility for these beliefs and their consequences to invade the home and render it unhomely. In a classic colonial Gothic figuration, these rites are fearsome because they are part of another culture that threatens to invade the characters’ everyday lives.

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While the Inner Sanctum radio show ended with a return to normalcy and a possible explanation, Weird Woman surprisingly ends on a more ambiguous note. This is in fact the only instance in the Inner Sanctum film series where the ending is left open. Although this strategy did not conform to the radio show, it offered a similar way of leaving the threat to linger in the viewers’

minds. Weird Woman thus unleashes its threat in the “normal” world, allowing for the possibility of its horrors becoming even more believable, and certainly more pervasive.

Dead man’s Eyes (Reginald Le borg, 1944)

The next film of the series, the third and last one directed by Reginald

LeBorg,9 remains in a contemporary environment, this time absent of super-
natural presences. Chaney Jr. plays the role of Dave Stuart, a painter who loses his sight after accidentally burning his eyes with acid. Soon after the accident, Stuart discovers that a cornea transplant could allow him to see again, but first, he must find a donor who will give him his corneas upon his death. Soon after the donor is found, he is murdered. Stuart receives his cornea transplant, but the operation appears to fail—Stuart is still blind. The rest of the film focuses on trying to unveil the mystery behind the murder. In the end, the criminal is arrested, and it is finally revealed that the operation actually did work—Stuart had been able to see since the operation and had only pretended to be handicapped so people wouldn’t suspect him of conducting his own investigation.

As in Calling Dr. Death, the film focuses primarily on the perspective of Stuart; however, this time, the inner voice over can be heard only in a few instances, which all serve to express Stuart’s anxieties toward his relationship with women, and toward his new “handicap.” The film explores the fear of mutilation and disability, fears that were closely linked to World War II and the return of traumatized and maimed soldiers. Issues around love, marriage, and trust also play an important role in this film, continuing the series’ thematic trends relating to the domestic sphere.

The type of intimacy with the main character that was developed in the first two films of the series is partly lost because of the film’s diminished use of the voice-over, and the horror does not result mainly from the psychological state of the character, but also from the mystery behind the murder. Through a dream sequence very characteristic of LeBorg’s style, 10 the viewer gets to
experience what is going on in Stuart’s head, but only for a brief moment.

Shortly after the dream, a scene leaves the camera lingering on Chaney Jr.’s face as he thinks about what he has lost, but the horror is not what goes on in his mind: for the first and last time in the series, physical horror left by the accident—the mutilation by acid—is shown in a very excessive way, and

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figures Stuart as a physical monster. Ultimately, Dead Man’s Eyes mostly explores the decidedly exteriorized horrors of both the mystery behind a murder case, and the drama of mutilation. The settings of the film show a return to an older style of architecture influenced by the Victorian era. It serves to create an oppressive atmosphere, but this home does not reflect the home of the 1940s viewer. By turning Stuart into an excessively mutilated monster, and by bringing the viewer into a different type of home, the film slightly moves away from the domestic horror that turns the home into the unfamiliar. The domestic is “other,” and the monster has had a serious physical transformation.

The Frozen Ghost (Harold young, 1945)

The fourth film of the Inner Sanctum series introduces a partial return to the classical horror tradition. The Frozen Ghost begins with performer, Alex Gregor (Chaney Jr.), in a hypnosis number. After surprising the audience with an impressive number, a sceptic joins Alex on stage to attempt to unveil his tricks, but the alcoholic man dies of a heart attack only a few seconds after reaching the stage. Despite the medical examinations, Alex continues to think that his psychic powers are the cause of the death, and is, like the characters of the three previous films, invaded by feelings of guilt. Alex’s publicist, George, recommends that he go to work for Mme. Valerie Monet (Tala Birell) in a wax museum to save his career from the bad publicity.

Soon, Rudi (Martin Kosleck), the very strange and eccentric sculptor working at the museum, becomes jealous of Alex. During an argument with Alex, Valerie faints, and Alex leaves her in the museum, thinking he has killed her with his psychic powers. When her body is found later, she is in fact dead.

Finally, it is revealed through a session of psychic trance that George and Rudi are responsible for the crime.

Chaney Jr.’s signature voice-over in the series thus far is completely absent from The Frozen Ghost, and although his internal torments are an important part of the story, they are not the film’s main focus. Once the world of the wax museum is introduced, the film takes on a new dimension, exploring the strangeness of the sculptor and his inanimate bodies. With the unveiling of the dark Gothic settings that take on psychological implications, the film suddenly begins to recall The Mystery of the Wax Museum (Michael Curtiz,

1933) and Mad Love (Karl Freund, 1935). The story still relates to prominent
themes of the World War II era: the torments around the fact that a man has the power to kill, and that he might be incapable of fully controlling that power or of choosing his victims. Furthermore, Kosleck’s disturbing performance recalls Peter Lorre as Dr. Gogol in Mad Love. This shift in approach announced a new direction that would be further explored in the later films of the Inner Sanctum series. It is difficult to determine the reason for this change

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of style, but it again clearly shows a desire to move further away from the influence of the radio show and to focus more on the formula that had made the studio successful in the 1930s.

Strange Confession (John Hoffman, 1945)

Strange Confession begins on a very mysterious note: a man dressed in a long coat walks in the streets at night, hiding from the police officer patrolling the neighborhood. The man enters a house furnished with candlesticks, orna-mented curtains, massive wood moldings, and a large wooden staircase, a setting very reminiscent of those found in Universal’s horror films of the 1920s and 1930s, especially its Old Dark House films. The man, Jeff (Chaney Jr.), announces that he has a confession to make. The film then goes into a flashback mode, and the story behind the dark confession is revealed.

This introduction into a world inspired by a Victorian interior style quickly leaves that space to return to contemporary settings. Despite the flashback structure and the subjective perspective of the storyteller, the tormented voice-over that had marked the style of the first three films of the series is once again completely absent. After the introductory sequence, the story becomes about a couple struggling financially. When Jeff was on the verge of creating an important medical cure, his employer sent him to Africa to pursue the tests, but there he discovered that the cure was actually a poison. But it was already too late: his employer had already stolen his formula and made it available on the market. Angry upon discovery of this reality, Jeff returns to the United States, and, in a moment of madness, kills his boss. This crime is the confession he has had to make.

While the film quickly goes from an obscure beginning to a family drama, it is still wrapped up in similar themes revolving around a haunted past fuel-ing the present with guilt and remorse. Despite its eschewal of a voice over, the film still focuses on Chaney Jr.’s thoughts and experiences, and his feelings in relation to them. Instead of relying on sound to convey the evolution of the character’s state of mind, the film uses a more conventional style of storytelling. The flashback evidently plays a crucial role in the introduction of the torments of the character, and again brings back a focus on internal torments and the disturbed psychology that characterized radio in the 1940s.

Although Strange Confession does not share as many stylistic resemblances with the Victorian Gothic style as the two previous films, its themes are not so far away from them. The film shows a return to the theme of madness and the unreliability of science, which again brings the story closer to Gothic horror. Ultimately, Strange Confession is not so interested in the character’s psychology as previous films, and thus shows a growing disinterest in the Inner Sanctum series’ sources of inspiration.

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Pillow of Death (wallace Fox, 1945)

The final film of the Inner Sanctum series11 moves a step further away from the influence of the radio show by completely removing the presence of the host. The film begins directly with the credit sequence, and then the story begins. In one of the series’ most straightforward treatments of anxieties around marriage, Wayne (Chaney Jr.) announces to his wife Vivian (the disembodied voice of Victoria Horne) that he is planning to leave her. He returns home that night to find Vivian murdered by asphyxiation. Wayne is arrested as a suspect, but is soon released for lack of evidence. A psychic séance is organized to try to communicate with the ghost of Vivian. During the séance, Wayne hears Vivian’s voice accusing him of the murder, but Wayne accuses a man hiding behind a door of being the accomplice of the psychic and of being responsible for the voice he heard. Wayne begins to suspect that his wife might still be alive. Donna (Brenda Joyce), who is having a romantic affair with Wayne, later catches Wayne having a conversation in his head with his dead wife. Wayne discovers that Donna has been listening to him, and, following the indications given by Vivian’s voice, attempts to kill her, but the police arrive in time to save her. Finally, and once again following Vivian’s suggestion, Wayne jumps out of the window and kills himself.

The film takes place in a large Victorian house filled with shadows, and in a dark cemetery. Below the massive staircase in the house hides a secret passageway, and above is an attic where lives “the ghost of Uncle Joe” (later revealed to be a raccoon). Several aspects of the mise-en-scène and décor are highly reminiscent of Universal’s silent Old Dark House horror film, The Cat
and the Canary (1927). And similarly, Pillow of Death plays with the viewer by oscillating between ghosts and trickery, but whatever the reality is, there always seems to be something threatening the characters.

The voice-over comes back to the series in this film, but rather than being the voice of the Wayne’s own thoughts, it is the voice of his dead wife that runs through Wayne’s head. It is only at the end of the film that the viewer gets the certainty that the voice is an inner voice, and that Wayne has appropriated the voice of his wife as his own. While this evocation of a “paranoid male” shows the film to be a gender twist on the 1940s paranoid woman’s film, the film’s story and style conforms to the tradition of the Old Dark House silent horror films in its setting and emphasis on an unstable environment of trickery and deception. Despite its focus on the traditional Gothic and its return to the 1930s style of Universal horror, Pillow of Death still shares a great deal with the Inner Sanctum radio program in the way it explores the unreliability of the human mind, and the way it makes use of the disembodied voice, though here in subversive ways perhaps never imagined in the radio episodes.

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ConCLusion

If radio was predisposed to horror, it is surprising to see that the creators of the Inner Sanctum film series did not try to explore (or to “remediate”) further the properties of the medium and how this could be translated to the screen.

It appears that the studio attempted something experimental for the series, but progressively began to give up parts of it as the series continued to return to older, tried-and-tested formulas of horror, while keeping with the social and psychological themes that reflected the fears of the time. Since horror was the genre that helped Universal Studios to get through the depression era with the success of films such as Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931), Frankenstein

(James Whale 1931), and Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale 1935), it is not surprising that the studio went back to its roots. Yet, the six Inner Sanctum films are clearly devoted to psychological exploration of trauma, guilt and desire—whatever their aesthetic treatment of the theme. This situates the entire series as a key example of 1940s notions of the monstrous. Chaney Jr.

who was famous for his role as the Wolf Man since the early 1940s, extended his iconic creation to form a new type of tormented monster, this time not physically horrible but psychologically disturbed.

What matters here is not whether the Inner Sanctum film series was a faithful adaptation of the radio show or not—or even whether they were “good”

adaptations or not—for, they reflected formal elements of the radio show in often unexpected and inventive ways, and suggest a connection between film and radio that goes beyond direct script adaptations. The Inner Sanctum series was only one of the numerous series that adapted radio shows in the 1940s.

What is worth exploring further is the other ways that radio influenced film, especially in terms of sound design, but also in terms of how films learned to convey the language of the psyche directly from an already-established tradition of horror radio.

noTes

1. A term coined by Bolter and Grusin to indicate a carrying-over of the form of an earlier technological medium into a newer medium. Here, the film opens with a direct borrowing of the disembodied voice (the film’s bodiless talking head) to announce in direct address to the audience the strange story they are about to witness.

Write Bolter and Grusin: “a medium is that which remediates. It is that which appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real” (1999: 65).

2. Sconce does argue, however, that extensive programming regimes normalized this relationship to the point that some of this ethereal quality of radio was lost. For

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studies of similar revelatory claims regarding cinematic and photographic media and their connections to the spiritual realm, See also Tom Gunning’s essay, “To Scan a Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision” (2007, Grey Room 26: 94–127) and Louis Kaplan’s essay, “Where the Paranoid Meets the Paranormal: Speculations on Spirit Photography” (2003, Art Journal, 62 (3) (Autumn): 19–29).

3. The term “uncanny” is used here to describe a feeling emerging from facing something that offers a dialectic between what is both known and unknown. The sense of the uncanny emerges from a potential collapse of the barriers between the known and the unknown (Punter, 2007: 131).

4. This kind of host-presence welcoming listeners to a series of horrors dates back to the carnival tradition. As a disembodied “presence” himself, Raymond Johnson was an uncanny combination of familiar (a voice that listeners could identify with every week) and unfamiliar. His influence turns up in the “severed” talking head in five of the six the Inner Sanctum films. Johnson’s delivery was rather humorous and irreverent, and prefigures the horror hosts on late-night TV some decades later.

A direct descendent of this tradition on TV is Alfred Hitchcock ( Alfred Hitchcock Presents [1955–1962]), with his sly and morbid consistent framing presence, and later Rod Serling ( The Twilight Zone [1955–1926] and Night Gallery [1969–1973]).

5. Sorry, Wrong Number was adapted seven times on the air between 1943 and 1960, always starring Agnes Moorhead. The date May 25, 1943 corresponds to its first adaptation on Suspense.

6. I use the term hypermediacy here to suggest an emphasis on the medium itself, its technological benefits, and its limitations.

7. Edward Dein had written the script for Calling Dr. Death before the studios acquired the rights. The main themes of the film: murder, paranoia, self-doubt, unconscious behavior, were greatly appropriated for the Inner Sanctum film series. Dein had previously worked at RKO and had contributed to the script of Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942).

8. Adapted in 1962 as Burn, Witch, Burn (aka, Night of the Eagle) by Sidney Hayers from a script by Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont.

9. LeBorg was selected by producer Ben Pivar to direct the first film of the series.

Seeing that LeBorg was able to work with small budgets, tight schedules, and on short notice, Pivar kept hiring him for the following films. LeBorg didn’t claim any authorship on the series. According to Brunas and Weaver, he was reluctant to return to direct Dead Man’s Eyes (2007: 1944).

10. The three films directed by LeBorg either have a dream sequence, or a sequence of paranoia in which a character hears voices in his head. Dead Man’s Eyes’

dream sequence is very similar to the hypnosis session in Calling Dr. Death, in which the thoughts of the character are superimposed over his or her forehead. Weird Woman has a comparable sequence in which Ilona imagines people announcing her death and accusing her of murder. Each character of the story appears one-by-one in a similar superimposition.

11. In 1948, the independent studio M.R.S. produced a film called Inner Sanctum, unrelated to the Universal series, and directed by Lew Landers, who was also responsible for 1944’s The Return of the Vampire.

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ReFeRenCes

Crowther, Bosley. “The Screen.” The New York Times (New York). April 1, 1944.

Doane, Mary Ann. 1987. The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s.

Theories of Representation and Difference. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Grams, Martin. 2002. The Official Guide to Inner Sanctum Mysteries: Behind the Creaking Door. Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing.

Grusin, Richard, and J. D. Bolter. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hand, Richard J. 2006. Terror on the Air!: Horror Radio in America, 1931–1952.

Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Hilmes, Michele. 1990. Hollywood and Broadcasting. Illinois Studies in Communications. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Horten, Gerd. 2002. Radio Goes to War. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Jancovich, Mark. 2005. “The Meaning of Mystery: Genre, Marketing and the Universal Sherlock Holmes Series of the 1940s.” Film International (17): 34–45.

Killmeier, Matthew A. 2010. “Modernity’s Enchanting Shadow: The Hall of Fantasy, Horror Programmes and US Post-War Radio.” Horror Studies 1 (2): 177–192.

———. 2012. “Aural Atavism: The Witch’s Tale and Gothic Horror Radio.” Journal of Radio & Audio Media 19 (1): 61–82.

———. 2013. “More than Monsters: Dark Fantasy, the Mystery-Thriller and Horror’s Heterogeneous History.” Journal of Radio & Audio Media 20 (1): 165–180.

Bottom of Form

Loviglio, Jason. 2005. Radio’s Intimate Public: Network Broadcasting and Mass-Mediated Democracy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

McCracken, Allison. 2002. “Scary Women and Scarred Men: Suspense, Gender Trouble, and Postwar Change, 1942–1950.” Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio. Eds. Michele Hilmes and Jason Loviglio. New York: Routledge.

183–207.

Punter, David. 2007. “The Uncanny.” The Routledge Companion to Gothic. Ed.

Catherine Spooner, Emma McEvoy. London: Routledge. 129–136.

Sconce, Jeffrey. 2000. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press.

Verma, Neil. 2010. Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama.

W., A. “At the Rialto.” The New York Times (New York). February 12, 1944.

Weaver, Tom, Michael Brunas, John Brunas, and Michael Brunas. 2007. Universal Horrors the Studio’s Classic Films, 1931–1946. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.

FiLMogRApHy

Calling Dr. Death. Directed by Reginald Le Borg. Universal Pictures, 1943.

Universal City, CA: Universal, 2006. DVD.

The Cat and the Canary. Directed by Paul Leni. Universal Pictures, 1927. New York, NY: Kino International, 2007. DVD.

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Cat People. Directed by Jacques Tourneur. RKO Radio Pictures, 1942. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2005. DVD.

Dead Man’s Eyes. Directed by Reginald Le Borg. Universal Pictures, 1944. Universal City, CA: Universal, 2006. DVD.

Dracula. Directed by Tod Browning. Universal Pictures, 1931. Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures, 2006. DVD.

Frankenstein. Directed by James Whale. Universal Pictures, 1931. Universal City, CA: Universal, 2004. DVD.

The Frozen Ghost. Directed by Harold Young. Universal Pictures, 1945. Universal City, CA: Universal, 2006. DVD.

Mad Love. Directed by Karl Freund. MGM, 1935. Burbank, CA: Turner Entertainment, 2006. DVD.

The Mystery of the Wax Museum. Directed by Michael Curtiz. Warner Bros., 1933.

Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2009. DVD.

Pillow of Death. Directed by Wallace Fox. Universal Pictures, 1945. Universal City, CA: Universal, 2006. DVD.

Strange Confession. Directed by John Hoffman. Universal Pictures, 1945. Universal City, CA: Universal, 2006. DVD.

Weird Woman. Directed by Reginald Le Borg. Universal Pictures, 1944. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios, 2006. DVD.

Chapter 8
poe, Horror, and the Cinematic

Mystery Hybrids of the 1940s

Dennis R. Perry

As with all writers, Poe’s image and reputation evolves with the changing times. However, because of Poe’s pervasive presence in popular culture these shifts can become radical. In the wake of Roger Corman’s popular adaptations in the 1960s, for example, Poe became associated with Technicolor
gothic horror.1 More recently he is fast becoming the face of serial-killer films
and series, such as The Raven (James McTeigue, 2012), a mystery thriller in which Poe himself must play detective in order to solve a series of murders inspired by his own fiction, and the new television series, The Following (2013– ), which links Poe’s tales with a cult-like network of serial killers in a context of extreme graphic violence. Before Corman’s 1960s reimagining, Poe’s identity as a horror icon had not yet distilled, though the dual emphasis on horror and detection stretches back at least to the 1940s. While Poe adaptations during the period include television, radio, and comics, I will focus primarily on films, with occasional contextual reference to other media. In the process we gain insight into issues related to horror in the 1940s, including its genre hybridity, the relationship between 1930s and 1940s “horror” film adaptations, the marriage of horror and mystery genres, and, most importantly perhaps, Poe’s central, if sometimes indirect, presence throughout the period.

While the three Universal studio Poe films of 1930s, Murders in the Rue Morgue (Robert Florey, 1932), The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934), and

The Raven (Lew Landers, 1935), mostly bear little resemblance to Poe’s tales, they did explore some very dark corners of the mind and create, at least in the first two, an uncanny and chilling atmosphere. In the 1940s, Poe’s influence on the popular horror and mystery genres often finds its place in more formulaic hybrid films that dilute the horrific potential of Poe’s disturbing psychological tales. However, a number of radio broadcasts, comics, Jules

Dassin’s 1941 short film adaptation of “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) and a

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1949 British adaptation of “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) by Ivan

Barnett more thoughtfully strive to adapt the spirit of the darker and more ambiguous depths of Poe’s work. Despite their commercial conventionalism,

Universal’s The Black Cat (Albert S. Rogell, 1941) and The Mystery of Marie

Roget (Phil Rosen, 1942) create several interesting intertextual and thematic
overlaps that provide the knowing viewer with unexpected pleasures. These films, unlike the more severe 1930s adaptations, are examples of the popular comic-mystery-thrillers of the time, perhaps using the Poe titles to cash in on audience memories of the edgier horror adaptations of Poe from the 1930s.

These older films included disturbing images of lethal human experimentation and inter-species sexuality ( The Murders in the Rue Morgue), flaying a living human being ( The Black Cat), and facial mutilation ( The Raven), all of which would have been difficult to forget. During World War II, however, the trend toward blending Poe into Old Dark House–style comedy-horror films mostly precluded images that were too graphic. Even Universal softened their explicit horror franchise films, making the Frankenstein monster a mere cameo at the end of their programmer sequels like House of Frankenstein (Erle C. Kenton, 1944) and House of Dracula (Erle C. Kenton, 1945).

Universal, and often other studios, also diversified their films by mixing genres. Such hybridity in the 1940s was common, from western-com-
edies ( The Paleface [Norman Z. McLeod, 1948]) to family-war dramas ( Mrs. Miniver [William Wyler, 1942]). In keeping with this trend, horror films and franchises also became mixed with other genres, yielding horror-comedies like Hold that Ghost (Arthur Lubin, 1941) and Spooks Run Wild (Phil Rosen, 1941), or horror mysteries like Fox’s and Universal’s Sherlock Holmes series (fourteen films between 1939 and 1946). 2 Earlier classic black comedy-horror-mysteries like 1927’s The Cat and the Canary (Paul Leni) and 1932’s The Old Dark House (James Whale) set patterns of plot and tone for later films of the 1940s like the remade The Cat and the Canary (Elliott Nugent, 1939), The Ghost Breakers (George Marshall, 1940), and, not surprisingly, Universal’s own The Black Cat and Mystery of Marie Roget. These productions were mostly B films, part of a Hollywood factory system that depended on tried-and-true formulas that could be made quickly and cheaply.

Having a relatively modest stable of stars, Universal’s success hinged more on popular genres than on star power. The Frankenstein monster, for example, was played by three different actors during the 1940s (Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr., and Glenn Strange), the role itself becoming the star.

The various formulas mixed and matched in surprising ways. For example, in the Old Dark House films, like The Black Cat (1941), certain basic plot situations became standard: a will, hidden passages in a large old house, creepy crypt-like areas, and mysterious servants were common. Many of the mainline horror films of the time incorporate variations on these same

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mystery elements, only becoming horror films proper by adding a supernatural monster. (Films like The Brute Man [Jean Yarbrough, 1946] and House of Horrors [Jean Yarbrough, 1946] starring Rondo Hatton’s non-supernatural

“monster,” “The Creeper,” were a fascinating exception, making the line between mystery and horror even blurrier.)3 In several of the Universal Frankenstein films, for example, a variation on the mystery thriller includes the sought-after will of the deceased rich relative, but here transformed into Frankenstein’s formula for creating life, making its possessor Frankenstein’s scientific “heir.” In Son of Frankenstein (Rowland V. Lee, 1939) and Ghost of Frankenstein (Erle C. Kenton, 1942) the bearers of the formula are Frankensteins themselves; in later films like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (Roy William Neill, 1943) and House of Frankenstein the formula is only “inherited” by finding it in a secret place in the ruins of a castle. Further contributing to the mystery dimension of these horror films, detective figures such as Col. Montford in The Wolf Man (George Waggner, 1941), Dr. Mannering in Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man, Erik in Ghost of Frankenstein, and Joan Raymond in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (Charles Barton, 1948) all stay busy trying to track down clues to explain the films’ weird goings-on. On the one hand, therefore, in this cinematic environment of rigid genre conventions, Poe seems as well hidden among genre conventions as the will is among the ruins—his influence marginalized to the reference to his name and a superficial association with strange and horrific tales. On the other hand, however, Poe’s presence and influence in the period is much broader and deeper than generally acknowledged, though it is largely indirect.

Because of Poe’s role in developing the conventions of the detective tale
with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie

Roget” (1842), and “The Purloined Letter” (1844)—as well as the pioneer-
ing of the modern Gothic tale—we can argue that Poe is indirectly, through a largely unconscious process relating to his work’s cultural currency, being

“adapted” in the very blend of mystery and horror genres itself. At the core of Poe’s detective fiction is C. Auguste Dupin, an eccentric genius who solves seemingly impossible crimes by imaginative and intuitive logic (Poe’s term is “ratiocination”) that baffles his less brilliant companion—the framework of Sherlock Holmes (as Doyle freely admitted) and most other classic detective and mystery stories. Moreover, with his first detective tale, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Poe included horrifying, and seemingly supernatural elements of animalistic violence. The final element, humor, is a major dimension of “The Purloined Letter,” wherein humorous exchanges between Dupin and the clueless Prefect of Police drive Poe’s theory of imaginative analysis. Hence, by blending horror, mystery, and humor himself, Poe arguably develops the deep structure underlying all of these hybrid films, making him the indispensable matrix figure behind these related genres. The idea of

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the “matrix figure” was coined by John Orr (2009) about Alfred Hitchcock,
asserting that his contributions to cinematic style and technique have been so widely imitated here and abroad that it becomes difficult to find a film that does not bear some traces of Hitchcock’s influence. Similarly, Poe’s contributions and innovations to literary theory, gothic horror, detective fiction, and even to science fiction (Jules Verne was such a fan that he wrote a sequel to Poe’s 1838 novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym) make him unavoidable within these related literary realms. 4 We might best explain the relationship of these films to Poe in intertextual terms. That is, while they are not generally strictly “conscious” adaptations, they travel parts of the intertextual highway that Poe laid out and paved.

This emphasis on Poe and mystery is incidentally also present in the
equally hybridized comic book genres in the 1940s. In the Classics Illustrated (CI) adaptations of Poe, for example, his Gothic and psychological horror tales like “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842) and “The Fall of the House
of Usher” (1839), as well as his science fiction hoax, “The Unparalleled

Adventure of One Hans Pfall” (1835), are surprisingly labeled as “mysteries” (CI 40, 1947). In fact, in the brief biography of Poe in the back of that issue Poe’s tales in the aggregate are called the “forerunners of the modern detective story.” Poe’s influence, therefore, on the hybrid genres in 40s films and other media appropriately suit the stylistically varied trends of cinematic horror during the period. The shift from horror to detection seems a conservative and conventional cinematic phenomenon, prompted by wartime concerns that caused Universal Studios particularly to shy away from the more raw and the grisly aspects of horror. America’s response to the period was not unique.

England’s trepidation about horror during wartime took the additional form as the British Board of Film Classification used the “X” rating certificate to discourage the production of even mild horror films. This conservative hybrid approach to horror films is born out in many of the other studios who mixed their horror films with large doses of detective and mystery elements.

Fox’s The Undying Monster (John Brahm, 1942) and Hangover Square (John Brahm, 1945) both include detectives as central characters. Even RKO’s Val Lewton films, particularly The 7th Victim (Mark Robson, 1943) , I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943), and The Leopard Man (Jacques Tourneur, 1943) all feature amateur detecting as central story elements. These films are often praised for their emphasis on subtlety—what you don’t see but is suggested to the viewer’s mind.

In terms of adaptation strategy, on the surface Poe’s Universal cinematic incarnation in the 40s could be labeled “colonization,” what Kamilla Elliot calls ventriloquism, in which an adaptation “blatantly empties out the [source
text’s] signs and fills them with new filmic spirits” (Leitch, 2007: 109). Thus,
the 1941 Black Cat includes merely a few of Poe’s ideas—his title, several

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cats, including one which meows eerily to expose a hidden body and the film’s murder plot. As essentially a comic mystery, the film does not attempt to engage Poe with any profundity. However, this paucity of elements from Poe’s tale does not mean the 1941 Black Cat has no interest as an adaptation.

In fact it does intersect with the tale from which it takes its title—perhaps even more so than the 1934 Edgar G. Ulmer version—and other Poe tales, in terms of its mixture of horror, mystery, and unexpected humor. As I have mentioned, Poe was not only an innovator in Gothic and detective genres; he also incorporated various types of humor within them. G. R. Thompson, for example, argues that even Poe’s most serious gothic tales were characterized by “a prevailing duplicity or irony in which the artist presents us with slyly insinuated mockery of both ourselves as readers and himself as writer”

(1973: 9). Thus in the context of a “mocking or ‘perverse’” universe, Poe explores “ambivalently . . . the irrational sources of man’s terror and despair in order to master them . . . through a doubled vision, through humor and
irony” (Thompson, 1973: 161–62). Others, too, have noted the veiled—and
not so veiled—humor in such “serious” tales as “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Berenice” (1835), the latter Poe himself described as “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical” (2004: 597).

While such a pairing of horror and humor might seem counter-intuitive, and for these Hollywood films simply a commercial convention, as Robert Bloch notes, humor and horror are really just two sides of the same coin

(cited in Carroll, 1999: 146). Poe understood what Noël Carroll argues, that
horror and humor share a continuum of novelty, unexpectedness, avoidance of proportion, and incongruity (1999: 146). There are even important similarities between clowns and monsters, both often morally transgressive and compiled of contradictory attributes: solemnity and humor (“bread good, fire bad”), politeness and violence (Dracula), and fear and evil (Usher). Children probably see this better than do adults in that they are often afraid of clowns, dummies, and puppets (1999: 156)—all of which share with monsters the elements of the uncanny and the weird. Monsters such as Frankenstein’s, the Mummy, and zombies are often slow and somewhat ineffective, also making them somewhat clownish (1999: 155). In short, both clowns and monsters rely upon extremes of emotion and defy expectation.

Poe’s own title for a collection of his work, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), actually suggests two separate types of humor as it relates to horror. The arabesques, including the more apparently serious gothic tales like

“Usher,” “Ligeia” (1838), and “The Assignation” (1834) can be described as

“ironic perspectives in the midst of confusion and ominousness” (Thompson,

1973: 109). But, more importantly in terms of the style of Universal’s The

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Black Cat, are Poe’s unabashedly humorous tales, sometimes referred to as his grotesques. As Thompson notes, the grotesque “suggests more strongly a yoking of the chaotic, the fearful, and the comic” (1973: 109). Certainly The Black Cat features misperception and irrationality in an atmosphere of
the ludicrous.5 While, on the one hand, Gil (Broderick Crawford) absurdly jumps at every sound, making wild assumptions and accusations, his partner, Mr. Penny (Hugh Hebert), a silly and obtuse antique dealer, is permitted to desecrate valuable pieces of furniture mindlessly without permission and with complete tolerance by a deadly serious family desperately vying for control of the estate. His oblivious behavior may remind us of Poe’s Psyche Zenobia from “The Predicament” (1838), whose every action is guided by a ridiculous misunderstanding of her work—in her case how to write fiction. Mr. Penny is also a kind of oblivious trickster figure, a benign and distracted Harpo Marx.

The presence of this absurd pair of outsiders in a house full of dangerous conflict and mystery is so silly that they seem like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck thrown into The Murders in the Rue Morgue. (In fact, Hugh Herbert is often featured as a character in cartoons for his distinctively silly “hoo hoo”

laughs and “oh mys.”) In one scene Gil tries to play Dupin by laying out the way a murder happened for his “girlfriend,” but is continually interrupted by Mr. Penny’s silly questions until the attempt at detection is given up entirely.

Speaking of detecting, at one point Gil, upon hearing a theory by the Basil Rathbone character, asks “who do you think you are, Sherlock Holmes?”

In the self-reflexive spirit of Poe, detecting itself, including Universal’s Holmes franchise, become objects of satiric parody and humor. In fact, these comedy-horror-mystery hybrid films seem to share Poe’s own deeper purposes of mixing humor and horror as a way to enable us to face our fears by laughing at them. For audiences feeling wartime stress, such a cinematic formula seems to have enabled a similar, therapeutic function.

Universal next briefly added Poe’s prototype detective, C. Auguste Dupin, to their Holmes mystery roster with 1942’s The Mystery of Marie Roget, which intersects with Poe’s original in several ways, and self-consciously alludes to his other detective stories. The trailer, in fact, emphasizes its source with large, bold letters: “From the pen of the world’s master of mystery.”

As in Poe’s “Rue Morgue” and “Marie Roget,” the film highlights public interest in newspaper accounts of unusual events, with shots of people flock-ing to newsstands and close-ups of headlines concerning the disappearances of Marie Roget. A body is found that has apparently been mutilated by an animal—à la “Rue Morgue”—and to make the connection as explicit as
possible, Dupin is congratulated three times for solving the murders in that grisly case (harking back to both Poe’s tale and Universal’s 1932 adaptation).

In addition, Marie Ouspenskaya, as Marie’s grandmother, has a pet leopard to once again remind us of the violent animal murders of “Rue Morgue.” We are

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also reminded of “The Purloined Letter” as Ouspenskaya offers Dupin a handsome fee for protecting her other granddaughter, Camille, making the film’s police chemist temporarily the paid amateur detective he is in the tale. Though exaggerated for comic effect, Dupin also constantly surprises his companion (the prefect, no less), who never understands where Dupin is going with an idea. In fact, the prefect’s utter stupidity also echoes the prefect from Poe’s “Purloined Letter.” There is some sincerity in the film’s attempt to characterize Dupin through his partner and the references to his past detecting triumphs, almost as if Universal were preparing the ground for a series.

Though the film is not a particularly good or clever mystery, it is described by Brunas, Brunas, and Weaver in Universal Horrors as “brisk and entertaining”

(1990: 291), with the only lament that “Universal’s failure to follow up with a series seems regrettable” (1990: 293).

Delightfully, in this film, as in the tales, Dupin and the incomprehensible workings of his mind are as much a mystery as the case itself, making him a perpetual enigma and irritant to the other characters. However, the disap-
pointing plot is merely a series of dead ends, Hitchcockian “McGuffins,”6
and time spent making various innocent characters look suspicious. But while the Thin Man films (six films, released between 1934 and 1947) do the same thing, they at least surprise the audience by making the least suspicious character turn out to be the villain (e.g., James Stewart in After the Thin Man

[W. S. Van Dyke, 1936]); in The Mystery of Marie Roget, Marcel, the most obvious suspect, is finally revealed to be the killer. He is caught as he sneaks up on Camille in her bed in one last reminder of “Rue Morgue” and the murder of the L’Espanaye women. (At the same time the rooftop chase of Marcel after he is discovered in Camille’s room is reminiscent of the climax of Universal’s Rue Morgue. ) In Marcel’s proving to be a human monster, having killed his wife and Marie Roget both, and mutilating their faces to confuse the police, the film ties itself to Poe’s psychological tales. Marcel and his duplicitous and homicidal tendencies is a fair, if incomplete, reproduction of aspects of Montresor (“The Cask of Amontillado” [1846]), Metzengerstein, and William Wilson—and, therefore, more horrifying than the essentially innocent ourang-outang of Poe’s “Rue Morgue.”

While films like The Mystery of Marie Roget combine the more comical aspects of Poe with the Old Dark House tradition of the 1920s and 1930s (that were also likely inspired by Poe), the darker aspects of Poe’s explorations of abnormal psychology and emotional distress would probably be found more implicitly in the films noir. However, in England, one 1940s Poe adaptation emerged that would revive the darker implications of Poe’s work,
and that was Ivan Barnett’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1949). This film
strives ardently to achieve the eerie and inexplicable atmosphere of Poe’s original story, adapting ideas as well as characters and events, thus capturing

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something of the mood and feel of the tale. It is an inexpensive independent film often cited for its inexperienced actors, awkward staging, and somewhat incoherent plot. To be sure, this obscure film has its critics. Don G. Smith, for example, refers to the writers as “untalented” and the film as merely a “typical low-budget British forties horror-mystery” (1999: 78). However, Smith archaically criticizes the film for its unfaithfulness to the original—perhaps unaware of the now more common notion that even the most divergent filmed variations can make for a strong adaptation or interpretation of the source text. Despite such obvious flaws as are highlighted above, those aspects of the film that might be viewed as weaknesses based upon budgetary and other constraints actually become strengths in Barnett’s inexperienced but earnest hands. These conditions of production help to create an effect of dreamlike and horrific strangeness, certainly part of Poe’s original purpose in one of the quintessential American Gothic tales.

The film begins with a frame story at a gentleman’s club where a discussion of horror fiction leads to a reading of “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

We soon see Roderick and the narrator—here named Jonathan—talking
about the familiar subjects of the family curse, his nervous condition, and Madeline’s sickness. However, a new turn of the screw is added to the tale as the suspicious live-in doctor reveals the precise origins of that curse. After Usher’s father discovers that his wife is having an affair with another man in the “temple” (an out building on the estate), he tortures his wife and beheads the lover. Before the lover can be killed, however, he curses the Usher children to die by age thirty. The doctor then tells Roderick that to end the curse they must burn the lover’s head which is protected by the now mad hag who is Usher’s mother, bringing in the Old Dark House tradition of literal curses to stand in for Poe’s more esoteric suggestions of atavaism.

After the unsuccessful attempt by Roderick, the doctor, and a gardener to burn the head and end the curse, the story, in dreamlike fashion, suddenly returns to Poe’s original plot as Usher announces Madeline’s death. Based on events so far presented, it seems clear that she has been poisoned, but it is unclear whether it is the hag, Usher, or the doctor who is responsible. During the reading of “The Mad Trist” (which in Poe’s story serves as one of several meta-texts for the story’s events) the film cross-cuts to Madeline forcing her way out of the coffin and heading upstairs. As she enters Roderick’s room, he fires a gun at her (anticipating Vincent Price’s move in Corman’s film twenty years later), and subsequently she stalks him up to the roof from which he falls to his death. The film then cuts back to the frame story where the listeners are full of questions about the ambiguous plot, to which the reader replies:

“Well, gentlemen, your guess is as good as mine.”

While the frame story is awkwardly mounted, and really should have been left out, it does act as something of an interpretation of the motives of both

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story and film. In describing “Usher” the club members note its “unearthly,”

“strange,” “weird,” and “uncanny atmosphere,” where “nothing [is] definite”

and one can never be “quite sure what happens”—good descriptions of both tale and film. The film’s incoherencies—intended or accidental—throw us into dreamlike shifts of scene and unmotivated and unexplained action that recreate the experience of reading the text better than any film since Jean Epstein’s La Chute de la maison Usher (1928). The incoherence of the film does seem to be the point: how could Roderick and Madeline, who lived on the estate thirty years, never have discovered the “temple”? Why did nobody tell them before of their mother living there? Why does the lover’s curse have the power it does? Why would Madeline be poisoned by Roderick or the doctor? While these are not the same questions Poe leaves us with, the narrative ambiguation—the effect of wonder and strangeness it creates—is similar.

Such ambiguous plot and character elements, together with the atmospheric, darkly-lit mise-en scène, and the attempts to create double narratives that reflect upon each other meta-fictionally, create a noble, if imperfect, attempt to capture not merely the plot but the uncanny essence of Poe’s tale.

The most effective film adaptation of Poe in the 1940s is Jules Dassin’s twenty-minute film, The Tell-Tale Heart (1941)—ironically from MGM,
the most unlikely studio to back a Poe adaptation. Released at Halloween, it is effectively directed and acted, with a strong supporting score, and sticks closest to the tale’s plot and effect of any cinematic Poe adaptation of the period. Given Dassin’s background in writing for radio, it was likely inspired by the many popular radio versions of “The Tell-Tale Heart” during the 1930s (on both the Black Night and Columbia Workshop programs in 1937) and the 1940s (on Inner Sanctum with Boris Karloff on August 3, 1941, just over two months before the release of Dassin’s film). In an article occasioned by the death of Dassin in 2008, Richard Corliss suggested that it might also be “the very first movie to be directly influenced by Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) (which came out less than six months before). This short film, with Joseph Schildkraut as the guilt-stricken killer, is positively a-swill in Wellesian tropes: the crouching camera, the chiaroscuro lighting, the mood-deepening use of silences and sound effects” (2008). Appropriately, it won the Oscar that year for best short feature.

One of the ways effective adaptations function is by grasping the spirit of the original so deeply that they seamlessly blend new ideas within the source text’s universe. Here Poe’s obsessive “protagonist” becomes a weaver’s apprentice to a mean-spirited and insulting boss. The very act of weaving becomes a metaphor of the apprentice’s troubled mind storing insult upon insult in a tapestry of resentment and hatred, planning his revenge as he weaves relentlessly. While the master has one bad eye it also functions more as a metaphor of his blind disregard of his apprentice than as the source

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of the apprentice’s madness. The Tell-Tale Heart is a relatively quiet film, the camera doing much of the narration. It zooms in close to the ear of the apprentice at the loom as he hears the master’s footsteps ascend the stairs into the shop—becoming an effective foreshadowing of the heartbeat. When the apprentice decides to kill the master, the camera again draws in close to him, subtly revealing what is coming. Later, after killing the old man, the camera shows the source of various “pounding” sounds that the sensitive killer now feels: the dripping faucet, the large clock ticking, the dripping of the drain pipe outside into the water container. At the same time Dassin makes significant changes to the source text that better fit the cinematic medium. A major example here is the evidence of the apprentice’s conscience in silence rather than in the “violent gesticulations,” “heavy strides,” and the foaming and raving of Poe’s narrator. While Poe’s approach reads like a dramatic monologue, easily performable by a single actor on stage, it needs significant reframing for film. The film’s long, uneasy silences as the deputies ask the increasingly disoriented apprentice questions about the whereabouts of the master perfectly transform the tale’s suspenseful climax from an extended, increasingly hysterical outburst to an unnerving silence. Unsurprising for the period, the tale becomes primarily one of conscience rather than one of the narrator’s madness, highlighted by a scripture appearing on screen after the credits:

“The law is written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness”

(Romans 2:15).

The only other Poe “films” of the period were made for early television, including “The Cask of Amontillado” ( Suspense, 1949) and “The Tell-Tale Heart” ( The Actor’s Studio, 1949), though neither Poe—nor horror—were significant in 1940s television. This would eventually change, with series such as Lights Out! (1946–1952), based upon a popular radio series of the same name (various incarnations from 1934–1947), drawing more heavily upon the pulp magazines of the early twentieth century for their scripts. The vogue for horror television wouldn’t really take off until Screen Gems released their packages of Universal horror films to television in 1957, spawning a flood
of horror hosts and creating a monster movie craze among young viewers.7

Even the Suspense series (1949–1954) included few strictly horror offerings.

Suspense’s version of “The Cask of Amontillado” (aired October 11, 1949) is an interesting re-telling of Poe’s tale set in post–World War II Italy where Count Montressor confesses his murder of General Fortunato (Bela Lugosi) for stealing his wife and killing his sister in flashback. 8 As for The Actor’s Studio version of “The Tell-Tale Heart” (aired February 20, 1949), starring Warren Stevens and Russell Collins, it appears to be unavailable for viewing, and little seems known about its production. Such losses of archival sources for early television episodes are common, as the episodes were often aired live and not recorded.

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As in our day, Poe occupied an unusual and esoteric place in 1940s popular culture. This is partially true because Poe contributed so much to how we think about and construct stories. In practical terms, that means that his work has been redefined with different emphases to suit the era, from heavily moralizing early horror films like D. W. Griffith’s The Avenging Conscience (1914); to Roger Corman’s almost vibrant, almost painterly, expressionistic allegories of the 1960s; to our current “Poe” as impetus for stories about serial killers ( The Following [2013–]), a topic he likely never considered.

In between these extremes are the Poe-inspired films of the 1940s, which explored both his humorous and darkly mysterious sides, often through a combination of the popular detective paradigm he developed and the old dark house genre. While the many comedy-horror-detective films I have examined show how surprisingly pervasive his influence was at the time, some of that influence was explicit, some implicit. To draw an image from Lovecraft, who considered Poe his “god,” we might compare the Poe of 1940s horror film to Cthulhu, the pagan god who sleeps in R’lyeh, but still exerts enormous influence over the dreams and doings of the unwitting. Likewise, though Poe’s development of the detective story, along with other genres, makes his presence nearly omnipresent in a 1940s cinema increasingly interested in exploring the damaged American psyche, that presence goes mostly unnoticed by audiences of the many uncredited films under his influence. This continues to be true today, as Poe’s detective formula unconsciously undergirds endless numbers of television dramas from Psych (2006–2014) to CSI (2000– ), Sherlock (2010– ) to Bones (2005– ), and from Criminal Minds (2005– ) to Castle (2009– ). However, the darkly and explicitly adapted Poe in the 1940s, particularly Dassin’s The Tell-Tale Heart and Barnett’s The Fall of the House of Usher, become signs of the unambiguous cinematic obsession with Poe that was to come.

noTes

1. This association between Corman and Poe was even the case with Corman’s

“Poe Cycle” film, The Haunted Palace (1963), which borrowed its title from a poem that Poe added to “The Fall of the House of Usher,” but was actually an adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s 1927 novella, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (published posthumously in abridged form in 1941, and later unabridged by Arkham House in 1943).

2. The first two Sherlock Holmes films ( The Hound of the Baskervilles [Sydney Lanfield, 1939] and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [Alfred L. Werker, 1939]) were produced by 20th Century Fox. The rights were then sold to Universal.

3. See Cory Legassic’s chapter in this collection for an analysis of the cultural importance of Rondo Hatton and his Creeper films.

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4. Christine A. Jackson’s The Tell-Tale Art: Poe in Modern Popular Culture (2011) details Poe’s underlying influence on popular culture, including how Poe’s detective formulas are endlessly adapted for television police procedurals. See also Perry and Carl H. Sederholm’s Adapting Poe (2012) for the ways Poe is adapted across a spectrum of pop culture media.

5. The film is about a family waiting to inherit their dying matriarch’s estate.

Before dying, however, she reads her will to them all, many of them disappointed.

When she does soon die, the mostly greedy members of the family are prevented from dispersing due to a violent storm. Some mysterious deaths heighten tensions and Gil, an old family friend—and former beau of the lovely inheritor of the house, there to purchase the estate and evaluate its furnishings—tries to figure out what’s going on.

His sidekick, Mr. Penny, blithely evaluates the antiques.

6. A term referring to an object or other misleading focus of a mystery narrative that initiate the events, or around which the events turn (the microfilm in North by Northwest [Alfred Hitchcock, 1959], for example). In his 1967 interview with Truffaut, Hitchcock famously described it as “nothing at all,” for the McGuffin is ultimately meaningless.

7. See Gary Rhodes’s essay in this collection for more on the Studio rereleases of their horror films in the late 1940s.

8. This episode is in the public domain and can be viewed on The Internet Archive at the following address: https://archive.org/details/Suspense-TheCaskOfAmontillado.

ReFeRenCes

Brunas, Michael, John Brunas, and Tom Weaver. 1990. Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films, 1931–1946. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland.

Carroll, Noël. 1999. “Horror and Humor.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57 (2): 145–160.

Corliss, Richard. 2008. “Master of the Heist.” Time.com. 6 April. time.com/time/arts/
article/0,8599,1728260,00.html.

Crowther, Bosley. 1942. “Movie Review: Mystery of Marie Roget (1942): ‘The Screen: Why—Oh, Why?’” The New York Times. (New York) May 5.

Jackson, Christine A. 2011. The Tell-Tale Art: Poe in Modern Popular Culture.

Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland.

Langford, Barry. 2005. Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Leitch, Thomas. 2007. Film Adaptation and its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Meehan, Paul. 2011. Horror Noir: Where Cinema’s Dark Sisters Meet. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Orr, John. 2009. “Hitch as Matrix Figure: Hitchcock and Twentieth-Century Cinema.” A Hitchcock Reader. Eds. Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland A. Pogue.

Danvers, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. 47–67.

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Perry, Dennis R., and Carl H. Sederholm. 2012. Adapting Poe: Re-Imaginings in Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.

Poe, Edgar Allan. 2004. “Letter to Thomas W. White.” The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. G. R. Thompson. New York and London: W. W. Norton

& Company.

Smith, Don G. 1999. The Poe Cinema: A Critical Filmography. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Thompson, Gary Richard. 1973. Poe’s Fiction. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973.

Truffaut, François, and Alfred Hitchcock. 1985. Hitchcock. New York: Simon and Schuster.

FiLMogRApHy

The Black Cat. Directed by Albert S. Rogell. Universal, 1941. Universal City, CA: Universal Horror Classics, 1998. VHS.

The Fall of the House of Usher. Directed by Ivan Barnett. UK: G.L.B./Vigilent, 1949, 1952.

The Mystery of Marie Roget. Directed by Philip Rosen. Universal, 1942. Baker City, OR: Nostalgia Family Video, 1996. VHS.

The Tell-Tale Heart. Directed by Jules Dassin. 1941, MGM. [Bonus Feature on The Complete Thin Man Collection] Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2005. DVD.

Chapter 9

“The Murderer’s Mind”

Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart,
and the monstrous Psychologies
of 1940s Horror Film

Mark Jancovich

Elsewhere it has been argued that figures such as Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr., and Lionel Atwill, although being predominantly known as horror stars, demonstrate the close relationship between the horror film and
the thriller in the 1930s and 1940s (Jancovich and Brown, 2012; and Jancov-
ich, forthcoming). These actors were known for playing specific “types” that
may have led to an association with horror but did not restrict them to horror.

Instead they were in continual demand for roles as horror monsters and/or villains as well as gangsters and spies, particularly Nazi spies. It is therefore hardly surprising that the inverse was also true and that stars that were associated with gangster roles in particular, and the crime thriller more generally, were also frequently cast in horror roles. For example, while Edward G.

Robinson’s biographer acknowledges that The Red House (1947) was a hor-
ror film (Gansberg, 1983), The Sea Wolf (1941), Flesh and Fantasy (1943),

Double Indemnity (1944), Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945), The Stranger (1946), and The Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948)

were also explicitly associated with horror by reviewers at the time, and he was even offered roles in films such as The Beast with Five Fingers (1946) that are still seen as horror today. Humphrey Bogart also made a series of appearances in horror films during the late 1930s and 1940s, and even played
a vampire in The Return of Doctor X (1939), a role that was not seen as in
any sense incongruous by critics at the time.

The horror monster and/or villain, the gangster and the spy were therefore seen as roles that shared certain characteristics, and this was due to their association with psychological disturbance. As Siegfried Kracauer claimed in 1946, there was a general category of films that he described as

“terror films” or “horror-thrillers,” a category that not only included films that would now be seen as horror films, but also a range of films that would 161

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now be described as crime thrillers or examples of the Gothic (or paranoid) woman’s film—films that he claimed featured “the theme of psychological destruction” so that their villains “no longer shoot, strangle or poison the females that they want to do away with, but systematically try to drive them
insane” (Kracauer, 1946: 133). While many 1940s gangsters, horror villains
and spies were driven by a desire to dominate the world, these very drives were frequently presented as psychological compulsions over which these figures had no control. Conversely, not only are these figures suffering from psychological issues but they also psychologically tormented their victims who were often driven to the edge of mental breakdown. It is in this way that, according to Kracauer, these films are preoccupied with the “theme of psychological destruction” (1946: 133). Furthermore, these films revolve around a series of anxieties about subjectivity prompting many critics of the period, including Kracauer, to complain about the ways in which they suggest “that normal and abnormal states of mind merge into each other imperceptibly and
are hard to keep separate” (Kracauer, 1946: 133). In these films, both victim
and victimizer suffer from similar problems: they are prey to forces that they cannot control and can no longer trust their own desires or perceptions. They are therefore either propelled by forces that they are powerless to resist or else paralyzed by self-doubt. Both villain and victim raise questions about subjectivity and about whether one is the author of one’s own actions.

Not only could this dynamic be seen both in the insatiable desire for power of many gangsters and in the terrorized paralysis of many of their victims, but it can also be seen in many of the horror monsters of the period, a period in which Universal’s two most successful monsters were not Frankenstein and Dracula, but rather the Wolf Man and the Mummy. The mummy,
for example, was a lumbering killing machine who was controlled by various high priests, but who also usually, at the conclusion of his films, turned on the priests who dominated and controlled him. This dynamic can also be seen in the mad scientists of the period and in their hapless victims. It is no surprise, then, that many commentators since the 1940s have complained that the Frankenstein monster lost his complexity during this period. In other words, the Frankenstein monster found itself in a similar situation, so that it was no longer a lonely and alienated figure but became a robotic killing machine who was controlled and dominated by the megalomaniacal hunchback, Igor.

Alternatively, Lon Chaney Jr.’s Wolf Man is a likeable young man who
is tragically bitten by a wolf and is overwhelmed by urges that he cannot control, a situation in which he is not only psychologically tormented by these urges but becomes a dual personality. The dual personality was also a common figure of another type of horror throughout the period. In these films, the monsters were not the product of science or the supernatural but were explicitly psychological figures. In other words, numerous films in the

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period featured serial killers, who were not only driven by compulsions over which they had no control but were often, like the Wolf Man, explicitly identified as dual personalities. These dynamics can also be seen in the Gothic (or paranoid) woman’s film of the period, many of which feature dominating and sadistic husbands who, as Kracauer highlights, are not content to simply murder their wives but are determined to psychologically dominate, torture and destroy them.

Consequently, the monster and the criminal were not seen as clear or distinct categories; and it is important to remember that, even in a film such as Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931), the monster’s problems are largely due to the use of an “abnormal” brain, and that Karloff was given the role at least in part due to his previous appearances as menacing criminals in films such as Graft (1931) and The Criminal Code (1931). Indeed, as I have argued at length elsewhere, film reviews throughout the 1940s did not distinguish between the categories of horror, the thriller or the Gothic (or paranoid)

woman’s film, as is common today (Jancovich, 2009 and 2010). On the con-
trary, as the case of Kracauer also illustrates, the key films associated with these categories were often explicitly identified by critics as horror films, or described in ways that strongly associate them with horror.

This chapter concentrates on the three main stars of the gangster film during the period—Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, and James Cag-
ney—and their relationship to horror. Rather than making my primarily focus on how their films work with their star images, I explore the ways in which these stars’ personas were understood within the period through an analysis of the terms and discourses present within their critical reception in the 1940s.

In the process, I also demonstrate the ways in which critics understood their film roles in relation to horror, and as working in relation to the psychological dynamics discussed above. In other words, I demonstrate the ways in which their films were not only generically understood, but also that reviewers had a clear image of each star, something that existed beyond the individual film and yet against which their individual film roles could be judged. Ultimately, this is not just a sense of how the image of each star was is related to their

“type” but also involved a more precise judgment about the differences between their images and whether or not a role was suited to these meanings.

In short, I not only demonstrate that Robinson and Bogart were associated with horror films in the period but that it was the psychological issues with which their personas were associated that were seen as making them suited to these horror roles, while I also conclude with some observations about why the same was not true of Cagney.

Robinson was largely associated with roles that operated as mirror images of one another—the dominator and the dominated—and he played both

“Napoleonic” figures that neurotically desire control over the world, and

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meek everymen whose mental stability finds itself under threat. In contrast, Bogart’s roles were not seen as mirror images but rather as different versions of the same primary type. If his heroes were cool, tough, and detached, his villains were cold, vicious and selfish. While these stars are the focus of the essay, the conclusion turns to the figure of James Cagney, who was seen quite differently from both Robinson and Bogart and was therefore the only one of these three stars of the gangster film who was not also given horror roles at the time. I argue that one reason for this difference was that, throughout the 1930s and most of the 1940s, Cagney was not associated with mental disturbance and was quickly disassociated from the figure of the gangster by Warner Bros. after the early 1930s, who developed quite different vehicles for him during the rest of the decade. Even his violence was often seen quite differently. Rather than being seen as the product of a sadistic desire to dominate, it was often discussed (even as early as The Public Enemy [1931]) as an almost innocent “rowdiness” or “pugnatiousness,”

so that his aggressive self-assertion seems to have elicited sympathy and indulgence rather than fear. It is therefore only in 1949, when he is cast in White Heat, that he came to be associated with mental disturbance, but this was eighteen years after he achieved stardom in Public Enemy. Furthermore, the role represented a comeback for Cagney, and it is likely that he was therefore obliged to conform to conceptions of the gangster rather than represent his own particular version of it. In other words, the ways in which Cagney’s persona was understood at the time were seen as being incompatible with the kinds of monsters figured in 1940s horror, while the disturbed psychologies with which Robinson and Bogart were associated made these stars shoo-ins for the 1940s horror cycle.

“THe pLAyTHing oF A FoRCe THAT is gReATeR THAn

HiMseLF”: DooM, DuALiTy AnD MenTAL bReAkDown
in THe FiLMs oF eDwARD g. Robinson

As we have seen, Edward G. Robinson may seem an unlikely figure to
discuss in relation to the horror film but many of the films that he made, particularly during the 1940s, were explicitly identified as horror by critics during the period. Furthermore, even in cases where films were not explicitly referred to as horror films, as I have demonstrated elsewhere, gangster films, spy thrillers and horror films were not distinct categories but were strongly
associated with one another during the period (Jancovich, 2009 and 2010),
and one of the primary ways in which they were associated was through their psychological themes. While gangsters were often seen as a product of social problems during the 1930s and 1940s, these social problems were often seen

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as creating pathological psychological drives, drives that (as we have seen) were similar to those of many horror villains and/or monsters.

Many of Robinson’s films were therefore concerned with the “criminal
mind,” often making this concern explicit as in the case of The Amazing

Dr Clitterhouse (1938), in which Robinson plays “an academic man of
medicine” whose investigations into the psychology of criminals result in
him turning “criminal primarily to obtain material for a treatise” (Nugent,

1938: 14). However, if Robinson’s character poses as a criminal to study
criminal psychology, the film also plays on a duality in Robinson’s persona, and Clitterhouse is described as “a schizophrenic hero.” In this way, the film plays on a duality within Robinson’s image and, while Robinson often played dominating gangsters, he also specialized in meek and gentle nobodies whose attempts to maintain a safe, simple and ordered life are ultimately thwarted so that they lose control of themselves and their environments, and suffer psychological breakdown in the process. On the one hand, Robinson played characters that strive for dominance and control over others and, on the other, he played characters who felt dominated and strived to hold onto some semblance of security and control over themselves. His characters either desire ultimate power or are seen as tragic figures that cannot control their own destiny ( Flesh and Fantasy, Scarlet Street, Night Has A Thousand Eyes).

In some films these roles are brought together so that in The Whole Town’s

Talking (1935), for example, Robinson plays two roles, the film being the story of “a wistful little man” who is not only “unbelievably downtrodden”

but has “the misfortune to resemble an escaped killer” (Sennwald, 1935: 16).

Even when not playing two roles as separate characters, the duality is often still in operation and, in The Amazing Dr Clitterhouse, there is a duality between Clitterhouse’s roles as academic and criminal in which the film questions whether Clitterhouse’s criminal activities are really motivated by science or whether his science is actually an excuse for his indulgence in crime: “Little Caesar keeps coming through the dignified veneer. It is easier to think of him as a criminal masquerading as physician than a medico front-
ing as a gang lord’” (Nugent, 1938: 14). Consequently, while David Thomson
observed that Robinson’s characters hovered between “sadism and cow-
ardice” (Thomson, 2002: 748), a review of Dark Hazard (1934) described

“Robinson’s familiar style of alternating between shy and snarling moods”

(A.D.S., 1934: 23).

The aggressive urge for dominance was clearly in evidence in his breakthrough role in Little Caesar (1931), where Robinson’s Rico was seen as
driven to power and dominance by psychological forces beyond his control, forces that were ultimately self destructive: he is “a figure out of Greek tragedy, a cold, ignorant, merciless killer, driven on and on by an insatiable lust for power, the plaything of a force that is greater than himself” (Anon.,

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1931: 21). However, this urge to dominate was also linked to psychological feelings of inferiority that were not only about class and ethnic exclusion but also linked to Robinson’s physicality as an actor—or rather his stature as a little man—that his more sympathetic roles also played upon. He was therefore
referred to as “the constantly Napoleonic Mr. Robinson” (Nugent, 1937: 21),
in a review of Kid Galahad (1937), Napoleon being a figure whose desires for imperial conquest are often seen as an overcompensation for his shortness.

This assertion of self over others also led to frequent claims that his characters were egotists: Yates Martin in Silver Dollar (1932) is supposed to suffer from “egoism” and from a “confidence in the power of wealth” (Hall,

1932: 20); Johnny Sarto in Brother Orchid (1940) is played “with all the egotistical but vaguely cautious push that one would expect from a gangster
who found himself in such a spot” (Crowther, 1940: 18); Wolf Larson in

The Sea Wolf, Robinson’s favorite film, is not only a “complex maniac,” but
is subject to “a careful dissection of [his] ego” (Crowther, 1941: 20); and

Johnny Rocco in Key Largo (1948) displays “the vulgarity, corruption and
egoism of a criminal man” (Crowther, 1948: 6). This “egoism” is seen as
responsible for Rocco’s “cruelty and arrogance” and associates Robinson’s gangsters with his other equally “arrogant, ruthless and dynamic” characters, figures such as Joe Keller in the film version of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons

(Crowther, 1948: 17), the film that Robinson made just before Key Largo.

These features are also associated with famous political figures. As we have seen, he is often described as a “Napoleon of Crime,” but he was also claimed
to be an “indomitable amoral spirit who belongs with the Borgias” (B.R.C.,

1939: 26).

However, as we have seen, this urge to domination was also linked to psy-
chological pathology. If Johnny Ricco was a figure of “cruelty” (Crowther,

1948: 6), it is not simply a cold and uncaring cruelty. He is driven by a hatred
of others, and by a perverse pleasure in inflicting pain. Similarly, Joe Krozac, in The Last Gangster (1937), is also a product of “warped desire” (Nugent, 1937: 33), a figure of “menace and brooding hate,” whose viciousness is not simply a means to an end but a product of psychological perversity.

This psychological dimension becomes more explicit in the case of Wolf Larsen, “a bundle of psychoses” whose “monstrous sadism is more studiously explored” than in previous film versions of the Jack London story (Crowther,

1941: 20). Rather than simply a “double-dyed brute,” Robinson’s Larsen is “a
complex maniac” whose “perversity” is subjected to psychological scrutiny by the film and its protagonists.

Nor were Robinson’s portrayals of the meek and dominated any less
psychological in character and, as we have seen with The Amazing Dr Clitterhouse, these roles frequently played upon the dialectic of domination and submission. If Clitterhouse can be seen both as a scientist posing as a

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criminal for the purposes of medical research and as a criminal using science as a veneer of respectability in order to justify his indulgence in criminality, Robinson’s nuanced performances were often seen as making it clear that one of the gangster’s primary motivations was a fear of weakness. Similarly, his meek characters often feared their own desires and held on to respectability as a defense mechanism, a defense mechanism that was often dismantled by the narrative.

In some cases these meek figures were dominated by women as in the
case of Robinson’s “henpecked” Henry Winkle in Mr. Winkle Goes to War

(Crowther, 1944: 16) or Christopher Cross in Scarlet Street. Even Professor Wanderley in Woman in the Window is a domesticated male hiding in the security of his humdrum life but secretly yearning to indulge in forbidden pleasures. However, as in Woman in the Window, while his characters may be

“henpecked” or domesticated, the oppressive forces are rarely if ever solely the women in their lives but rather more pervasive so that they experience a more general sense of paranoia, and there is often a more tragic sense of doom, of forces that can’t be resisted. In Flesh and Fantasy, Robinson plays

“an eminent American lawyer” who has his palm read and is predicted to

“commit murder’” (T.M.P., 1943: 29). This respectable gentleman wrestles
with the prediction that initially seems out of character but, as he agonizes over the prediction, he not only finds himself arguing with a double but undergoing a gradual mental breakdown that eventually results in the fulfillment of the prediction. He is therefore seen as a victim of “destiny,” and we find that the story is again one of a vicious double that is hidden behind a veneer of social respectability. Night Has a Thousand Eyes also explicitly concerns destiny or fate, and features Robinson as a man who can foresee the
future and becomes “fatefully chained to a crystal ball” (Crowther, 1948: 38).

He is “a figure of tragic proportions” who predicts doom for himself and others (1948: 38).

Furthermore, this tragedy is usually given psychological dimensions and Robinson’s protagonists often suffer mental breakdown under the strain of their situations. This not only occurs with the “hounded” professor in Woman in the Window (T.M.P., 1945: 16), but also Christopher Cross, Robinson’s

“morose little man” in Scarlet Street (Crowther, 1946: 29). Cross’s meet-
ing with Joan Bennett’s Kitty was not only seen as “fateful,” but the plot contrives to gradually destroy Cross’s life which goes “to rack and ruin”

(1946: 29). Finally, suffering from complete mental breakdown, Cross is

“tortured by ceaseless conscience and by mocking voices ringing in his ears,”

torments which are described as “punishments more terrible than death” and eventually end in suicide (1946: 29). The Red House also tells the tragic story of mental breakdown, and is not only described as “an adult horror number”

but one which concerns “a couple of fifteen-year-old murders and their dire

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hold on Pete Morgan,” Robinson’s character (A.W., 1947: 27). Not only is Morgan another meek figure whose veneer cracks and from which erupt dark psychological forces, but he is one who is unable to escape a fate determined for him in the past and finds his “mind is cracking under the thrall of the horrible secret of the red house.”

Even when he was not the victim of psychological forces, Robinson’s
films often featured similar tales of psychological destruction. In Double Indemnity, for example, he plays an insurance investigator whose “studiously searching eye” makes it difficult for two murderers to “maintain their
composure” (Crowther, 1944: 21). The story is therefore described as being
one that “pictures” the “psychological crack up” of these murderers with

“sadistic” detail. Similarly, in The Stranger, he is an FBI agent who is trying to track down Orson Welles’s Nazi “bogeyman,” a “monstrous mass murder
machine” (Crowther, 1946: 18). This “erstwhile monster” not only succeeds
in “proving beyond any question that [Welles] loves to scare people to death”

but also undergoes a mental breakdown that leads to his demise: “everything is going nicely until a G-Man blows into town. . . . Then Mr. Welles . . .

begins to feel hot breath on his neck and his nostrils begin to flange out and his eyes to pop and roll. The first thing you know he is plotting to murder his knowledgeable wife” (1946: 18). In those roles where Robinson did not undergo a mental breakdown, he was usually seen as instigating one in others.

“An inTeResTing new FACe AMong THe posTHuMous

FRATeRniTy”: CyniCisM, viCiousness, AnD vioLenCe

AgAinsT woMen in THe FiLMs oF HuMpHRey bogART

If Robinson displayed an overt duality in his roles, Bogart’s characters were single-minded. They were driven by a tough inner-core and, although they were sometimes tragic, their tragedy was different to that of Robinson’s characters. Robinson’s characters suffer a paranoiac sense of being fated or doomed, while Bogart’s tragic figures were driven largely by a sense of self to which he had to remain true, even if it meant his own destruction.

For example, in High Sierra (1941), “Mad Dog” Earle is a criminal with a

“good heart” who has “got some ideas about freedom and the joy of living”

but is warned, “Remember what Johnny Dillinger said about guys like you
and him: he said you’re just rushing towards death” (Crowther, 1941: 11).

This warning is eventually fulfilled when Earle is “finally brought to bay on that peak in the high sierras,” but his tragic end is less the tragedy of paranoiac torment than the result of his dedication to his inner truth. He doesn’t die broken and defeated but “gallantly” accepting his lot and true to himself up to the very end.

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Furthermore, if Robinson was either dominating or meek, Bogart’s toughness yearned for independence, not control, and even his villains were parasites rather than despots. His positive and negative roles were not opposites like Robinson’s doubles but different versions of the same tendencies. His positive characters were cool, tough, and detached while his negative roles were cold, callous, and selfish; and while they displayed a vicious malevolence, this was not an attempt to attempt to exact vengeance against the world, or to purge some fear of weakness, but rather a cruelty born of selfish-ness and lack of caring.

Bogart’s relationship to horror is also far closer than is commonly remembered and many of his films were closely identified with horror throughout the 1940s. If he played a vampire in The Return of Doctor X, he would also play psychologically disturbed males in three examples of the paranoid (or Gothic) woman’s film, a series of films that were explicitly identified as horror during
the period. For example, Conflict (1945) was written by Robert Siodmak at the height of his career, when he was known as a horror expert and promoted
as the “Master of Goosepimples” (Greco, 1999). It was also described as a

“calculated shocker” (Crowther, 1945: 10). The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947)

featured Bogart as a “homicidal artist with particular designs on his wives,”

a “psychopathic” character who is described as behaving “in the preposter-ous fashion of a dead pan American thug whose mother was horribly frightened by a robot built by Dr. Frankenstein” (Crowther, 1947: 20). In fact, his performance was condemned for going “through the whole repertory of a low-budget bogey-man.” If these two films are sometimes seen as aberrations or
embarrassments (Biesen, 2005; Kanfer, 2011), it should be remembered that

Bogart returned to the role of the murderous lover in 1950 in one of his most
celebrated roles, Dixon Steele, in the film, In a Lonely Place (1950), an overt
appropriation of the Gothic (or paranoid) woman’s film, even if it was given a tough, unglamorous, and masculine treatment by director, Nicholas Ray.

In fact, during the mid 1940s, Warner Bros. even marketed Bogart through his violent treatment against women. As a Warner Bros. press release claimed in 1944: “What the women want, what really makes them weak and willing, is a guy with guts who treats ’em mean and tough. They’re just mad about being mauled. As a matter of common fact . . . the number of fainting femmes in the audience is direct ratio to how unkempt Humphrey Bogart dresses
and how savagely he slaps around his leading ladies” (Quoted in Biesen,

2005: 196). Even his more sympathetic roles played on this aspect of his
persona. Casablanca (1942), for example, presents him as seemingly cruel
and uncaring in his treatment of women, including Bergman’s Ilsa, even if it is eventually revealed that this is merely a protective exterior.

Like Robinson, then, Bogart’s roles often had a psychological dimen-
sion that extra-textually linked his gangsters with his horror roles, but while

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Robinson’s horror films largely revolved around mental breakdown, Bogart’s were usually associated with psychopathic malevolence. This is even the case in Conflict, in which he is a wife murderer “who can’t live with his own conscience” when a psychologist “stars to nibble and hack away at the
murderer’s mind” (Crowther, 1945: 10). Bogart’s character was therefore
described as a “tortured man” who gives himself away once he has become sufficiently “nerve-shattered,” but even here, although the narrative works to trick Bogart’s murderer into revealing his guilt, this murderer is hardly a sympathetic victim of mental breakdown but rather a “cold and callous”

figure (1945: 10). This conflict is not internal: he does not feel remorse for his actions but only fear that his guilt will be revealed, and the psychologist works by “planting evidence and staging illusions to make him fear that his wife is still alive” (1945: 10). In other words, the psychological game is one of trickery rather than mental destabilization. Ultimately, Bogart’s character cares only for himself.

Similarly, in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Bogart’s character
goes “to pot mentally before our eyes, dissolving from a fairly decent hobo under the corroding chemistry of gold” (Crowther, 1948: 11). But even here the suggestion is that this is not a process of mental breakdown but rather the revelation of an inner essence. He becomes “a hideous wreck of humanity possessed with only one passion—to save his ‘stuff’” (1948: 11). He is stripped down to his bare, selfish essentials by a narrative that is described as “a searching drama of the collision of civilizations vicious greeds with the instinct of self-preservation in an environment where all the barriers are down” (1948: 11).

Bogart’s big break had been as Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest (1936), where he played “a psychopathic gangster more like Dillinger than
the outlaw himself” (Nugent, 1936: 14), and this role set the template for

Bogart’s roles throughout the late 1930s. In Dead End (1937), he was “Baby

Face” Martin, a “marauding killer” who is “snarling at life” (J.T.M., 1937:

25), and in Bullets or Ballots (1936), he “turns in another grim portrayal of a
killer” (Nugent, 1936: 27). By 1939, his role in Invisible Stripes (1939) was even described as befitting “his customary roles as the Crook They Couldn’t Kill With Kindness,” so much so that in the same year it was claimed that he was held “not so much by five year contracts as five year sentences” by the
studio (B.R.C., 1939: 19). This predictability, along with his frequent status
as a supporting player rather than the lead, also meant that he received little commentary, even in key roles such as Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) and The Roaring Twenties (1939), where his psychopathic presence was hardly even deemed worthy of mention. However, during this period, Bogart’s
psychopathic killers were especially deranged, largely because his role was often to emphasize the worst elements of the criminal and so make the male

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leads look more sympathetic, despite their criminal activities. Angels With Dirty Faces, for example, stars Cagney as a hoodlum who hovers between the world of his old friend, the Catholic priest Father Connolly, and the criminal underworld of his partner, Humphrey Bogart’s James Frazier. In other worlds, Bogart’s gangsters were particularly vicious in order to make the criminality of Cagney more redeemable.

Consequently, when he played a vampire in The Return of Doctor X, the following year, there was little sense of surprise or incongruity. On the contrary, he was described as “an interesting new face among the posthumous fra-
ternity” (B.R.C., 1939: 38). In other words, he was not seen as out of place but
only as “interesting in the role” (1939: 38). If he was now playing one of the living dead, reviewers also emphasized the connection between the monster and the criminal through their claim that “the real problem” with the “resus-citation of the dead” is how to “get the boys to do something dramatically constructive after you have got them out of the trenches” rather the repeating the predictable: “they usually tend to lead a life of crime” (1939: 38).

Even by the time of his breakthrough role in High Sierra, after which he acquired leading man status and became a sympathetic rather than a psychotic criminal, he was mistakenly read as psychotic and nicknamed “Mad Dog,”

the irony only working to highlight his “good heart” (Crowther, 1941: 11).

If High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon (1941), and Casablanca turned Bogart into a star that would distance himself from the psychotic villains of the later 1930s, he never fully separated himself from them. On the contrary, their shadow was continually present throughout his positive roles, and he continued to play psychopaths on a regular basis throughout the period.

The vicious malevolence of his psychotics was tempered to a “hardboiled vitality” in High Sierra (Crowther, 1941: 11) and, in The Maltese Falcon, he is a profoundly ambiguous figure. Rather than a criminal, he is a private detective, but he is far from being a representative of law and justice and
has “a code of morals that is coolly cynical” (Crowther, 1941: 18). In other
words, criminality became cynicism and cold viciousness became coolness.

Indeed, coolness is a quality attributed to many of his key roles, particularly The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, To Have and Have Not (1944), and The Big Sleep (1946). Coolness was also associated with “ruggedness” and “toughness” in many roles, a quality that was central to many of his action roles during the war years in films such as Action in the North Atlantic (1943), Sahara (1943), and Passage to Marseilles (1944).

These qualities of coolness and cynicism maintain continuity with his psychopaths through their detachment, even while they give it a sympathetic twist, but in other films, such as Conflict and The Two Mrs. Carrolls, he maintained the coldness, callousness, and brutality that were the key traits of his early psychopathic killers. Even in a film like The Big Shot (1942), which

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tries to make Bogart’s gangster sympathetic through his search for “peace
and serenity” (Crowther, 1942: 8), his character is described as “cold” and

“callous” (1942: 8), a description that demonstrates that the reviewer found this attempt to make him sympathetic to be unsuccessful. It was even claimed that “it is only the performance of Mr. Bogart, a serene and solid citizen at all times, which keeps the hero of the picture from looking like the rat he mainly is” (1942: 8).

By the late 1940s, then, Bogart was able to play both psychotic criminals and sympathetic heroes, although in those films where he played the hero, another actor usually performed the function that he had fulfilled in the 1930s—that is, they played the psychopath who emphasized his heroism.

In Dead Reckoning (1947), for example, he “takes the drubbing of his cinematic life from a tough, psychopathic character who delights in “messing
up” his victims to the strains of sweet music” (T.M.P., 1947: 31), while in

Key Largo (1948), Edward G. Robinson plays Johnny Rocco, a criminal of

“egoism,” “cruelty and arrogance” (Crowther, 1948: 6).

The strength of In a Lonely Place was therefore seen as being the way in which it combined both facets of Bogart’s personality, or rather demonstrated the contradictions of that personality. Like the Gothic (or paranoid) woman’s film, it concerns a woman who cannot tell whether or not her lover is a murderer, and Bogart recreates a version of the figures that he had played in Conflict and The Two Mrs. Carrolls. He is a “violent, quick tempered Hollywood movie writer suspected of murder” and this character “is almost as flinty as
the actor himself” (Crowther, 1950: 37). The use of the word “flinty” here
is highly suggestive: it conveys both a sense of the toughness and hardness of the Bogart persona, and the capacity to create sparks and fire, but it also suggests a coldness that makes the hardness more brutal. Furthermore, the character remains “as much an enigma, an explosive, contradictory force at loose ends when the film ends as when it starts,” and hence it does “not compromise to fabricate a happy ending” in which Bogart’s character is resolved (1950: 37). Consequently, Bogart’s Steele is “callous, insulting and vicious in his dark, ugly moods” and “tender and considerate under the influence of love” (1950: 37). Nor is his darker side any less psychopathic than his earlier roles, and there is “a maniacal fury to his rages,” (1950: 37) rages that are compulsive and beyond his control.

ConCLusion: THe eneRgy, viTALiTy,

AnD sTAbiLiTy oF JAMes CAgney

Both Robinson and Bogart, then, specialized in psychological portraits and, while they were clearly associated with gangster films—just as Karloff and

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Lugosi were clearly associated with horror films—the psychological links between the figures of the gangster and the horror villain and/or monster meant that they were often cast in horror films once the 1940s horror boom gained momentum. In contrast, James Cagney seems to have had no association with horror, except for his portrayal of Lon Chaney Sr. in the 1957
biopic, The Man with a Thousand Faces. Furthermore, his gangster roles were free from the psychological associations that were so central to both Robinson and Bogart, the exception to this rule being White Heat but this was a late gangster role: it was released in 1949, eighteen years after The Public Enemy (1931). It was also Cagney’s return to both the figure of the gangster (and to Warner Bros.) after a difficult period, and it is therefore likely that Cagney had to conform to the then-current conception of the gangster rather than the version he created with his 1930s performances.

Rather than horror, Cagney’s non-gangster films were often musicals or military stories, such as Here Comes the Navy (1934) and Devil Dogs of the Air (1935). Instead of the darkness of both Robinson’s and Bogart’s films, Cagney’s persona was bright. Thomson has even discussed it as exhibiting a “gaiety and a delight” (Thomson, 2002: 125). Nor is Thomson providing an unusual assessment here, and reviewers in the 1930s and 1940s clearly saw Cagney in a similar way. There is no suggestion of psychopathology in the New York Times review of The Public Enemy. The motivations of the murders may be

“incoherent” but these are “lost in the slaughter” not hidden in the unconscious

(A.D.S., 1931: 30). Instead, Cagney’s Tom Powers is depicted as “strutting
with a vast self-satisfaction” and, however negative his character may be, Powers is not seen as demented but rather as energetic and overassertive so that

“audiences . . . laughed frequently and with gusto as the swaggering Matt and Tom went through their paces, and this rather took the edge off the brutal picture the producers appeared to be trying to serve up” (1931: 30). Cagney was also claimed to be a “swaggering recruit” in The Fighting 69th (Nugent, 1940: 9)

and his “usual swaggering self” in Captain of the Clouds (Crowther, 1942: 24).

The term “swagger” here suggests an irrepressible self-assertion, and Cagney’s key feature was frequently seen as his vitality: in The Mayor of Hell, he was said to “fill the part . . . with the gusto and swagger one expects of him” (A.D.S., 1933: 16); and his performance in The Saint Louis Kid is claimed to follow “the excellent tradition of its kind by its vigor of method and
directness of approach” (Sennwald, 1934: 25). The Lady Killer was also sup-
posed to feature his “vigor” and “energy” (Hall, 1934: 28), and he was claimed
to have “more energy than half of Hollywood” in Torrid Zone (T.S., 1940: 11).

Both A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) and The Great Guy (1936) stressed his dynamism, even if he was claimed to be “too dynamic” for his role in the
former (Sennwald, 1935: 31). Articles on him also saw him as a “virile” per-
former, a term also used to describe him in Picture Snatcher (M.H., 1933: 20).

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As a result, he did not play the dominating or callous figures with which Robinson and Bogart were associated, but was frequently seen as having a boyish playfulness, and an almost fanciful quality. He was therefore claimed to be

“rowdy” in Angels with Dirty Faces (Nugent, 1938: 18), while Here Comes the Navy is supposed to feature his “rough-and-tumble antics” (F.S.N., 1934:

14). If he is associated with violence, it is rarely mean-spirited but rather that of the loveable boyish scrapper. He is “pugnacious” in both Blonde Crazy

(Hall, 1931: 28) and The Strawberry Blonde (Crowther, 1941: 11), and he is
even described as “that terrier of the screen” in Taxi (Hall, 1932: 27).

Not surprisingly, then, Cagney’s performances in musicals and comedies were hardly seen as out of character. On the contrary, in 1933, reviewers not only recognized that his roots lay in musical theater—“Mr. Cagney . . . has not forgotten all that he learned in the chorus of ‘The Great Street Follies’”—
but also saw his musical performances as simply revealing “one more side
of his astonishing versatility” (A.D.S., 1933: 21). By Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Cagney’s appearance in the musical was not simply accepted but was seen “a matter . . . of joyous anticipation all around,” the reason being that the very qualities of irrepressible energy that Cagney brought to his other roles was seen as perfectly suited to the musical. As Richard Dyer notes, the sense of transparency and energy are crucial to the “Utopian” appeal of the musical

(Dyer, 1985). As one critic put it, Cagney’s performance in Yankee Doodle Dandy “glows with energy” (Crowther, 1942: 9). Consequently, while

Cagney may be best remembered for his gangster roles today, his persona lacked the association with psychological pathology with which Robinson and Bogart were associated but featured qualities that he had developed as a musical performer prior to his casting in gangster roles, qualities that were seen as making him well suited to musicals but which were hardly seen as relevant to the horror films of the 1940s.

ReFeRenCes

A.D.S. 1931. “Two Thugs.” New York Times (New York), 24 April: 30.

———. 1933. “James Cagney, Dudley Digges and Frankie Darrow in a Grim Drama of a Boys’ Reform School.” New York Times (New York). 1 July: 16.

———. 1933. “A Scream Musical Comedy.” New York Times (New York). 6

October: 21.

———. 1934. “Dark Hazard.” The New York Times (New York), 23 February: 23.

A.W. 1947. “The Red House.” New York Times (New York). 17 March: 27.

B.R.C. 1939. “At the Strand.” New York Times (New York). 25 March: 19.

———. 1939. “At the Capitol.” New York Times (New York). 15 September: 26.

———. 1939. “At Loew’s Criterion.” New York Times (New York). 23 November: 38.

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Biesen, Sheri Chinen. 2005. Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Crowther, Bosley. 1940. “Brother Orchid.” New York Times (New York). 8 June: 18.

———. 1941. “High Sierra.” New York Times (New York). 25 January: 11.

———. 1941. “The Strawberry Blonde.” New York Times (New York). 22 February: 11.

———. 1941. “The Sea Wolf.” New York Times (New York). 22 May: 20.

———. 1941. “The Maltese Falcon.” New York Times (New York). 4 October: 18.

———. 1942. “‘Captain of the Clouds’, Heroic Film About Royal Canadian Air Force and Starring James Cagney, Arrives at the Strand.” New York Times (New York). 13 February: 24.

———. 1942. “‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’, with James Cagney as George M. Cohen, Opens at Hollywood.” New York Times (New York). 30 May: 9.

———. 1942. “‘The Big Shot’, with Humphrey Bogart, Another of Warner Bros.

Epilogues on Crime, Attraction at the Strand.” New York Times (New York). 18

July: 8.

———. 1944. “‘Mr. Winkle Goes to War’, a Modest Comedy, in which Edward G.

Robinson Plays a Draftee, at Loew’s Criterion’, New York Times (New York). 3

August: 16.

———. 1944. “‘Double Indemnity’, a Tough Melodrama, with Stanwyck and

MacMurray as Killers, Opens at the Paramount.” New York Times (New York). 7

September: 21.

———. 1945. “Conflict.” New York Times (New York). 16 June: 10.

———. 1946. “Scarlet Street.” New York Times (New York). 15 February: 29.

———. 1946. “The Stranger.” New York Times (New York). 11 July: 18.

———. 1948. “Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” New York Times (New York). 24

January: 11.

———. 1948. “All My Sons.” New York Times (New York). 29 May: 17.

———. 1948. “Key Largo.” New York Times (New York). 17 July: 6.

———. 1948. “Night Has a Thousand Eyes.” New York Times (New York).

14 October: 38.

———. 1950. “In A Lonely Place.” New York Times (New York). 18 May: 37.

Dyer, Richard. 1985. “Entertainment and Utopia.” Movies and Methods, Volume 2.

Ed. Bill Nichols. Berkeley: University of California Press: 220–32.

F.S.N. 1934. “Mr. Cagney Afloat.” New York Times (New York). 21 July: 14.

Gansberg, Alan L. 1983. Little Caesar: A Biography of Edward G. Robinson.

London: New English Library.

Greco, J. 1999. The File on Robert Siodmak in Hollywood: 1941–1951. Parkland: Dissertation.com.

Hall, Mordaunt. 1931. “White Collar Crooks.” New York Times (New York).

4 December: 28.

———. 1932. “Taxi Racketeers.” New York Times (New York). 8 January: 27.

———. 1932. “Edward G. Robinson in a Film Version of David Karsner’s Biography of Haw Tabor.” New York Times (New York). 23 December: 20.

———. 1934. “Cagney in New Film.” New York Times (New York). 1 January: 28.

J.T.M. 1937. “The Rivoli’s ‘Dead End’ Presents Anew a Prima Facie Case for Revision of the Social Scheme.” New York Times (New York). 25 August: 25.

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Jancovich, Mark. 2009. “‘Thrills and Chills’: Horror, the Woman’s Film, and the Origins of Film Noir.” New Review of Film and Television. 7 (2): 157–171.

———. 2010. “‘Two Ways of Looking’: The Critical Reception of 1940s Horror.”

Cinema Journal. 49 (3): 45–66.

———. Forthcoming. “‘The Theme of Psychological Destruction’: Horror Stars, the Crisis of Identity and 1940s Horror.”

Jancovich, Mark, and Shane Brown. 2013. “‘The Screen’s Number One and Number Two Bogeymen’: The Critical Reception of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in the 1930s and 1940s.” Cult Film Stardom. Eds. Kate Egan and Sarah Thomas.

New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 243–258.

Kanfer, Stefan. 2011. Tough Without a Gun: The Extraordinary Life of Humphrey Bogart. London: Faber and Faber.

Kracauer, Siegfried. 1946. “Hollywood’s Terror Films: Do They Reflect an American State of Mind?” Commentary 2 (2): 132–136.

M.H. 1933, “Cagney Joins the Tabloids.” New York Times (New York). 19 May: 20.

Nugent, Frank S. 1933. “The Capitol Tells the Melodramatic History of ‘The Last Gangster.’” 10 December: 33.

———. 1936. “Heralding the Warner Brothers Film Version of ‘The Petrified Forest’, at the Music Hall.” New York Times (New York). 7 February: 14.

———. 1936. “The Warners Offer Another Racy Crime Melodrama in ‘Bullets or Ballots,’ at the Strand.” New York Times (New York). 27 May: 27.

———. 1937. ‘“Kid Galahad,’ a Crisp Prize-Ring Film, Comes to the Strand and, With it, a New Star, Wayne Morris.” New York Times (New York). 27 May: 21.

———. 1938. “An Amusing Melodrama with Scientific Undertones Is ‘The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse’ at the Strand,” New York Times (New York). 21 July: 14.

———. 1938. “‘Angels With Dirty Faces’: Racy Guttersnipe Drama, With James Cagney, Comes to the Strand.” New York Times (New York). 26 November: 18.

———. 1940. “Old Cagney Formula Still Present at the Strand in the Warner Film of the Fighting 69th.” New York Times (New York). 27 January: 9.

Sennwald, Andre. 1934. “James Cagney in ‘St. Louis Kid,’ at the Strand.” New York Times (New York). 1 November: 25.

———. 1935. “A Whirl of Laughter at the Music Hall in ‘The Whole Town’s Talking.’” New York Times (New York). 1 March: 16.

———. 1935. “Warner Brothers Present the Max Reinhardt Film of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ at the Hollywood.” New York Times (New York). 10 October: 31.

T.M.P. 1943. “At Loew’s Criterion.” New York Times (New York). 18 November: 29.

———. 1945. “At the Palace.” New York Times (New York). 26 January: 16.

———. 1947. “Dead Reckoning.” New York Times (New York). 23 January: 31.

T.S. 1940. “Torrid Zone.” New York Times (New York). 18 May: 11.

FiLMogRApHy

The Amazing Dr Clitterhouse. Directed by Anatole Litvak. Warner Bros., 1938.

[ Gangsters Collection] Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2008. DVD.

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Casablanca. Directed by Michael Curtiz. Warner Bros., 1942. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 1999. DVD.

Conflict. Directed by Curtis Bernhardt. Warner Bros., 1945. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2010. DVD.

Double Indemnity. Directed by Billy Wilder. Paramount, 1944. Universal City, CA: Universal Home Video, 2006. DVD.

In a Lonely Place. Directed by Nicholas Ray. Columbia, 1950. Culver City, CA: Columbia/Tri-Star Home Video, 2003. DVD.

Little Caesar. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy. First National Pictures, 1931. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2005. DVD.

The Man with a Thousand Faces. Directed by Joseph Pevney. Universal-International, 1957. Universal City, CA: Universal Home Video, 2008. DVD.

Night Has a Thousand Eyes. Directed by John Farrow. Paramount, 1948. RoDon Enterprises, Inc., 2006. DVD.

The Red House. Directed by Delmer Daves. Sol Lesser / United Artists, 1948.

Narberth, PA: Alpha Video, 2003. DVD.

The Return of Doctor X. Directed by Vincent Sherman. Warner Bros., 1939. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2006. DVD.

The Stranger. Directed by Orson Welles. International Pictures, 1945. Los Angeles, CA: MGM Home Entertainment, 2007. DVD.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Directed by John Huston. Warner Bros., 1948.

Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2003. DVD.

The Two Mrs. Carrolls. Directed by Peter Godfrey. Warner Bros., 1947. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2010. DVD.

The Whole Town’s Talking. Directed by John Ford. Columbia, 1935. Culver City, CA: Columbia/Tri-Star Home Video, 1998. VHS.

Woman in the Window. Directed by Fritz Lang. International Pictures/RKO, 1945.

Beverly Hills, CA: Twentieth Century-Fox Home Entertainment, 2007. DVD.

Part III

HisToRy

Chapter 10
serial killers, Deals with the Devil,
and the Madness of Crowds

The Horror Film in nazi-Occupied France

David Hanley

“Nothing is more revealing of an epoch than the choice and style of its escapism.”

—André Bazin (1981: 71)

Between June 1940 and August 1944, France was under Nazi occupation.

Although this greatly affected the lives of almost every French man and woman, it was never directly portrayed in any of the 220 feature films made in France during those years. Instead, the French film industry produced what has been called a “golden age” of the fantastique (Petit, 2009), a series
of popular thrillers and fantasies that, on the surface, seemed deliberate eva-sions of the situation French audiences (and filmmakers) found themselves in.

Nevertheless, it is possible to read some of these “escapist” films for expressions of the conflicts and questions arising from the Occupation, keeping in mind that these expressions needed to be ambiguous enough to appeal across the spectrum of political opinion and, even more importantly, avoid Nazi
censorship. Films such as L’Assassin habite au 21 (Henri-Georges Clouzot,

1942), La Main du diable (Maurice Tourneur, 1942), Le Loup des Malveneur

(Guillaume Radot, 1943) and Le Corbeau (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1943)

are not usually discussed as horror films. However, they use the expressive use of lighting and supernatural or grotesque elements associated with earlier cycles of horror films. Examining these Occupation films will reveal what it is about the horror genre that made it useful for the era’s filmmakers, as well as provide a deeper understanding of both the films and the genre they belong to.

There is a long horror tradition in French literature and drama. Of particular importance for French cinema are the legacies of the fantastique 181

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and Grand-Guignol. The fantastique stretches back in French literature to La Fontaine’s fables and even earlier. It can include fantasy, fables, gothic and horror tales, science fiction and surrealism. It is “everything that is not
rational” (Lofficier, 2000: 9) and applies when, in a story world governed by
the same laws of nature as the real world, a character encounters something that is impossible. Tzvetan Todorov (1970) argues that in this situation, the impossibility will result in a tension between the hesitant acceptance of the irrational and the availability of a rational solution (a dream, a trick, an illusion, a hallucination or madness) that leaves the world’s natural laws intact, which he describes as the “uncanny”; or a initial hesitation toward the irrational leading to the acceptance of a supernatural solution outside the laws of nature, which Todorov calls the “marvelous.” Before the narrative is resolved, the reader (or viewer) exists in an area of uncertainty and, for Todorov, the fantastique “occupies the duration of this uncertainty” (1970: 25). That is, the fantastique exists only as long as the protagonist and reader-spectator remain in doubt as to the source of the impossible phenomenon encountered, and

“fantastique-uncanny” narratives remain in the fantastique only if they leave themselves open to both supernatural and non-supernatural readings. For Pierre Mac Orlan, horror narratives that do not remain open or engage with the possibility of the supernatural, staying rooted in the real world, fall into the “fantastique-social,” which deals with the irrational aspects of everyday life, such as serial killers (2013: 147–153).

The fantastique arrived in French cinema via the pioneering work of Georges Méliès, by all accounts the father of horror cinema, who produced films such as Le Manoir du diable as early as 1896. As Darragh O’Donoghue notes, Méliès’ “trick films” were typically based on the impossible “erasure or subversion of boundaries,” notably between reality and dreams and the animate and inanimate (2004). In La Lune à une mètre (1898), the telescope-
munching Moon and other bizarre goings-on are eventually explained as an astronomer’s dream, making it an example of the uncanny. Méliès’ Voyage
dans la lune (1902), by contrast, accepts the impossibilities of the narrative
as being within the laws of the story world (but with different laws than our world), and is an example of the marvelous. What these examples also illustrate is that the fantastique is not synonymous with horror for those who believe that a defining element of horror is repulsion, conveying what

H.P. Lovecraft called “an emotion of profound fear and terror” (Todorov,

1970: 35). This is because, as Todorov points out, “there are certain fantastic narratives from which all terror is absent” (1970: 36). These may share certain characteristics with horror narratives, but are distinct from them.

Méliès also made films belonging to the fantastique-social, notably Barbe-
bleue (1901), which features a forbidden room where the corpses of seven
women hang like sides of beef. This type of shocking image is characteristic

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of the uncanny, but also suggests the influence of another source of French horror that was contemporaneous with Méliès and related to the idea of the fantastique-social, Grand-Guignol. This was a style named for a Parisian theatre which opened in the 1890s and specialized in realistic plays with gory
special effects.1 Grand-Guignol also has a long tradition in French cinema, and the country’s first feature length horror film, Le Système de docteur Gou-
dron et du professeur Plume (Maurice Tourneur, 1913), was an adaptation of
a Grand-Guignol play (Waldman, 2001: 18).

While there were French successes in the genre as late as Belphégor (Henri

Desfontaines, 1927), horror films were scarce in French cinema in the 1930s.

The most notable exceptions were Le Golem (1936) and Le Charette fantôme

(1939), remakes by Julien Duvivier of classic German and Swedish silent films of the early 1920s. Duvivier also directed Pépé le Moko (1937), one of
the key entries of a popular series of downbeat romantic melodramas whose style, like Duvivier’s horror remakes, was heavily influenced by German expressionism. Marked by chiaroscuro lighting, moody soft-focus photography and mise-en-scènes which mirrored the troubled lives of their sympathetic, but doomed, protagonists, films such as Pépé le Moko, Le Quai des
brumes (1938, Marcel Carné) and La Bête humaine (1938, Jean Renoir) were
labeled “poetic realism.” Their look, when combined with their pessimism and critical view of society, were an important influence on Hollywood film noir (Durgnat, 1996: 38). 2 Their leftist politics made them the main cinematic casualty of the new order that followed the German invasion, but their style lingered as a strong influence on the era’s films.

In June 1940, France was invaded and militarily defeated by Nazi Ger-
many. The dysfunctionally democratic Fourth Republic collapsed and was replaced by a new regime, led by Marshal Philippe Pétain, which agreed to humiliating peace terms. While the new administration headquartered in Vichy theoretically claimed authority over the whole country, France was in fact partitioned into a zone (which included Paris, center of the film industry) occupied by Nazi troops, and a “free zone,” where Pétain’s authoritarian administration retained some autonomy as long as it agreed to collaborate with the Germans. Even this distinction ended after October 1942, when the Nazi military entered and took over the unoccupied zone. Faced with the destruction of their armed forces, the discrediting of their political class, and the loss of democratic liberties, some French citizens fled the country; others stayed and joined the Resistance. In the confusion following the surrender, Pétain, a hero of World War I with great prestige, urged cooperating with the Germans as a way of France retaining some control over its own affairs.

While many French men and women followed Pétain’s lead and actively
collaborated, the large majority tried to “prudently wait out the Occupation
years” (Gordon, 1995: 501). However, the very fact of Occupation made this

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difficult, as interaction with the occupying forces and their French acolytes became increasingly unavoidable. As Robert O. Paxton writes, “the urge to return to home and job started many Frenchmen down a path of everyday complicity that led gradually and eventually to active assistance to German measures undreamed of in 1940” (1972: 19). In these circumstances, the question of collaboration must have been on the minds of French audiences, and any film that presented analogous situations—such as deals with the Devil—is difficult to dismiss as simply escapist.

The most prominent manifestation of the Occupation in French cinema was Continental Studios. This was a German-owned company which had been a presence in the French film industry since the mid-1930s, but, after 1940, became the wealthiest and most popular studio due to generous Nazi financial backing, the related ability to attract top stars and other talent, and governmental connections which allowed it to avoid the shortage of film stock and
technical equipment that hindered its competition (Waldman, 2001: 136–37).

Although some of those making films at Continental were opposed to Vichy, or even actively participated in the Resistance, many who worked there were criticized for being too close to their German bosses. Beyond Continental, there were industry figures who considered themselves pro-Vichy but not pro-German, notably Maurice Chevalier and Pierre Fresnay, while others, including Danielle Darrieux, Albert Préjean, and Suzy Delair, took part in official propaganda visits by industry figures to Germany. Still, it is important to remember that many in the film industry engaged in a “collective, passive resistance” to Vichy in that Jews, former communists and Resistance members continued to work, sometimes under aliases, without being denounced.

Alan Williams writes that this “collective refusal to inform is more remarkable than it might at first appear, for such denunciations, often anonymous and made for personal gain or to settle old scores, were widespread in other sectors of French society” (1992: 252). However, none of the divisions or doubts permeating the film industry because of the Occupation was ever mentioned on the country’s movie screens.

If there is one thing you can count on to be absent from films made in France during the Nazi occupation, it is the presence of Nazis. There are no characters who happen to be German soldiers, or any Germans at all; there are never direct references to the fact of military occupation. There are, in fact, very few references to the war then currently engulfing the world, and then only allusive enough that they could be taken to be referring to a more general topic. The ostensible subject matter of French films was therefore deliberately escapist, with stories taking place safely in the past, often a vaguely medieval period, or in an indeterminate contemporary setting which could be taken either as being just before the war—but with no mention of the Depression or societal divisions associated with the 1930s—or as a fictional present in

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which the war and Nazi occupation never happened. Yet the war hangs over these films, and it is a mistake to see them as divorced from the context in which they were made. Supposedly apolitical genre films may in fact be the ideal place to look for displaced expressions of a national trauma.

There is controversy over the extent French films made under the Occupation commented on current events, even obliquely. Support for the Allies or straightforward attacks on the Nazis were obviously impossible. Yet even the implied criticism of the Nazis and their French collaborators that has
been attributed to several films, notably Les Visiteurs du soir (Marcel Carné,

1942), has been disputed. François Truffaut argued that there “was no place
for subversion or protest in the films of this period; the sanctions imposed would have gone beyond those of the Commission de Censure” (1981: 18).

This is overstated. As Evelyn Ehrlich writes, the “nationalist, even resistance sentiments that the French sometimes attempted to express in their work were of limited importance to the Germans” (1985: xiii). As long as there was no overt criticism of the German invaders or positive representation of the British (or, later, Americans), the Nazi regime allowed some latitude of expres-
sion, and otherwise relied on filmmakers’ self-censorship (Mayne, 2007: 18).

André Bazin argued that, despite censorship, it might “have been possible to produce films which had no precise political tendency but in which some of the public’s problems would have been portrayed,” but claimed there was no popular appetite for them (1981b: 98). This might explain why the avoidance of explicit political comment was shared by supporters of the collaborationist regime, as the rightist sentiments found in some 30s films were also muted

(Sims, 1999: 744). For example, the film most associated with the popular-
ization of Vichy ideology was Le Ciel est à vous (Jean Grémillon, 1944). It
was praised by the Vichy press and premiered at a gala presided over by the wife of Marshall Pétain, but its content was ambiguous enough to receive almost equally good reviews from clandestine anti-Nazi journals, and it was in fact directed by an active member of the Resistance (Semple, 1985: 143).

The messages in these films were therefore strictly implicit, as any attempt at explicit statements would have run foul of both government censors and hypersensitive audiences.

Given these crosscurrents, it is possible to consider ambiguity as one of the defining characteristics of Occupation-era films. As Ehrlich argues, many of them “can be read as having both resistance and collaborationist sentiments”

(1985: xii). They contain references that had a specific resonance to their immediate audience, but did not necessarily resolve the problems associated with these references, and were vague enough to allow for different interpretations.

Beyond this ambiguity and shared formal characteristics, what links the horror-related films is that they deal with questions of free will, guilt, and responsibility. The most obvious examples of this were “fantastique-marvelous”

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films in which individuals were offered wealth, power, or sexual fulfillment by the Devil, a plotline which offered the possibility of an allegory for the question of whether to cooperate, and to what extent, with the Nazi occupiers and their Vichy allies. Other films offered resolutions which assigned guilt for a specific crime or a general societal malaise to individuals or groups, a situation which also held allegorical possibilities for a society perhaps wondering who was responsible for the state in which they found themselves. This dovetailed with an ongoing theme of the Vichy government’s propaganda, that the French themselves were responsible for the Occupation, that it was a “deserved punishment” (Lafond, 2002) for the rot and decadence that ran through society.

This argument was particularly aimed at the “defeatist” cinema of the 1930s, represented by films such as Le Quai des brûmes and La Grande illusion

(1937, Jean Renoir), whose pessimistic and pacifist views were accused of
undermining French morale (Ehrlich, 1985: 103). Consequently, criticisms of French society or institutions could be seen as feeding this narrative of collective guilt. However, they could also be interpreted as criticism of the widespread collaboration with the Nazis. Given the divisions within French society, ambiguity seems to have been a sensible strategy.

One of the direct results of the Nazi invasion is that seven of the film industry’s top directors, Jean Renoir, René Clair, Max Ophuls, Jacques Feyder, Abel Gance, Pierre Chenal, and Julien Duvivier, went into exile. Others were interned in prison camps, while Jewish filmmakers who remained free were blacklisted, although some found work writing scripts under pseudonyms

(Truffaut, 1981: 16). This provided opportunities for a number of younger directors such as Jacques Becker, Robert Bresson, Jean Delannoy, and Guillaume Radot. Among the most distinctive of these was Henri-Georges Clouzot, a prolific screenwriter during the 1930s whose first major film as director was L’Assassin habite au 21 (1942). This was a comic suspense thriller from

Continental Studios featuring popular stars Pierre Fresnay and Suzy Delair in the same roles they had played in the Clouzot-scripted serial killer mystery

Le Dernier de six (Georges Lacombe, 1941). Like the earlier film, the hunt
by Fresnay’s Police Inspector Wens for the person responsible for a string of murders takes second place to the sophisticated comic dialogue between him and beautiful aspiring singer Delair. However, Clouzot includes several
touches that foreshadow his creepily suspenseful later films such as Le cor-
beau (1943) and Les Diaboliques (1955). Like Hollywood films noir and the Val Lewton horror cycle, Clouzot borrowed from German expressionism and 1930s French cinema, “expanding the conventions of 1930s poetic realism”

to create a “darker, more disturbing moral universe” (Bowles, 2010: 144),
investing his cityscape with expressionist shadows and fog reminiscent of pre-war romantic melodramas such as Le Quai des brûmes and Le jour se lève

(Marcel Carné, 1939). However, instead of the trademark romantic pessimism

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associated with the “poetic realism” style, Clouzot substitutes witty sexual banter between the leads and a sour view of society punctuated by violence whose nastiness edges the film into the fantastique-social style of horror. For example, the film’s first murder in L’Assassin habite au 21 is staged as a suspenseful cat and mouse game between an increasingly agitated prey and the movie camera, which presents the serial killer’s point of view as a first-person perspective, uniting the audience with the unseen murderer as he cruelly stalks and viciously murders a personable tramp who has just won the lottery.

The blade of the sword cane entering from the bottom of the frame as if it was an appendage of the camera to dispatch the hapless clochard can even be seen as a precursor of the camera as murder weapon which would turn up in

Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960). 3 The audience is further implicated in the sadistic pleasure the film takes in its series of murders by having one of the suspects earn a living through the creation of popular dolls who can shoot, stab, or strangle in the manner of the film’s serial killer, pointedly highlighting how entertaining the public has always found gruesome violence.

The film’s political subtext seems deliberately ambiguous. On the one hand, Fresnay, masquerading as a Protestant minister, reads aloud a biblical passage that seems remarkably provocative: “The faithful city has become a whore! It had been righteous, but now it has murderers. But darkness will not reign forever on earth with its anguish.” This can be read as a condemnation of Parisian collaboration with German “murderers,” with the final sentence holding a promise of deliverance from the Occupation. Similarly, the revelation that the serial killer is actually three men who provide a cross section of France (an artisan to represent the working class, an ex-army doctor representing both the military and bourgeoisie, and a conjuror to stand in for the entertainment industry) who are thoroughly corrupt underneath their respectable surfaces can be taken as a condemnation of society’s easy adjustment to the new dispensation. However, these elements are ambiguous enough that they can also be read as supporting Vichy’s portrayal of French society as infected with rot and as engineer of its own humiliation, with the promised deliverance a result of the New Europe the Nazis were creating. It is also the case that the killers are caught and order restored by representatives of the state, which is not usually the case in films hostile to Vichy.

This ambiguity which served the film so well at the time turned out to be a problem after the German defeat. Clouzot’s conduct during the war was to be severely criticized following the Liberation in 1944, and he was initially given a lifetime ban from filmmaking, later shortened to two years. Part of the problem was his prominent position at Continental Studios, where he not only wrote scripts and directed films, but was also head of the screenplay division. Also hurt by association with Continental was Pierre Fresnay. He had been a prominent actor in both films and on the Paris stage during the

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1930s, famous for playing, among other roles, Marius in Marcel Pagnol’s Marseilles Trilogy ( Marius, Fanny and César) (1931–1936) and Captain de Boeldieu in La Grande illusion. Just as the departure of a number of popular directors had cleared the way for Clouzot, Fresnay became one of the biggest stars of the war years partly as a result of the exile of leading men such as Jean Gabin, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Victor Francen, Marcel Dalio, and Charles Boyer (several leading ladies also went into exile, notably Michèle Morgan and Françoise Rosay). To this list should be added the name of Harry Baur, who died in 1941 after being arrested and tortured by the Gestapo. Neither Fresnay’s strong ties to Continental, nor his outspoken support for Pétain, which continued after the war, seemed to damage his popularity, although it would result in his spending six weeks in prison following the Liberation (Crisp, 1993: 195).

A different kind of serial killer from that found in L’Assassin, of a type
more familiar to horror fans, turns up in Le Loup des Malveneur (Guillaume

Radot, 1943). Given the film’s title and the eyebrow-raising, but unironically
presented, family motto of the main characters (“With them, I’m howling”), it is a little disappointing that the question of whether or not there is a monster, let alone a werewolf, is left unclear, placing the film in the story world of the fantastique-uncanny. Frank Lafond argues that the film shares “various aesthetic themes and features” with the Universal monster films of the 1930s, such as a gothic setting, a mad scientist and surly peasants, even noting that the opening credits share the same lettering as James Whale’s Frankenstein

(1931) (Lafond, 2001). However, the links to Hollywood’s early 1930s horror
cycle is tenuous, and at best shows a shared influence, as these characteristics, along with the naïve governess, deaf mute servant, and crumbling castle, are also staples of gothic literature. Indeed, while there is some off-screen howling and a slightly above average-sized wolf turns up toward the end, its actual connection to the events remains murky. There is no transformation scene of the type one usually, with rare exceptions, finds in werewolf movies, or really any direct link between wolf and man. For the real monster of the film is not supernatural at all. It is Reginald de Malveneur, the castle’s nobleman as well as a mad scientist, who thinks he is the victim of a supernatural curse on his family. Because of this, he kills the local gamekeeper and performs unsavoury resurrection experiments on the body in order to overcome the curse. If anything, he was driven mad by the idea of the curse rather than by really being cursed. Or that seems to be the case until the end, when the wolf is shot by peasants at the same time Reginald is caught in the fire which burns down the castle. The narrative’s opting for the fantastique-social is subverted when it is recalled that the wolf’s simultaneous death with Reginald repeats the events of the original cursed Malveneur, giving the resolution an ambiguous twist that preserves the uncertainty required of the fantastique-uncanny.

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Despite a dreary romantic subplot between a naïve governess and a young artist (who, to no one’s surprise, turns out to be a policeman), there are enjoyable horror touches along the way, particularly the eerie atmosphere created by moody lighting and a menacing castle, and a fine mad scientist performance from Pierre Renoir (brother of Jean) as Reginald. Much of the film is in a style vaguely similar to the Universal horror films, but Lafond points out that its most strikingly creepy sequence, a funeral in a field with oddly stylized crucifixes, “does not resort to Universal’s traditional expressionist lighting, but seems instead to owe its dreamlike atmosphere—mostly
produced by eerie, hazy shots—to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr [1932]”

(Lafond, 2001). This sequence, which seems to have been shot silent to
accentuate an otherworldly feel heightened by a canted camera and the use of extreme high and low angles, is wonderfully nightmarish and gives the film a supernatural tinge. As to placing the film in the context of the Occupation, there is no indictment of a cross section of French society as in L’Assassin.

Rather, its aristocracy (whose blood, according to a line of dialogue, is “too rich”) is shown to be diseased and dangerous, while the governess and artist-policeman are often visually associated with the positively represented common people of the region. Further, the climactic burning of the castle presents a narrative resolution favoring popular insurgency, as does the belated collective effort of the peasantry in hunting down the wolf. In Hollywood horror films, notably Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935), the mob with
pitchforks and torches are sometimes cast as the “real monsters,” but here the enraged common people acting in unison are shown as the only ones who can end the curse. What also positions this as a pro-Resistance narrative is the tracing of the source of the family curse to a Malveneur ancestor having sold his soul to the Devil, making it one of several French fantasy films made during the Occupation which seemed to compare deals with the Devil to collaboration with the Nazi occupiers.

The most popular of these was Marcel Carné’s Les Visiteurs du soir

(1942), the film with the longest first-run in a Parisian cinema during the war

(Truffaut, 1981: 8). It was made by the filmmaking team of director Marcel

Carné and poet-turned-screenwriter Jacques Prévert, creators of two of the most prominent poetic realist films of the 1930s, Le Quai des brûmes and Le jour se lève. In this film, set in the Middle Ages, the Devil sends two emis-saries to a French castle which is busy with preparations for a wedding uniting two noble families. These agents of Satan are, it turns out, damned souls who have been granted eternal youth and beauty in exchange for corrupting innocents and delivering these souls to their master. The envoys’ specific mission is “to bring despair to humanity,” and their method of achieving this seems almost stereotypically French, as they seduce the bride, the groom, and (for good measure) the bride’s father. Given the popular equation of the

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Devil with the Nazis, it is interesting that the instigators of chaos are presented so attractively. Jules Berry plays a sophisticated and witty Devil, while his minions are the handsome Alain Cuny (as Gilles) and the spectacularly beautiful Arletty (as Dominique). Further, they don’t physically overpower or coerce their intended victims; they offer worldly pleasure in exchange for the souls they collect. This is partly why suggestions of allegory are sometimes seen as exaggerated, with some claiming the film is more properly seen as escapist cinema avoiding contemporary issues by taking “refuge in historical
films of fantasy and enchantment” (Truffaut, 1981: 18). A certain irony also arises due to the presence of Arletty in the film most often cited for its anti-collaboration message. For she would be one of the most severely punished film performers following the Liberation, serving four months in prison and an additional eighteen months under house arrest because of her affair with a German officer and her spirited defense that “my heart belongs to France,
but my ass belongs to the world” (Ehrlich, 1985: 174). Still, no matter how
veiled the message may be, it is difficult to dispute the claim that somewhere in the midst of its sparkling, witty dialogue and breathlessly romantic performances, there is also a lesson about morality and collaboration for those with an eye to see it.

Les Visiteurs du soir is a romantic fantasy where Gilles, instead of merely seducing and corrupting the bride, falls in love with her, and the couple’s steadfastness in the face of the angry Devil leads to their being turned into stone. However, their love achieves a symbolic victory as their hearts continue to beat within the stone, presumably in unison. Beyond the presence of the supernatural, there is not much in the way of formal elements to point at in the film as related to the horror genre. It is instead an illustration of the idea that fantastique narratives which opt for the marvelous can be distinct from horror. This applies here even though the film possesses plot points—
notably the transformation of humans into statues and the harvesting of souls for eternal damnation—which could make for a full-blooded horror narrative.

Ehrlich notes that the film is usually read as explicitly symbolic, with the Devil standing in for Hitler, the envoys for the army of Occupation, and the medieval court they subvert for Europe: “The implication of such an allegory was that although the Nazis could defeat the French physically, the spirit of freedom, the unbreakable heart of France, would live on” (1985: 103). It is important to note that the most that Les Visiteurs du soir can offer is a symbolic victory and it does not advocate collective action to vanquish evil. This is not a film where a group of peasants can end a curse by hunting down a wolf; this manifestation of the Devil is simply too powerful.

The runaway success of Les Visiteurs du soir was followed by a series of popular supernatural-tinged films which has led to this period being labeled the “golden age” of the fantastique, notably La Nuit fantastique (Marcel

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L’Herbier, 1942), L’Éternel retour (Jean Delannoy, 1943), Le baron fantôme

(Serge de Poligny, 1943), Sortilèges (Christian-Jaque, 1945), and La Fiancée
des ténèbres (Serge de Poligny, 1945). The most interesting of these from
the point of view of both horror cinema and allegory is Maurice Tourneur’s

La Main du diable (1943). Scripted by Jean-Paul Dreyfuss, a Jewish mem-
ber of the Resistance using the pen name Jean-Paul Le Chanois (which he adopted for his long postwar career as writer and director), and with an allegorical lesson about collaboration more straightforwardly presented than Les Visiteurs du soir, it is surprising that it does not have an equal reputation, either as superior genre film or as anti-collaborationist parable.

The reason for this may at least partially be due to its being produced by Continental and starring Pierre Fresnay. Here he is Roland, a frustrated artist who sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for commercial and critical success as an artist and the love of a beautiful, but avaricious, woman. Judith Mayne suggests that its being produced by Continental does not necessarily suggest a collaborationist point of view, pointing to this film, along with two by Christian-Jaque, L’Assassinat du père Noël (1941) and La Symphonie
fantastique (1942), and arguing that “several Continental films are surprising
for how much they suggest the possibility of a critical view of collaboration”

(2007: 17). While her point is generally true, these examples are a little misleading, since both Christian-Jaque films can be read as pro-Vichy as easily as pro-Resistance. L’Assassinat du père Noël does feature a climax where squabbling villagers of all classes put aside their differences in order to join together to help a sick child, but this could as easily be interpreted as a paean to the new order which had replaced the bitterly divided pre-1940 France.

The glorification of French history in La Symphonie fantastique, a period musical biopic of composer Hector Berlioz, celebrates a brilliant French past, but this was a stance at least as identified with Vichy as with the Resistance.

La Main du diable is less open to multiple readings and is a better example of a Continental film that critiques collaboration.

There is, of course, no direct reference to the Occupation. However, as Lafond suggests, “Roland’s wild-eyed looks upon entering the inn at the outset of the film express a feeling of pervading paranoia that one can fully
comprehend only by taking into account the extra-diegetic reality” (Lafond,

2002). Making a Faustian bargain, Roland unthinkingly trades away his soul
for sex, money, and, not the least in importance, flattering praise for artistic ability he doesn’t really possess. The narrative’s resolution is crucial to interpreting the film’s politics. Roland is not saved by the action of an outstanding or supernatural figure, as an angel’s attempted intervention proves futile. Nor does he accept that the Devil’s power is impossible to challenge directly and can be resisted only through steadfastness, as in Les Visiteurs du soir. Instead, he actively works to escape his fate and rallies the previous owners of the

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Devil’s talisman to help him. As in Le Loup des Malveneur, collective action by “the people” is necessary to lift the curse. In the end, Roland fights to the death with the Devil; although he loses, it is clear his soul is saved and his sacrifice has ended the power of the cursed hand. As Ehrlich writes, “French audiences who flocked to see the film in June 1943 could scarcely have overlooked the meaning of the ending” (1985: 53). Nevertheless, the meaning seems to have eluded some, as Tourneur was tainted by his connection with Continental and had difficulty finding work after the war.

Its setting in the art world, a creative milieu that can easily be seen as a stand-in for the film industry, gives the story an unexpected bite. The film represents the artistic world as empty and shallow, while making Roland an artist (and, by analogy, filmmaker) implicitly condemned artists who collaborated with the Nazis. This would be an odd stance to take from artists working for the German-owned Continental, but perhaps can be seen as a gesture by them to show they have not sold their souls. This interpretation might seem a stretch, but reading the artist as a filmmaker only provides an additional strand to the film’s complex reflexivity. The most striking demonstration of La Main du diable’s consciousness of itself as a horror film is its working out of the different means of telling tales of horror. The film begins, setting the stage for what is coming, by having a group of boarders in a remote inn swap ghost stories. At a point in a story where there is a sinister knock on the door, a knock on the inn door is heard, heralding the arrival of Roland and the beginning of the film’s main narrative. Later, when Roland paints a mysterious series of canvases while “possessed” by his new hand, they turn out to be violent, horrific images and are described by a character as “a dramatic investigation of the fantastic,” an excellent description of what is going on in the film. A third medium is linked to horror narratives when Roland confronts the cursed talisman’s previous owners, a tableau of figures arranged as if on a theatrical stage. The Grand-Guignol stage, to be exact, as all the figures are maimed, missing their right hand. This evocation of theater is reinforced by having most of these figures be artist-performers of a kind, including a chef, a juggler, a boxer, and an illusionist. Beyond this, the film’s narrative is related by Roland as an extended flashback to the inn’s guests, positioning them as filmmaker and audience. In both La Main du diable and Les Visiteurs du soir it is clear from the start that the story worlds are of the marvelous rather than the uncanny, but while Carné’s film is an example of where the fantastique-
marvelous can be distinct from horror, La Main du diable is an example of how they can be synonymous.

While much of the film’s structure and built-in meditation on horror is no doubt due to the script, some of it, as well as the enduring stylishness of the production, is almost certainly due to Maurice Tourneur, who had directed the first French feature length horror film in 1913. At the time, he was well

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known as the manager of the Odéon Theatre, where he had directed many Grand-Guignol plays (Suchenski, 2011: 88), most notably the work of André de Lorde, the prolific author of over 200 stage dramas known as the “Prince of Terror” for the shocking content of his work, once described as a “museum
of horror” (Waldman, 2001: 8). Tourneur’s role as a pioneer of French film
horror should rightly be shared with de Lorde, who adapted his own play (inspired by an Edgar Allan Poe story), Le Système du docteur Goudron et du professeur Plume, for their debut. Tourneur returned to the genre with an adaptation of another de Lorde Grand-Guignol shocker, Figures de cire

(1914), before moving on to a successful career in Hollywood, where he
directed such silent classics as The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917), The Blue

Bird (1918, a fantasy film with painted backdrops), and The Last of the

Mohicans (1921). Tourneur returned to France to direct talkies in the early

30s, but his son Jacques remained in Hollywood, and at the same time as the father was making his contribution to French horror cinema, the son was a key figure in the Val Lewton–produced cycle of Hollywood horror as director of Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and The Leopard

Man (1943). The elder Tourneur’s La Main du diable, which would be his best remembered French film, achieves its shock effects through the contrast between the handful of supernatural sequences, which is not a dominant trait of Grand-Guignol, and the realistic detail of the rest of the narrative, which is

(Pierron, 1995: xvii). There is frequent use of stylized, expressionist lighting,
but only a handful of magical moments, notably the bizarre “Hall of Masks”

sequence where Roland meets the previous “owners” of the cursed hand and the appropriately grotesque effect of the hand being painfully lost whenever the talisman is officially passed from one owner to the next.

While La Main du diable offers an implicit condemnation of France’s artis-
tic world (including its film industry), Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Corbeau

(1943) presents a harsher and more comprehensive attack on French society.

One of the characteristics of life under the Nazis was their use of confi-dential informants to keep tabs on their subjects, which not only produced widespread paranoia but provided the means of settling scores, old and new.

François Truffaut remembered of the time that “the walls of the Métro were plastered with posters calling for the denunciation of people wanted by the authorities” (1981: 10). What soon emerged as the favorite means of denunciation was the anonymous letter, also known as a “corbeau.” Ehrlich notes that their popularity can be “demonstrated by the frequent editorials against them” (1985: 183). Mayne argues that this common practice “was not always as encouraged by the German occupiers and the officials of Vichy as some accounts would lead us to believe. The letters provided tips, to be sure, but just as often they were motivated by petty jealousy and personal vendettas”

(2007: 56). However, it is undeniable that denouncing a countryman to the

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Gestapo or its Vichy equivalent, the Milice, was potentially devastating, since the authorities often did act on these anonymous accusations. Yet, despite this, even Mayne concedes this practice “flourished” (2007: 56).

Le Corbeau is rarely discussed as a horror film, but given its nightmarish qualities that at least one point spiral into hallucination, that might be its most accurate description. The film can, in fact, be linked to France’s original horror feature, Maurice Tourneur’s Le Système du docteur Goudron et du professeur Plume, which involved the typical Grand-Guignol scenario of two innocent travelers who arrive at an insane asylum which they come
to learn has come under the control of its inmates (Waldman, 2001: 18).

In Le corbeau, the asylum is the town itself, a sleepy provincial outpost that is gradually engulfed in a cycle of hysteria and incipient violence by a series of anonymous poison pen letters (the “corbeau” of the title refers not only to the letters themselves, but also to the “signature” on them—the drawing of a crow and the printed words LE CORBEAU, French for “the crow”). During the course of the film, it appears as though lunatics have indeed taken over the asylum, as madness spreads through the community, another theme lifted from Grand-Guignol. The opening sequence features a shot of children seen through the bars of a gate. That they explode through these gates once they are opened does not lessen the effect, since the town outside the gates of the school is as much a prison as the school itself. Other town institutions are presented similarly. Both the hospital and the Roman Catholic parish church have prison-like gates, while the post office has bars on its windows. Indeed, as Ehrlich writes, “every exterior space is enclosed by a fence or a wall,”

further noting that the “impossibility of escape is most vividly symbolized by Marie Corbin’s terrified race through the empty, endless maze of the town, but no character in the film escapes the town’s boundaries” (1985: 184).

Beyond that, the film’s protagonist, Dr. Germain (played, of course, by Pierre Fresnay), is observed through windows, eavesdropped upon and gossiped about throughout the narrative, and he is not alone in this. It all contributes to a portrait of a society not only thoroughly repressed, but also with many members actively engaged as agents of repression. All, however, are ready to explode like the children through the school gates once the repression is lifted. In this film, it is the poison pen letters that open the town’s metaphorical gates and expose its sordid, dark side, just as the opportunity for anonymous denunciation had done in occupied France.

A central metaphor used by Clouzot and co-scriptwriter Louis Chavance is the idea of the poison pen letters as a type of virus. This virus enters the town’s bloodstream with anonymous letters accusing Germain of performing abortions and conducting an affair with the wife of an older colleague.

This older colleague, Dr. Vorzet (Pierre Larquey) is soon telling Germain that the Crow could be anybody and that the “whole town may be infected.”

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The letters multiply in number and arrive faster as the fever takes hold. As mourners walk in the funeral cortège for the hospital patient who commits suicide after receiving a letter revealing the true extent of his illness, a letter flutters to the ground and into their path. The marchers part to skirt it gingerly as they pass, as if the letter itself was dangerously infectious. Eventually, it is picked up by a child. Canted camera angles highlight the deepening hysteria as the letter is passed from hand to hand through the mourners as they turn into the howling mob which chases off Marie (Héléna Manson), who is suspected of being the Crow, and later storms the hospital gates. Soon after, as Marie runs through the town to escape the mob, the townspeople are not shown chasing her. Instead, she runs down empty streets as the sound of the maddened crowd increases, as if it was the spirit of the town itself that was after her blood. This spreading madness and paranoia is accentuated by the film’s expressionist-influenced style, which, as Mayne writes, makes frequent

“use of light and dark contrast and shadows to create a world of suspicion and paranoia” (2007: 39), pointing both backward to the methods of poetic realism and forward to the sensibility of film noir. As Marie, very much resembling a crow in her black nurse’s uniform, makes her nightmarish run from the mob through a maze of strangely crooked and abandoned streets that strongly resemble each other, wild camera angles and ominous shadows express her subjective terror. If there is a sequence more than any other to point to when situating this film within the horror genre, it is this. There is no suggestion of the supernatural, but moments like Marie’s seemingly endless and aimless dash for freedom or the members of a funeral procession carefully stepping around an envelope on the ground are close enough to surrealism to border on the fantastique. Even though the story world is in the coldly rational world of the uncanny, the maddened crowd and mounting hysteria owe a clear debt to Grand-Guignol and convey feelings of revulsion and terror to the audience.

In presenting a typical French provincial town as a seething pit of corruption under its staid surface and then transforming it into a fevered rabble, Clouzot spares no one. Fresnay plays Germain as quarrelsome and arrogant, while his “romantic interest” Denise (Ginette Leclerc) is a manipulative hypo-chondriac. Everybody else is irredeemable. The officials are corrupt, the doctors make cruel jokes about their patients, the children are liars and thieves, all the married couples are cheating on each other, while the petty bourgeois and working class are easily manipulated. These common people are much more akin to the monstrous peasants of Bride of Frankenstein than the heroic Resistance surrogates of Le Loup des Malveneur. In spite of this, Mayne argues that the film does not provide an indictment of society as a whole, writing: “The letters reveal what is repressed and feared in the town, and in that sense are a powerful catalyst, but there is not the same strong sense that all

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the villagers have been overpowered by the desire to write poison pen letters”

(2007: 59). But that is exactly what the film shows in a humorously played scene in the post office where a flood of poison pen letters leads to the observation that everybody seems to have taken up writing them, and it is described as an “epidemic.” And indeed, everybody also seems to be implicated by them, as shown in the scene between the hospital director and the town clerk, each of whom has received letters containing uncomfortable truths about the other. This comprehensive societal indictment is probably what made the film so controversial. It is a critique that fits all too neatly into the Vichy narrative of a corrupt pre-war France needing to be purified (which is what the Crow claims to be doing), as does the priest’s funeral sermon, where he tells his con-gregation that “the spirit of evil descended on your town because of your sins.”

The film’s production circumstances did not help its reputation. Given the context of a society where anonymous denunciations were increasingly com-monplace, the subject matter was extraordinarily sensitive, and a frequently raised question was “how and why” a Nazi-financed company would make
a film about it (Mayne, 2007: 16). As Gregory Sims notes, “it is clear that

Le Corbeau would never have gotten past the pre-production stage, much less passed Vichy censorship, had it not been produced, financed and distributed by Continental” (1999: 752). This left the film vulnerable to a type of “corbeau,” an unsigned attack on the film by Georges Adam and the actor Pierre Blanchar in the clandestine Resistance journal L’Écran Français. In it, they condemn the filmmakers for “promoting the twisted ideology of the enemy” by portraying a France in which “the inhabitants of our little towns are no more than degenerates who deserve nothing better than servitude,”

and that it was “created by Clouzot’s enslaved mind, as if in direct response
to a Nazi order” (Drazin, 2011: 206). As Sims writes, Le Corbeau “in the eyes of many, was (and remains) doubly reprehensible: a morally corrupting product of flagrant political collaboration” (1999: 752). After the Liberation, the film became the symbol of collaboration between the French film industry and the Nazis, and many of those associated with it were punished, with Pierre Blanchar, co-author of the most prominent attack on the film, presiding over the “Purification Committee.” As a result, Clouzot and Chavance were banned from the profession permanently, although this was later reduced in both cases to a couple of years. Fresnay and Ginette Leclerc served brief jail sentences, while supporting cast members Micheline Francey, Noel Roquevert, and Jean Bouchard were banned from acting for terms ranging
from two to twelve months (Ehrlich, 1985: 176).

Yet even before this poison pen review in a Resistance journal, which appeared in March 1944, the film was already in trouble from another
direction. Upon its release in September 1943, it received “general critical
acclaim” and was “triumphant at the box office throughout France” (Ehrlich,

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1985: 179). Although the good reviews included some from pro-Vichy news-
papers (Sims, 1999: 753), other figures associated with the collaborationist
regime criticized the film. Church authorities also disliked it, and the Centre

Catholique de Cinéma condemned the film as “blasphemous” (Ehrlich, 1985:

177–178). As a result, despite its popularity, Le Corbeau was withdrawn from cinemas after only three weeks and was not shown publicly for years afterward, as its ban was extended by the Liberation authorities. In addition, while it was alleged that the film was shown in Germany and elsewhere as an example of French decadence, in reality the German film company UFA
refused to distribute it (Drazin, 2011: 207; Gans, 2005: 51).

Leaving aside questions surrounding its production, it is easy to see why the film was disliked by the German authorities and their Vichy allies.

As Eric Gans writes: “No film more forcefully denounces mob persecution and scapegoating, not to speak of the notorious Occupation practice of informing on one’s neighbours” (2005: 51). Also, it positions itself as a Resistance film by having the story resolved and the villain, the original Crow, punished not by the police stepping in and restoring order (as in L’Assassin habite au 21) or through the steadfastness of its protagonists (as in Les Visiteurs du soir), but through an individual, the suicide’s mother, taking the law into her own hands, an act of violence against evil that, Gans argues, “cannot but recall the deeds of the Resistance” (2005: 54). But this act of solitary revenge is not quite equivalent to the villagers joining together to hunt down the wolf in Le Loup des Malveneur or Roland joining forces with the previous holders of the Devil’s talisman in La Main du diable. Those are collective actions, a positive representation of mob, or at least group, violence that is justified by desperate circumstances. In the world of Le Corbeau, which is one seized by madness, where only two quasi-outsiders, Germain (who is a recent arrival) and Denise (shunned because of her sexual history), are partially immune, mob violence is inherently irrational, and therefore implicitly condemned, regardless of motive. As Ehrlich writes about Clouzot and Chavance, “the underlying problem was their world view, their refusal to acknowledge that moral positions were clear-cut” (1985: 185). In this reading, the Resistance may be shown in a better light than the Nazis, but there is a moral ambiguity attached to their actions which members of the Resistance would have been very unlikely to agree with.

Judith Mayne writes that “too often the very term ‘diversion’ is used to obscure the possibility that distraction and entertainment can reveal important understandings of how the Occupation was lived, understood and experienced” (2007: 16). It is this essay’s assertion that a good deal can be learned from the way ideas are represented and expressed in the era’s “escapist” cinema, particularly its seemingly apolitical horror films. Further, the genre’s characteristics, involving expressive use of light and shadow to create

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suspense and delineate good and evil, were ideally suited to the complex moral questions and ambiguities citizens living under an occupying power were concerned with. Supernatural plots or, in the case of Grand-Guignol, exaggerated horrific detail, were also useful, as they seemed to distance the narratives from direct comment on the current situation, while any story tinged with questions of life and death was bound to strike a chord with audiences living in a time of long casualty lists. A second, related assertion is that formal and thematic elements associated with the horror genre can be found in works not typically discussed as horror films, and that discussing them in terms of their horror elements can provide new insights into the films and the circumstances in which they were made.

It is no accident that the Devil looms as the most important figure in Occupation-era cinema, as he serves as a perfect supernatural analogy for French men and women dealing with the temptations and dangers presented by the German invader. As Todorov writes, the fantastique “permits us to cross certain frontiers that are inaccessible so long as we have no recourse to it” (1970: 158). Because the Devil assuming human form is “impossible,”

it becomes possible in narratives where this happens to suggest much more than realism can. In this light, the making of thrillers and fantasy films should not be seen as a retreat into genre, but a strategic use by some filmmakers of genre elements to express the reality of the world around them: the Occupation, its dilemmas, and its confusions.

noTes

1. See Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare’s chapter in this book for more on the GrandGuignol and its importance to horror cinema.

2. See also Kristopher Woofter’s chapter in this book, for links between poetic realism and an American “gothic realism” of the 1940s that includes horror and film noir.

3. See Peter Marra’s chapter in this book for a discussion of similar POV aesthetics in 1940s horror films such as John Brahm’s The Lodger (1944) and Hangover Square (1945).

ReFeRenCes

Bazin, André. 1981. “On Realism.” French Cinema of the Occupation and Resistance: The Birth of a Cultural Aesthetic. Ed. François Truffaut. New York: Ungar. 70–72.

———. 1981b. “Reflections for a Vigil of Arms.” French Cinema of the Occupation and Resistance: The Birth of a Cultural Aesthetic. Ed. François Truffaut.

New York: Ungar. 95–100.

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Bowles, Brett. 2010. “The Attempted Nazification of French Cinema: 1934–44.”

Cinema and the Swastika: The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema.

Ed. David Welch and Roel Vande Winkel. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan.

130–146.

Crisp, Colin. 1997. The Classic French Cinema 1930–1960. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Drazin, Charles. 2011. “The Occupation.” French Cinema. New York: Faber and Faber. 190–219.

Durgnat, Raymond. [1970] 1996. “Paint It Black: The Family Tree of the Film Noir.” Film Noir Reader. Ed. Alain Silver and James Orsini. Pompton Plains, NJ: Limelight. 37–51.

Ehrlich, Evelyn. 1985. Cinema of Paradox. New York: Columbia University Press.

Gans, Eric. 2005. “Clouzot’s Cruel Crow.” P.O.V. 20. 51–58.

Gordon, Bertram M. 1995. “The ‘Vichy Syndrome’ Problem in History.” French Historical Studies. 19 (2): 495–518.

Lafond, Frank. 2001. “With Them I’m Howling.” Kinoeye. 1 (5). Online source:

www.kinoeye.org/01/05/lafond05.php. Last accessed 20 May, 2013.

———. “A Hand Full of Horrors.” Kinoeye. 2.4 (2002). Online source: www

.kinoeye.org/02/04/lafond04.php. Last accessed 20 May 2013.

Lofficier, Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier. 2000. French Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Pulp Fiction: A Guide to Cinema, Television, Radio, Animation, Comic Books and Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Mayne, Judith. 2007. Le Corbeau. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press.

O’Donoghue, Darragh. 2004. “Georges Méliès.” Senses of Cinema. 32. Online source: http://sensesofcinema.com/2004/great-directors/melies/. Last accessed 5 July 2014.

Orlan, Pierre Mac. [1926] 2013. “Le Fantastique [le fantastique social].” L’Invention d’un genre: Le cinéma fantastique Français. Ed. Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb.

Paris, France: L’Harmattan. 147–153.

Paxton, Robert O. 1972. Vichy France, Old Guard and New Order: 1940–1944.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Petit, Alain. 2009. “Interview.” Les visiteurs du soir. Directed by Marcel Carné.

[France] M6 Vidéo. DVD.

Pierron, Agnès. Ed. 1995. “Préface.” Le Grand-Guignol ou le théatre des peurs de la Belle Époque. Ed. Agnès Pierron. Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont. i–lxv.

Rousso, Henry. 1991. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Schrader, Paul. [1972] 1996. “Notes on Film Noir.” Film Noir Reader. Ed. Alain Silver and James Orsini. Pompton Plains, NJ: Limelight. 53–63.

Semple, Jeanie. 1985. “Ambiguities in the Film Le ciel est à vous.” Vichy France and the Resistance: Culture & Ideology. Ed. Harry Roderick Kedward and Roger Austin. Beckenham, UK: Croom Helm. 123–132.

Siclier, Jacques. 1981. La France de Pétain et son cinéma. Saint-Ouen, France: Henri Veyrier.

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Sims, Gregory. 1999. “Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le corbeau (1943): The Work of Art as Will to Power.” MLN (Modern Language Notes). 114 (4): 743–779.

Suchenski, Richard. 2011. “‘Turn Again, Tourneur’: Maurice Tourneur between France and Hollywood.” Studies in French Cinema. 11 (2): 87–101.

Todorov, Tzvetan. 1970. The Fantastic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Truffaut, François. 1981. “André Bazin, the Occupation and I.” French Cinema of the Occupation and Resistance: The Birth of a Cultural Aesthetic. Ed. François Truffaut. New York: Ungar. 3–21.

Waldman, Harry. 2001. Maurice Tourneur: The Life and Films. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Williams, Alan. 1992. Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

FiLMogRApHy

L’Assassinat du père Noël. Directed by Christian-Jaque. Continental, 1941. Paris: R.

Chateau, 2004. DVD.

L’Assassin habite au 21. Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot. Continental, 1942.

Paris: Gaumont, 2011. DVD.

Barbe-bleue. Directed by Georges Méliès. Georges Méliès. 1901.

Le Baron fantôme. Directed by Serge de Poligny. Consortium du Films, 1943. Paris: LCJ Editions and Productions, 2013. DVD.

Belphégor. Directed by Henri Desfontaines. Pathé, 1927. Starmax, 2001. DVD.

La Bête humaine. Directed by Jean Renoir. Paris Film, 1938. New York: Criterion Collection, 2006.

The Blue Bird. Directed by Maurice Tourneur. Paramount, 1918. Phoenix, AZ: Grapevine Video, 2005. DVD.

Bride of Frankenstein. Directed by James Whale. Universal, 1935. Universal City, CA: Universal Home Video, 1999. DVD.

Cat People. Directed by Jacques Tourneur. RKO, 1942. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2005. DVD.

César. Directed by Marcel Pagnol. Les Films Marcel Pagnol, 1936. New York: Interama Video Classics, 1991. VHS.

La Charrette fantôme. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Transcontinental, 1939. Neuilly-sur-Marne: SND, M6 Vidéo, Warner Home Video France, 2007. DVD.

Le Ciel est à vous. Directed by Jean Grémillon. Consortium du Film, 1944. New York: Criterion Collection, 2012.

Le Corbeau. Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot. Continental, 1943. New York: Criterion Collection, 2004. DVD.

Le Dernier de six. Directed by Georges Lacombe. Continental, 1941. Paris: Gaumont, 2010. DVD.

Les Diaboliques. Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot. Cinédis, 1955. New York: Criterion Collection, 1998. DVD.

L’Éternel retour. Directed by Jean Delannoy. DisCina, 1943. Paris: M6 Vidéo, Warner Home Video France, 2008. DVD.

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Fanny. Directed by Marc Allégret. Les Films Marcel Pagnol, 1932. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2008. DVD.

La Fiancée des ténèbres. Directed by Serge de Poligny. Éclair-Journal, 1945. Stras-bourg: Arte, 2002.

Figures de cire. Directed by Maurice Tourneur. 1914. Paris: Ateliers diffusion audio-visuelle, 1996. VHS.

Frankenstein. Directed by James Whale. Universal, 1931. Universal City, CA: Universal Home Viceo, 2004.

Le golem. Directed by Julien Duvivier. AB, 1936. Teaneck, NJ: Ergo Media, 1999.

VHS.

La Grande illusion. Directed by Jean Renoir. RAC, 1937. New York: Criterion Collection, 1999.

I Walked with a Zombie. Directed by Jacques Tourneur. RKO, 1943. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2005. DVD.

Le Jour se lève. Directed by Marcel Carné. Sigma, 1939. New York: Criterion Collection, Janus Films, 2009. DVD.

The Last of the Mohicans. Directed by Maurice Tourneur. Associated Producers, 1920. Sherman Oaks, CA: Slingshot Entertainment, 2000. DVD.

The Leopard Man. Directed by Jacques Tourneur. RKO, 1943. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2005. DVD.

Le Loup des Malveneur. Directed by Guillaume Radot. UTC, 1943. Le Plessis Robinson, Cinema Video Conseil, 1989. VHS.

La Lune à une mètre. Directed by Georges Méliès. Georges Méliès. 1898.

La Main du diable. Directed by Maurice Tourneur. Continental, 1942. Paris: Gaumont, 2010. DVD.

Le Manoir du diable. Directed by Georges Méliès. Georges Méliès. 1896.

Marius. Directed by Alexander Korda, Les Films Paramount, 1931. New York: Kino on Video, 2007. DVD.

Peeping Tom. Directed by Michael Powell. Michael Powell (Theatre), 1960.

New York: Criterion Collection, 1999. DVD.

Pépé le Moko. Directed by Julien Duvivier. Paris Film, 1937. New York: Criterion Collection, 2003. DVD.

The Poor Little Rich Girl. Directed by Maurice Tourneur. Artcraft, 1917. Pahrump, NV: Mad Phat Enterprises, 2007. DVD.

Le Quai des brumes. Directed by Marcel Carné. Ciné-Alliance, 1938. Paris: Studio-Canal Vidéo, Universal Music Group, 2004. DVD.

Sortilèges. Directed by Christian-Jaque. Moulin D’Or, 1945.

La Symphonie fantastique. Directed by Christian-Jaque. Continental, 1942. Paris: René Chateau Video, 2003. DVD.

Le Système de docteur Goudron et du professeur Plume. Directed by Maurice Tourneur. Société Française des Films Éclair, 1913.

Vampyr. Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer. Tobis, 1932. New York: Criterion Collection, 2008.

Les Visiteurs du soir. Directed by Marcel Carné. DisCina, 1942. New York: Criterion Collection, 2012. DVD.

Voyage dans la lune. Directed by Georges Méliès. Georges Méliès. 1902.

Chapter 11

“Always Hearing voices,
never Hearing Mine”

Sound and Fury in The snake pit

Karen Herland1

In 1948, audiences were thrown into The Snake Pit, director Anatole Litvak’s adaptation of Mary Jane Ward’s novel loosely based on her own experience in a mental institution. Both works offered a glimpse into a terrifying world in which personal agency is replaced by dependency on frustrated and over-burdened caretakers. The institution is honeycombed with winding corridors featuring locked doors and barred windows, which the camera captures in

“[h]igh angle shots reveal[ing] over-crowded wards with female patients wandering around aimlessly, crying, and begging doctors or nurses for help”

(Hollinger, 1992: 45). The title, shared by both novel and film, refers to
the barbaric practice of dropping the mentally ill into a pit of snakes on the assumption that if being surrounded by a slithering mass of snakes would drive a sane person mad, the same experience might shock an insane person back to sanity (Erb, 2006: 53). Paradoxically, instead of identifying an objective distinction between reason and madness, the snake pit illustrates how casually the line between reason and insanity can be established (or ignored).

The possibility that anyone can be tipped into the snake pit, that the insane might be hidden among us or, worse, might have authority over us—or that we ourselves are unstable—produced numerous films focusing on psycho-
logical aberrations, during the 1940s.2 Monsters on the screen emerged from
within the minds of neighbors, partners, and family members. This fascination may have been fueled by society’s recognition of the horrors of war and their impact on the men returning from the front. In a post–World War II context, the potential for psychological torture and the revelations of conditions in concentration camps all heightened fears about humanity’s capacity for monstrous behavior. The film plays with and against its subject matter.

Regularly described by critics and audiences as sensational and horrifying, Litvak was quoted as saying that his intention was to directly address such 203

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abuses and “awaken public interest in this vital matter, to reassure people that mental disorder is an illness which can be cured, and to direct attention to the
facilities now available in our institutions” (quoted in Fishbein, 1979: 644).

The promotional campaign stressed the film’s legitimacy since events were drawn from Ward’s observations during her eight months as a patient in New York’s Rockland State Hospital. Yet, the film digressed significantly from its source material. Ward’s 1946 novel about a creative woman at odds with gender expectations dissolves into a Freud-infused guilt complex with a Hollywood-style happily-ever-after resolution of marital domesticity. No longer just dependent on a medical diagnosis of her malaise, Ward’s protagonist, Virginia Cunningham, continues to be read through the competing interpretations of the filmmaker, critics, audiences, and academics, each attempting to fit her into an archetype.

The film opens with the camera focused tightly on an uncharacteristically disheveled Olivia de Havilland as Virginia, struggling to find her way back to her New York City apartment. Slowly, as she takes in the locked doors, barred windows, and crisply uniformed nurses barking endless orders at her and other women dressed in shapeless smocks, she realizes she is in an institution.

Still, she rationalizes her situation as research, source material for an article.

Virginia’s internal monologue tries to make sense of what the camera reveals as a strictly monitored environment rendered chaotic by the constant frustrations experienced by both patients and staff. Janet Walker writes: “The case of the sane outsider who enters the institution only to fall ill or be driven mad has a common counterpart; the case of the insider who imagines himself or herself sane” (1993: 90). Virginia’s blind insistence that she is sane is the evidence of her insanity. The opening scenes remain destabilizing for the audience who must slip in and out of the protagonist’s point of view. In Ward’s novel, this confusion persists through the first fifty pages, ending when Virginia acknowledges, “She really had been knowing it a long time but now she had to admit that she knew it. . . . Here in this bare dormitory that had no door, here on the narrow cot, clothed in a numbered nightgown, she lay with women who
were insane, and she was one of them” (Ward, 1946: 50–54). In the 108-min-
ute film, Virginia finally admits her circumstances at about the twenty-four-minute mark. By straddling the arbitrary line that identifies sanity, the viewer is forced to constantly assess the veracity of what is within the frame.

Litvak manages to blur the definition of sanity, a theme taken up regularly in Ward’s novel. Whether irreverent, frightened, or defiant, Ward’s Virginia repeatedly measures herself against the often-irrational behavior of those around her. She studies the patrons in an asylum cafeteria evaluating her own appearance against theirs. “I can’t tell which is which; maybe they can’t tell
about me” (Ward, 1946: 134). In the film, discussing her possible release with
her husband, Robert, Virginia muses: “Sometimes I think I’m not as sick as

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205
the others. But they say if you think you’re well, you’re really sick.” After a pause, she adds: “If I say I’m sick, maybe that means I’m well.” This slippage extends to staff, as Virginia later learns that one of her former nurses is now a patient in her ward, driven mad by the endless pressures of her responsibilities. The permeable division between sanity and insanity is in large part what makes both film and novel so frightening.

Litvak was shown the unpublished manuscript of Ward’s novel by a friend
at Random House in 1946 (Fishbein, 1979: 646). He immediately secured
the rights and the backing of Darryl Zanuck at 20th Century Fox. Litvak’s own interests encouraged him to develop the story in accordance with the growing influence of Freudian psychology in the 1940s. Litvak commis-sioned three different psychologists to draw up case studies of Virginia’s
character as if she were one of their patients (Fishbein, 1979: 650). This
manufactured Freudian analysis was superimposed onto Ward’s experiences and observations as the basis for the film’s narrative structure. Litvak considered several high profile actresses to portray Virginia before de Havilland was cast. Among them were Gene Tierney, who would later suffer her own nervous breakdown; Ginger Rogers; and de Havilland’s sister, Joan Fontaine.

Once the cast and crew were in place, Litvak had them spend hours visiting various hospitals for the insane, attending events and observing activities

(Fishbein, 1979: 654). De Havilland threw herself into the process, sitting in
on talk sessions between doctors and patients, witnessing electro-shock and hydrotherapy treatments, and attending dances similar to the one featured at the end of the film. De Havilland also consulted nearly a dozen psychiatrists to help her understand the external signs and symptoms of her character’s
mental illness (Fishbein, 1979: 654).

In seeking inspiration within asylums, Litvak was not just grounding
his film in authenticity, as he perhaps intended, but reaching back to an established tradition of rooting horror in the real. In Pretend We’re Dead, Annalee Newitz identifies the unflinching naturalism of the late nineteenth century culture as a precursor to the horror genre underscoring “violence as a metaphor for ordinary human relations, while at the same time pointing out the ordinariness of extreme violence” (2006: 16). Similarly, the excess of gore and mayhem associated with the Grand Guignol often drew from
contemporary medical and psychiatric practice. André de Lorde, one of the theater’s most prolific writers with 150 plays to his credit, collaborated with experimental psychologist Alfred Binet (just as Litvak had done with his trio of Freudian experts) to lend authority to his works.

Litvak’s vision was supported by the context of the film’s release, in which conditions in state asylums in the United States had become a national scandal. In 1946, while Litvak was reading Ward’s manuscript, Life maga-
zine presented a horrific photo series entitled “Bedlam 1946” (Erb, 2006: 48;

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Fishbein, 1979: 644). The multi-page spread featured appalling images of
naked, filthy, and neglected patients, often strapped down. The photos were accompanied by a damning text written by Albert Q. Maisel filled with terrifying descriptions of beatings, cruelty, corpses gnawed by rats, and comparisons to conditions in the concentration camps across the Atlantic. This was Life’s second such exposé. An earlier one, featuring photos taken at the Pilgrim State Hospital of Long Island, had been published in 1938.

Meanwhile, also in 1946, Albert Deutsch published a series of articles in a New York newspaper describing similar problems in a variety of state hospitals. These stories were republished as a book in 1948 (the same year The Snake Pit was released) under the title, The Shame of the States. The novel, collection, and film were indistinguishable at the time. “In the book,” writes Cynthia Erb,

“Deutsch lauded a passage from [Ward’s] novel that echoed the discourse of the exposés: ‘There wasn’t enough of anything at Juniper Hill. Not enough doctors, not enough nurses, not enough toilet paper, not enough food, not enough covers for cold nights. . . . There wasn’t enough of anything but patients.’”

(2006: 50; Ward, 1946: 253). The same issue of Time ran reviews of both The Snake Pit and Deutsch’s book, and compared the book’s descriptions of state hospital conditions with the film’s depiction as if they were interchangeable: But snake pits still exist. The Shame of the States, a recently published, chillingly factual report on conditions in state mental hospitals (see MEDICINE), reveals horrors in the midst of the world’s wealthiest, healthiest country which many Americans may refuse to believe. The large, hidden population of the mentally ill lives amid squalor, dirt and creeping fear, in the solitary confine-
ment of the sick mind and behind the walls of the world’s indifference. ( Time,

“Shocker,” 1948: paragraph 6)

The Time’s book reviewer writes:

Deutsch found New York’s Rockland State Hospital, the “Juniper Hill” of The Snake Pit (see CINEMA), one of the best, but even Rockland was 30%
overcrowded, with 6,100 patients jammed into space intended for 4,700. “The hospital needed at least twice as many doctors, twice as many nurses, and
three times as many attendants to provide adequate care and treatment.”( Time,

“Herded Like Cattle,” 1948: paragraph 4)

These conditions were regularly alluded to in the novel. The film, like Ward’s book, hints that an excuse to move Virginia into a different jurisdiction (her husband wants her to recuperate at his mother’s farm) have as much to do with her release as any actual “cure” of her breakdown. In fact, Ward herself was hospitalized three more times after her Rockland State Hospital stay

(McCoubrey, 2000: paragraph 13).

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Using a psychologically focused female-centered story to frame a gritty

“real-world” investigation into American mental health care, The Snake Pit manages to exploit various trends. When it was released, reviewers described it as a drama, a woman’s film, or a social problem picture. The female point of view was privileged through the 1940s as a nod to the wartime’s primarily
female audience (Tay, 2003; Waldman, 1984: 29). Simultaneously, during
the 1940s, social problems were regularly highlighted on the screen in serious, high profile films ( Life, 1948: 71).

The post–World War II era saw a spike in this type of drama, dubbed the

“problem picture” in promotion and publicity, in which an urgent social issue such as racial prejudice, anti-Semitism, juvenile delinquency, or alcoholism was dramatized in a high-profile production with major stars. Generally, the basis for the script was a novel of some renown. The problem picture was Hollywood’s attempt to deal with serious subject matter, something many moguls and producers claimed they strived to do at their studios. This subgenre garnered prestige for studio heads and producers, though they preferred not to court con-
troversy in the process. (Doll, TCM: paragraph 1)

Among those films were The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945) and Smash Up: The Story of a Woman (Stuart Heisler, 1947) both of which deal with alcoholism; Elia Kazan tackled anti-Semitism in Gentlemen’s Agreement (1947) (as did Edward Dymtryk in Crossfire, that same year) and racism in Pinky (1949). Much as these films were earnest in their portrayals, they generally resolved happily, pulling back from the problems they presented:

“Consistent with the patterns of Hollywood mythmaking, films of this type often ended on an optimistic note so that audiences could leave the theater reassured, their anxieties eased out to the margins” (Gabbard and Gabbard,

1987: 35).

As a high-profile, A-list film, The Snake Pit reflects studio directors’

instructions to “tone down” a scenario “brimming with scenes of violence
and horror” (Shortland, 1987: 425). The authors argue, in Psychiatry and the Cinema, that social problem pictures often rest on a border between education and exploitation (1987: 70). The Snake Pit straddled multiple genres, both “low” and “high,” and reviewers went out of their way to legitimate the film’s high-minded aspects:

Last week, in the opulent gloom of movie theaters in Manhattan and Chicago, the lovely woman screamed & screamed. For a moment, the scene looked exactly like the old-fashioned thrill shot that moviemakers call a

“cliff-hanger.” But what moviegoers were actually getting was a breathtaking
glimpse of an abyss in the infinite mountains of the mind. (“Shocker.” 1948:

paragraph 2)

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Time’s description of Virginia spans the range of styles the film manages to cover. Under the heading “Shocker,” the review acknowledges the frightening elements of the film while relocating the monster in the minds of contemporary individuals, instead of in the supernatural or fantastic, confirming
a trend in 1940s films identified by Jancovich (2007). As the Time quotation suggests, reviewers reinforced an artificial notion of high-mindedness by suggesting that the film eschewed the “old-fashioned thrill shot” to focus on the (apparently) more modern study of the inner workings of the human mind. Most reviewers excused or excised the terror of the film, and reassured potential audiences of the sophisticated goals of the film’s producers (quoting Litvak’s intention to “awaken public interest in this vital matter”). As Peter Remington warns: “Films which intend serious consideration of mental illness have to struggle against its common employment to evoke fear and tension” (2011: 144). This friction became a key element in how the film was discussed. For instance, Bosley Crowther of the New York Times emphasized the responsibility of the filmmakers who “shunned the obvious temptation to melodramatize insanity” concluding that “although it is frequently harrowing,
it is a fascinating and deeply moving film” (Crowther, 1948: paragraph 2).

This attempt to validate the film’s brutal content by leaning on its impec-cable research and purpose persists. In the filmography for their volume on psychiatry and cinema, the authors introduce the list by explaining that

“numerous low-budget movies of the horror and sex genres” have been omit-
ted from their work (Gabbord and Gabbord, 1987: 259). Even contemporary
reviewers seem reluctant to acknowledge the film’s potential to be considered as sensational: “The title of this film, The Snake Pit, seems more appropriate to a horror film than to a penetrating study of mental illness, but what could
be more horrifying than to lose one’s mind?” (Bailey, 2004: paragraph 1).

The film was presented, and received, as a gripping, authentic depiction of the difficulties of mental illness and how society inadequately addresses those problems. Much was made of The Snake Pit’s realism, in terms of its origins in the semi-autobiographical pages of Ward’s novel and its documentary-style presentation. In Canadian Forum the reviewer wrote, “no one would, I think, call it either art or entertainment. . . . The picture has the somewhat secondary impact of documentary” (Mosdell, 1948: 255). Far from artificial,

“the vast Hollywood machine designed to disguise and prettify reality had to be swung into reverse” ( Time, 1948: paragraph 11). The Time reviewer then went on to explain that hairdressers were banned from the set. Review
after review stressed the film’s social significance (Shortland, 1987), as in
this passage from Crowther’s review: “Most striking aspect of this picture is the forcefulness with which it makes us feel the dark confusion, distress and anguished yearnings of a person who is mentally ill. And this it does from a literal, straightforward and quietly objective point of view . . .”

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(1948: paragraph 3). Similarly, Life presented the film as well-balanced between fact and fiction, stressing its potential as a tool for social change rather than merely a diversion:

The Snake Pit is partly an introductory lecture in psychiatry, partly an exposé of neglect and overcrowding in state hospitals for mental diseases, partly a good old-fashioned freak show; but partly, and most importantly, it is Hollywood’s first honest and unflinching look into the minds of the insane with all their terror and bewilderment and frustration. ( Life, 1948: 71)

Michael Shortland, in describing the film’s British reception, identifies numerous ways in which The Snake Pit was presented as more fact than fiction. He quotes the reaction of a reviewer from the British Board of Film Censors: The drastic and alarming “shock therapy” and the “tubs and wet pack” cure, plus the strait jacket and forcible feeding, read more like nazi [sic] tortures than curative methods. It is a repellent picture that emerges from the fogged descriptions given by the muddled mind of this insane woman . . . a film should not be made of this book because there is so little story . . . As the therapeutic treatment is described from only the patient’s point of view it appears almost horrific. I fail to see how a certificate could be given to any version of this unpleasant book.

(quoted in Shortland, 1987: 426)

Ultimately, with nearly ten minutes of the more objectionable material excised, and preceded by an on screen advisory that conditions in Britain were different than those depicted, the film was released in the UK for adults over sixteen. Its reception there remained troubled. “The Sunday Times announced in a headline that it was ‘A DANGEROUS FILM’ and the Daily Express described it as ‘TERRIBLE,’ asking ‘WHY WAS IT MADE?’”

(1987: 424). As Shortland points out, this reception, along with reports of viewers driven mad by watching the film (1987: 426) seem calculated to boost the film’s audience more than anything else: “At no point in the mass of criticism directed to the [ sic] Snake Pit did anyone ever point out that the film was, after all, a Hollywood artifact, written by scriptwriters, played by actors, and produced by the vast resources of 20th Century-Fox” (1987: 427).

Critical and audience response, both positive and negative, were often directed at the psychiatric community and the state medical system. Attention for the actors, writers, and crew focused on their bravery, dedication, and ideals, not on their ability to do their jobs. The film was marketed through its source material’s authenticity (Doll, TCM), and Litvak’s principled commitment to realism and research, all of which placed the production above
reproach. In the wake of its ultimately successful, and prize-laden release,3 it was even credited as responsible for changing conditions in mental hospitals

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in twenty-six states—as touted in studio press releases. Peter Roffman and Jim Purdy distance The Snake Pit from other, more superficial Hollywood efforts to address societal ills in their study of social problem pictures precisely because of its perceived role as a catalyst to institutional reform (Roff-
man and Purdy, 1981: 304). Despite the overwhelming condemnation of the
conditions and treatment in traditional state hospitals, the film is ambivalent on the subject. Virginia’s doctor represents “modern” psychoanalytic practice, yet in direct opposition to traditional talk therapy methods, Dr. Kik requests electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) and narco-hypnosis in order to
more quickly “reach” his patient (Erb, 2006: 50; Walker, 1993: 95). These
events are harrowing in the novel:

They put a wedge under her back. It was most uncomfortable. It forced her back into an unnatural position. She looked at the dull glass eye that was set into the wall and she knew that soon it would glow and that she would not see the glow.

They were going to electrocute her. (Ward, 1948: 43)

After this scene, the novel abruptly shifts to a new chapter, leaving the impression that the entire episode yielded no impact. However, in the film, the outcome is strangely contradictory:

ECT is made to appear grotesque by means of camera angles and orchestral crescendo on the sound track. To emphasize the excruciating pain of the process, the film focuses on the contraption forced into the mouth of the victimized patient. . . . However after exploiting the melodramatic aspects of electroshock, Snake Pit goes on to endorse its positive effects: after a few sessions, the
patient’s condition begins to improve. (Gabbard and Gabbard, 1987: 36)

These results allow Dr. Kik to finally begin analysis. While the film may have exposed problems within the state hospital system, its half-hearted nod to a psychoanalytic alternative was both inauthentic and unsustainable. The likelihood that such an intensive psychoanalytic treatment would (or ever could) be available in the over-extended setting of a state mental institution is entirely unrealistic. The inadequacy of the film’s endorsement of an individual, psychoanalytic solution for a collective problem has been criticized

(Cvetcovich, 1992: 2; Fishbein, 1979: 643). As one contemporary reviewer
observed: “Judging by The Snake Pit, the outlook for any mental patient who is not, so to speak, Olivia de Havilland, and who cannot afford individual treatment outside a state institution, is none too bright” (Mosdell quoted in

Fishbein, 1979: 655). Gabbard and Gabbard again suggest this is due to a

Hollywoodesque simplification, “the recovery of the heroine seems designed to make the audience forget the distress of the mental patients that are left behind” (1987: 68).

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This unrealistic cure also serves to shift the focus from the novel’s female protagonist to the film’s apparently flawless physician. In the film, Virginia’s inability to accept her (limited) role as an adult woman is the problem and her cure is attributed to the tireless ministrations of the ever-present Dr. Kik.

The good doctor is unfailingly available to meet with Virginia for impromptu discussions, even in the middle of the night, when she fakes an appendicitis attack. Time’s reviewer balked at this oppressively kindly depiction of the doctor whose screen time is frequently framed under his office portrait of Freud: “Dr. Kik is the ideal psychoanalyst—patient, handsome, experienced and endowed with a deep, beautiful voice as intricately gentle as a surgeon’s hands. He is the perfect Freudian knight and the picture’s real hero” ( Time, 1948: paragraph 14). Gabbard and Gabbard refer to him as a “godlike thera-pist surrounded by grotesquely disturbed patients in a chaotic institution”

(1987: 78). While the book focused on the monstrous injustices of the overcrowded, understaffed asylum system, “[the film’s] actual indictment of the American mental institution is quite limited . . . evidencing a strong tendency
to support authoritarian psychiatric practice” (Walker, 1993: 94).

Given the validation The Snake Pit received as a book (it was translated into several languages, enjoyed status as a Book-of-the-Month selection, and was anthologized for Readers Digest) (Fishbein, 1979: 646), it is remarkable
that the film’s narrative diverges so significantly from its origins. Although individual scenes from the book are recreated in the film, the overarching construction of the story is vastly different. Writes Frank Miller in TCM’s online archive:

In adapting Ward’s novel, the screenwriters changed the nature of both Virginia’s condition and her cure. In the book, Virginia’s mental illness is brought on after years of marriage by the economic failure of her husband, a leftist writer, and by the strain of trying to maintain her own writing career while also serving as wife and mother. For the film, they turned her problems into a father fixation intensified when her first fiancé, a controlling male, dies in a car crash. (TCM, “Articles” Miller: 9)

The book’s depiction of an accomplished woman, mother, and author who is temporarily sidetracked by financial pressures provoked by her non-con-formist husband, is reformulated by the filmmakers as a fairy tale in which her indefatigable doctor’s main objective is to have her embrace her role as a young bride. Dr. Kik’s psychoanalysis superimposed onto Ward’s original experience becomes a ploy to get Virginia to accept her status as a wife (Robert literally returns the ring to her finger as they leave the hospital). This rein-terpretation of the story was the focus of a series of academic articles from the late seventies through to the nineties that sought to reclaim Virginia as a radi-
cal feminist heroine.4 The chronicling of “Virginia’s recovery largely through

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her own struggles” in the book is altered in the film “to her doctor’s use of Freudian psychoanalysis to get to the roots of her mental illness” (TCM,

Miller; also Fishbein, 1979). An early reviewer of the book, Orville Prescott,
celebrated the author’s original ambivalent stance on psychoanalysis. In his New York Times review, Prescott wrote:

The cause of Virginia’s mental collapse is never revealed. Psychiatry cannot always discover the cause. Recoveries are sometimes made anyway. “The Snake Pit” might have had greater interest and force if Virginia’s malady had been neatly explained. But it might also have seemed too pat and so less convincing.

Miss Ward has wisely left to others the dangerous mantle of psychiatric omni-
science. (quoted in Fishbein, 1979: 645)

In Ward’s novel, Virginia, and eventually her husband, Robert, are skeptical
of Dr. Kik’s motives (Fishbein, 1979: 648). He seems inconsistent in his care
and uncommitted to his treatment of Virginia. Ward’s original protagonist challenges Dr. Kik’s analysis of her problems repeatedly; privately, to Robert and to other doctors, dismissing it as “the sort of thing that would be nice in a book.” Time’s reviewer complained:

The heroine’s case history is based on precisely the kind of Freudian detective work which the book avoided. . . . [and] remains artistically the weakest part of the picture. Perhaps if King Lear or Hamlet had been written with the assistance of three prominent psychiatrists, the great tragedies would have bogged down in clinical detail and collapsed under the weight of father complexes and mother fixations. ( Time, 1948: paragraph 18)

Many feminist scholars have criticized the film for redefining the source of Virginia’s malaise. Beyond merely manufacturing a Hollywood happy
ending (Gabbard and Gabbard, 1987: 35), or as an attempt to cash in on the
growing popularity of psychoanalysis, authors including Fishbein, Walker, and Semarne argue that this represents a shift in authority, from female protagonist to male doctor and from female author to male director. These scholars criticize the film’s effort to locate the monster in Virginia, herself.

Released at a time when the social pendulum was swinging back towards a

McCarthy-era definition of conservatism and conformity (Appignanesi, 2008:

306–7), The Snake Pit can be read as operating within long cultural tradition of using the terrifying spectre of madness to determine and control female
behaviour (Appignanesi, 2008; Zambreno, 2012). Certainly, the film reduces
social disruptions to individual failures—blaming and medicalizing women who can’t, or won’t, fulfill prescribed roles.

Although her relationship to husband Robert is solid in the book, Virginia’s marriage problems are key to the Freudian premise of the film. The film’s

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original marketing contradicted the social problem angle with the tagline,

“Married and in Love . . . with a Man She Didn’t Know or Want!” Initially, in the film, Virginia regularly presents herself as both married, and without a husband in her conversations with Dr. Kik (“That is strange, isn’t it?” she says when he confronts her). Dr. Kik describes her condition as “a complete inability to accept his love.” Feminist scholars have interpreted Virginia’s denial of her husband’s existence as a rejection of him and an attempt to escape the confines of marriage (Semarne, 1994; Walker, 1993). However, acknowledging Virginia’s context suggests an alternate reading. As she makes sense of life inside the hospital, she realizes that she is entirely dependent on the staff to get her a light for her cigarette, a square of toilet paper, or passage through a locked door. Whenever she sees Robert, she doubts it’s

“really” him. This suspicion could be due not to rejection, but a manifestation of her fears that “they” have once again decided to intervene between herself and her most basic needs.

The film’s complication of the institution of marriage echoes a long history of Gothic horror, familiar to 1940s audiences as what Mary Anne Doane characterized as paranoid women’s films. In these films, women are dependent on a husband (often older and established) whose intentions, motives and trustworthiness she doubts. 5 It is possible that post-war female audiences
related to Virginia’s anxieties about her husband. This notion of “marrying a stranger” was a regular theme of many Hollywood films of the 1940s, reflecting “the increase in early marriages in the 1940s, and the process of wartime
separation and reunion” (Waldman, 1984: 31). By predicating Virginia’s
recovery on her acceptance of her marriage, the film echoes Gothic tropes yet again. As has been argued, the inevitable ending for a classic/traditional Gothic romance is marriage. There can be no further adventures, sequels, or chapters because that would suggest that the marriage was somehow flawed,
and undermine the protagonist’s appeal in the first place (Mussell: 66 in Flee-
nor, 1983). This resolution is evident in Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940),
where the young bride realizes that her predecessor is in no way her rival, leaving her free to finally relax into her role as wife. However, this distrust in traditional marriage, however brief or misguided, opens the text to the possi-
bility for adventure. In Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944), the new bride rightly
suspects her husband as responsible for an active campaign to take advantage of her. Waldman writes that, “although the Gothic mode has always permitted the articulation of feminine fear, anger, and distrust of the patriarchal order, the films of the war and post-war period place an unusual emphasis on the affirmation of feminine perception, interpretation, and lived experience”

(Waldman, 1984: 29). She goes on to argue that Gothic fiction shares with
both horror and fantasy fiction the ambiguity of whether specific events or motives are revealed to be benign or sinister as the central plot point. In the

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cinema, the burden of interpretation falls to both the (female) protagonist and viewer, and its narrative resolution “carries with it the ideological function
of validation or invalidation of feminine experience” (Waldman, 1984: 31).

The feminist scholars who have revisited The Snake Pit argue that, in the film, Virginia’s perspective is eclipsed by Dr. Kik’s analysis. They suggest that Litvak’s production undermined the female point of view characteristic of so much Gothic fiction and sent a not-so-subtle message to its female audience that it was time for them to leave the working world they had occupied during the war effort and to return home, under the care of their misunderstood husbands. Both Dr. Kik and Robert are almost interchangeable in their roles in the film, each one regularly supporting the position and claim of the other over Virginia’s well-being. The two men first appear on screen together and, after a brief exchange with Virginia, they retreat to exchange information and better understand what is wrong with her. The men’s joint interpretation of Virginia’s experiences fits the film into a larger trope shared by many of the paranoid women’s films: “the unusual emphasis on the point of view of the heroine has been put to the service of the invalidation of feminine perception and interpretation, equating feminine subjectivity with some kind of false consciousness, as the male character ‘corrects’ the heroine’s
false impressions” (Waldman, 1984: 33; Jancovich, 2007). As in Gaslight, where the protagonist’s fears must be confirmed by a (well-meaning) male detective, in order to be believed.

Fishbein suggests it was the filmmakers’ desire to dictate appropriate female behavior that led to the narrative shift. She quotes a text contemporary with the production of The Snake Pit that neatly encapsulates efforts to reverse the impact that the demands of wartime had on women:

The effect of this “masculinization” on women is becoming more apparent daily. Their new exertions are making demands on them for qualities wholly opposed to the experience of feminine satisfaction. As the rivals of men, women must, and insensibly do, develop the characteristics of aggression, dominance, independence and power. These are qualities which insure success as co-equals in the world of business, industry and the professions. The distortion of character under pressure of modern attitudes and upbringing is driving women steadily deeper into personal conflict soluble only by psychotherapy. ( Modern Women: The Lost Sex [1947], quoted in Fishbein, 1979: 657)

It is no accident that post-war observers saw psychotherapy as a solution to problems related to pressures created by changing social norms. The desire to normalize through control holds specific meanings in the context of women and madness. The figure of the Madwoman in the Attic serves as both a manifestation of the risks associated with breaking the rules, and as a threat to

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those who are expected to maintain them. In this way, a diagnosis of insanity carries with it the power to determine who is and is not credible, and their appropriate sphere.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman pointed this out in an essay she wrote contextualizing her publication of the classic Gothic nightmare, The Yellow Wallpaper (1892). In that novella, the protagonist (as with Ward, loosely based on Gilman’s own experiences) suffers a post-partum breakdown and is ordered by her doctor to give up writing, or intellectual activity of any sort and to surrender to complete rest in order to restore her senses. Writes Gilman in any essay,

This wise man sent me home with solemn advice to “live as domestic a life as possible” to “have but two hours intellectual life a day” and “never to touch pen, brush or pencil again” as long as I lived. I went home and obeyed those directions and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.

(Gilman, 1913 reprinted in Golden, 1992: 52)

Kate Zambreno describes Gilman’s physician, Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell’s, belief that women “got sick because they were trying to be like men when really they should be kept in an infantile state” (2012: 56–57). In her essay, Gilman presages the passage quoted by Fishbein, that the source of the pressure is identified very differently for men and women:

and the “nervous breakdown” which is more conspicuous when the sufferer

[male] is in business, is assumed to be a consequence of that business. If the breakdown occurs in the home [female], it is then alleged to be due to the pressure of “outside interests” conflicting with the “natural” domestic ones. (202) In opposition to this double standard, Gilman argued against a cure of reducing stimulation in favor of one that embraces it.

If the label of madness can be used to reinforce the legitimacy of social roles, how stable is the diagnosis? In the early seventies Dr. D. L. Rosenhan published a paper in Science magazine called: “Being Sane in Insane Places”

based on a study designed to assess the existence of an objective definition of sanity. The thesis was tested by having eight individuals present themselves at different state-run hospitals with invented symptoms, which, after being admitted, immediately were subsumed by accurate representations of each of their own experiences. All of these essentially sane individuals found themselves hospitalized for between seven and fifty-two days. Rosenhan suggests that the hospital itself conveys a particular lens through which behavior is interpreted, such that it appears mad in the context of the asylum’s wards, instead of as a response to the circumstances that a patient is exposed to.

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In other words, the label of insanity supersedes any external influence as the source of antisocial or non-compliant behavior. The paper enumerates example after example of ways that the pseudo-patients were ignored or dismissed. Ultimately patients were “shorn of their credibility by dint of their
psychiatric label” (Rosenhan, 1973: 250). This was borne out repeatedly
in the article Maisel published in Life magazine in 1946. At one point, he describes a patient being bullied, threatened, and finally beaten by an attendant for not moving out of another attendant’s way before it was discovered that the patient was strapped down and unable to move (105).

The fluidity of the definition of sanity and the weight of that “psychiatric label” are the foundation for the compelling theme of madness in the horror canon. In his attempt to define horror, Noël Carroll talks how protagonists in horror stories have the burden of proof to convince others that the monster
really exists, that the impossible/unimaginable has manifested itself (Carroll,

1987: 57). For those seeking to leave the mental hospital, the opposite bur-
den of proof exists. The asylum makes it less likely that the protagonist who protests his sanity will be heard/believed, since their context neutralizes the power of their words. In the film, patients fruitlessly demand, cajole, or beg passing staff members to release them. As Zambreno so deftly argues in her compelling reflection on women and madness:

This is the fiction behind our medical model of mental illness—that a diagnosis by a doctor (by one doctor, several doctors) somehow makes it real, when it is instead rhetoric constructed and corroborated by authorities who have much at
stake in the terms that they themselves invented. (Zambreno, 2012: 204)

As Walker puts it:

The psychic states “mad” and “sane” are reexpressed in physical terms as

“inside” and “outside” the institution. But the institution is not such a dictatorial signifier where inside equals mad and outside equals sane; rather it is a spatial signifier of the two available options and their inevitable relation. (1993: 89) In the context of the women’s films of the 1940s, this tension is exacerbated by a gendered binary of rational/irrational, medical/emotional, male/female.

Ward brilliantly evokes this truism in her novel when she complains that Dr. Kik is: “always talking about hearing voices and never hearing mine”

(1948: 43).

As Virginia is threatened, ignored, and taken advantage of by those
around her, she finds herself (like the protagonists in paranoid women’s films) unsure of her own interpretations of events: “Narratively the woman herself is often uncertain whether to trust her own perceptions or not, and
therefore often fears that she is going mad” (Jancovich, 2007). In The Snake

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Pit, the protagonist is mad, at least she carries that diagnosis. As Fishbein has argued, the film incorrectly locates its tension in the protagonist, not society (1979: 656) identifying as madness what could be considered a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation. Given that the post-war context focused a lot of attention on the psychological damage the war
had caused to those men who returned from the front (Appignanesi, 2008:

303), it is interesting the film turns on a woman’s inability to cope with
social pressures. “The film,” suggests Fishbein, “ignores the pressures experienced by the literary heroine in trying to combine housework and writing and in coping with her husband’s failure to fulfill the traditional
male role of breadwinner” (Fishbein, 1979: 656). Mistakenly locating the
source of madness not in external pressures but in internal inadequacies is echoed in Rosenhan’s conclusion that an individual patient’s violent or anti-social behavior might actually be attributable to the artificial (external) conditions of the asylum setting, instead of simply presuming all behavior to be a reflection of the existing diagnosis of madness. In 1888, journalist Nellie Bly underwent a similar experiment when she had herself declared insane to experience, first-hand, conditions in the Woman’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island. “Not to be confined alone, but to be a companion, day and night, of senseless, chattering lunatics, to sleep with them, to be
considered one of them, was an uncomfortable position” (Bly, 1888: Loc.

719 of 1953). After ten days of being forced to eat rotten food and bathe in
shared, frigid bathwater while watching the women around her incessantly mistreated, mocked, and beaten by the staff, she also concluded that the asylum itself contributed to the inmate’s anti-social behavior. “What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment?” (loc. 1068 of 1953). Similarly, for Gilman and her contemporaries, activities in opposition to their domestic roles were understood as the source of their malaise, not the
confines of their homes (Zambreno, 2012: 56).

In Litvak’s film, Virginia’s unreliability becomes part of the mood of isolation and horror that the audience shares. The viewer feels all the more threatened when the camera contradicts the soundtrack, as in the opening scenes when Virginia’s efforts to get home are belied by her institutional surroundings. The viewer is inclined to believe Virginia’s voice-over, “to
identify with her madness auditorially” (Walker, 1993: 103), and sound
becomes not just the medium for Virginia’s point of view to be conveyed, it is also strongly associated with madness, throughout the film. Litvak’s early research included recording the sounds in the dormitories at night to capture the atmosphere in an asylum. Time magazine noted the impact of that effort: “the soundtrack weaves a chilling pattern of the weeping, moaning and plaintive singing that come from the separate nightmares” ( Time, 1948: paragraph 20). It is worth noting that, despite a half-dozen Oscar nominations

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including for de Havilland’s performance, Litvak’s direction, and for best picture, the only statue the film won was for sound.

The disruption between sound and image separates the audience from

Virginia’s experiences to a degree not present in the novel: “The impact of the original novel,” argues critic D. Mosdell, “is more personal and immediate than that of the film, because from the beginning, the points of view of the patient and of the reader are as nearly identical as the author’s considerable talent allowed. The film audience’s point of view is almost entirely that of the spectator, surveying the patient . . .” (1948: 255). The audience becomes a pawn in what Karen Hollinger has called “narrative battles for control of the story between various competing elements in the text, a dichotomy between word and image, and a proliferation of point of view” (Hollinger, 1992: 35).

She argues against the interpretation of Doane, Fishbein, Walker, and others who see this split as a deliberate effort to destabilize or attack the female nar-
rator (Doane, 1987, 150–152) by suggesting that the aural/visual split, opens
up the possibility for reading between the frames: “The female spectator is not denied a subject position in regard to these texts . . . but rather is placed in a position that encourages a reading of the contradictions expressed through
this word/image dichotomy” (Hollinger, 1992: 36). The viewer can watch the
supposedly mad protagonist act out in inappropriate ways (which often gets her punished) while identifying wither her freedom to challenge conventions and expectations of her role or gender more easily than a reliable protagonist would be able to do. This opens up another way to reinsert Gothic tropes into the women’s films of the 1940s. Karen F. Stein suggests:

In the Gothic mirror, the self is reflected in the extreme poses of rebel, outcast, obsessive seeker of forbidden knowledge, monster. Monsters are particularly prominent in the work of women writers, because for women, the roles of rebel, outcast, seeker of truth, are monstrous in themselves. For a man to rebel, to leave a comfortable home and to search for truth are noble acts . . . For women, however, such assertions of questing self-hood have been deemed bizarre and
crazy. (Stein, in Fleenor, 1983: 123)

In her 2007 monograph on the association of women with madness, Lisa

Appignanesi explores the relationship between disobedience, defiance, and madness, a context that shifted the role of the asylum from one of treatment to one of punishment (349). This pattern is borne out by the inevitability of images of straitjackets, and restraints after every instance of Virginia’s frus-
tration with the unfairness or inappropriateness of her situation (Fishbein,

1979; Semarne, 1994). Certainly, this conflation of psychoanalysis with punishment, or an effort to dictate appropriate behaviour was a common by-product of the popularity of Freudian principles and methods. The late 1940s and early 1950s were a highpoint of using either criminalization, or

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institutionalization to shut up (and shut away) those who did not conform to the mainstream. Ironically, Leif Erikson, the actor who played Virginia’s original, domineering fiancé in The Snake Pit, had seen his real-life ex-wife, actress Frances Farmer, institutionalized by her own mother when she refused to conform to her role a Hollywood leading lady. Zambreno rightly identifies the artificial pressures of the star system as the reason Farmer cracked, rather than any fault of her own (2012: 56). Farmer endured the electroshock and hydrotherapy treatments featured in the film during her own incarceration at a variety of West Coast hospitals in the United States. Years later, on an episode of This is Your Life, these painful experiences are carted out for TV
viewers under the guise of entertainment. She responds: “I didn’t think then, and I still don’t, that I was actually sick, but there were so many people who did think I was mentally ill that I just had to find out why . . . Well, you know, if you get treated like a patient, you’re apt to act like one.”

The theme of asylum incarceration as punishment figures more directly in another madhouse-themed film released just two years before The Snake Pit. RKO’s Bedlam (Mark Robson, 1946) centers on the inhumane conditions in an asylum loosely based on eighteenth-century London’s Bethlehem Royal Hospital. At the time, tuppence could allow anyone to tour the hospital (known as “Bedlam”) to view the antics of the insane as entertainment. The film pits the defiant Nell Bowen (played by Anna Lee) against Boris Karloff as George Sims, Bedlam’s cruel director. Bowen’s efforts to improve the conditions for those in the asylum are not only thwarted by Sims, he tries to silence her by having her declared insane and locked in the very institution she has condemned. Lewton’s film addresses the horrors of asylum life, but distances his audience by setting the action in the past.

As Rosenhan’s 1973 study would later demonstrate, any clever observa-
tions Virginia makes are dismissed as manifestations of her illness. Fishbein says this “undermines Virginia’s genuine radicalism, her ability to discern the fundamentally coercive nature of seemingly benevolent institutions, by portraying it as a symptom of disease” (1979: 662). Virginia must negotiate endless days and nights spent at the mercy of the Juniper Hill State Hospital’s patients and its overextended, often capricious staff, whose behavior seems as petty, irrational, and destructive as the patients’. Yet, even as her sanity, hence authority, is in question, she remains fairly adept at identifying the unfair, or unreasonable in what goes on around her. She mocks a nurse’s efforts to keep a floor-rug pristine by refusing to allow anyone to step on it: “Why not put it on the wall?” Later, a scene where an incompetent doctor keeps jabbing his finger in Virginia’s face cuts to wild footage of ocean waves crashing against a cliff. The audience eventually learns that Virginia snapped, and is now wrapped in canvas in tepid tubs (a “cure” known as hydrotherapy). When we discover Virginia bit the haranguing doctor’s finger “her defiance seems as
reasonable as it is crowd-pleasing” (Gabbard and Gabbard, 1987: 71).

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As viewers, we relate to Virginia’s frustrations, recognizing how often she is forced to pay for the dissatisfactions of the hospital staff. She responds to the nurses pinning her down before her electroshock treatment by observing,

“three against one, no fair . . .” before being cut off when they force a gag into her mouth. Much later, when she comes back to her senses in the tubs, she chastises one of the nurses for referring to Virginia as “uts-nay” in discussion with another nurse. While some of these situations are clearly intended to be humorous, others cut more sharply. When Dr. Kik visits her in the tubs, she articulates her feeling of betrayal “your voice is sweet but it drips with poison and lies. I know you and I hate you.” This indictment also stresses the verbal and aural we associate with Virginia over the image of the concerned doctor going out of his way to check in on a patient. Later, when she angers a nurse by pointing out her very obvious attraction to Dr. Kik “the Freudian knight,” the nurse’s cold, silent response frightens Virginia and she tries, unsuccessfully, to take back what she said. Instead, she ends up locked in a bathroom in a standoff with nurses, who promise to let her see her husband if she comes out. She emerges, only to be chased down by the nurses, brandish-ing a straitjacket. Her desperate cries of “Liars, Liars,” sound insane, though, essentially “Virginia is punished for acting out in response to what the plot presents as unjust treatment, the institution is implicated in the compounding
of her madness” (Walker, 1993: 100). Again, the solution can more properly
be seen as the cause.

The question becomes whether Virginia’s breakdown is a result of the
pressures of society’s expectations on her as a woman (the need to follow her husband blindly towards certain financial ruin, the stresses of attempting to succeed as an author while being solely responsible for raising a family and maintaining a home), or of her rejection of those unrealistic, unfulfilling expectations. What would be considered a reasonable response in another context is, because it is articulated from within the asylum, understood as a manifestation of her insanity. However, a broader evaluation of the context of the film’s release suggests that this is not necessarily how such a message was received. Ultimately, the film’s point of view is key to its interpretation.

While many critics have read the film simply as a domestication of Virginia’s character, the film might have actually been cathartic for female audiences by expressing their fears of being forced back into post-war domesticity (Hanson citing Modelski and Waldman in 2007: 47–48). At another point in the film, Virginia describes her dedication to improving her writing during adoles-cence. The parallel between successful author Ward’s novel and Gilman’s notion of writing-as-agency in The Yellow Wallpaper is clear here. However, Dr. Kik later corrects Virginia by labeling this behavior not as ambition, but as self-sabotage: a way of depriving herself of romantic connection, because of her unresolved father issues. Virginia’s cure and release depend on her ability to echo the assumptions and values of the hospital staff. By the end

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of the film, Virginia entirely defers to Kik’s explanations, as Veda Semarne notes:

On one hand, the film allows the spectator to identify intimately with an intelligent, witty, suffering female protagonist from whose point of view the story is told, and who often pulls away from her situation, observing herself and others with a critical eye. On the other hand, it salutes the patriarchy by sending the female protagonist home after a short bout of independence from her mate.

During which she might have reasoned herself out of marriage and more deeply
into her professional life. (Semarne, 1994: 144)

However, Virginia has at this point spent several months in Juniper Hill, by complying, with Dr. Kik’s analysis of Virginia’s problems, female audience members, like Virginia herself, can finally have their freedom.

In many ways, Virginia seems distanced from her entire hospitalization.

Her own epiphany about her relationship to the other patients comes after her stalemate with the lying nurses leads her to the ward where those cases considered hopeless are confined. Surrounded by muttering, pleading, wail-ing patients in a high angle shot intended to make the ward resemble a writh-ing snake pit, Virginia realizes she is in fact different from those around her.

That knowledge marks the turning point toward her release. Even in her final interview with the hospital staff, when one of the doctors asks her to describe her illness as a way to reinforce Kik’s “remarkable results applying psychotherapy almost exclusively,” (ignoring the various other “treatments” she has received), all she can do is defer to his wisdom. “I’d have to be a doctor to put
it into the right words . . .” (Walker, 1993: 97). She never truly incorporates
the explanation Dr. Kik provides for her breakdown.

Several scholars have argued that this situation literally takes the words out of Virginia’s mouth, silencing the aural perspective she brings to the film. Walker argues that the film equates speaking not with finding a voice,
but with being able to echo information provided (Walker, 1993: 98). The
film becomes a battle for the author/authority of the story: the slippery line between us and them that Virginia wrestles with, that Rosenhan studied and that Litvak exploited to create the monsters in his film. Litvak’s dis-sonance in terms of point of view can be read as simply a cinematic device to destabilize the audience and disrupt the narrative, but that crack opens the possibility of multiple readings for post-war female audiences. It is possible that Virginia simply decided to stop arguing in exchange for her freedom

“because the undercutting or subversion of the female first-person voice-over does not necessarily eliminate its importance as a means of introducing
woman related issues into the text” (Hollinger, 1992: 35). In other words, the
film serves not as a cautionary tale on how to comply with gender expectations, but as a blueprint on how to read against them.

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noTes

1. This chapter could not have been possible without the formidable editing skills of Kristopher Woofter. As always, capable of seeing the thread.

2. In addition to The Snake Pit, films dealing with the theme of mental illness would include titles some titles listed by Mary Anne Doane in her study of the medical discourse in film as The Cat People (Jacques Tourneur 1942); Now Voyager (Irving Rapper 1942); Lady in the Dark (Mitchell Leisen 1944); Dark Mirror (Robert Siodmak 1946); A Stolen Life (Curtis Bernhardt 1946); Bedlam (Mark Robson, 1946) The Locket (John Brahm 1946); Shock (Alfred Werker 1946); Possessed (Curtis Bernhardt 1947); Johnny Belinda (Jean Negulesco 1948); Beyond the Forest (King Vidor 1949); Whirlpool (Otto Preminger 1949) (Doane, 1987, 189 en3).

3. The film was nominated for the following Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Direction, Best Writing (Screenplay), Best Actress and Best Music (Scoring Dramatic or Comedy Picture). It won an Oscar for Best Sound Recording. As Virginia, de Havilland won the New York Critics Award for Best Acting of 1948, the Foreign Language Press Film Critics’ award for best actress of the year, and a Venice Film Festival Award. The Foreign Language Press Film Critics association also voted The Snake Pit as the Best Picture of 1948. The Committee of American Psychologists credited the picture with “awakening the public to the deplorable conditions existing in public institutions for the mentally ill” and gave it an award for “outstanding contribution by the entertainment industry to the field of mental health.” The film also received recognition for its script (TCM: Notes paragraph 7 http://www.tcm.com/
tcmdb/title/90607/The-Snake-Pit/notes.html).

4. The first of such critiques was published by Leslie Fishbein in 1979 (in “The Snake Pit [1948]: The Sexist Nature of Sanity.” See also: Mary Anne Doane, 1987, The Desire to Desire [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press]; Janet Walker, 1993, Couching Resistance [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press]; and Veda Semarne, 1994, “The Snake Pit: A Woman’s Serpentine Journey toward (W)holeness”

[ Literature Film Quarterly 22(3): 144–50]).

5. A partial list of these films includes: Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), Suspicion (1941), Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943), Dark Waters (Andre de Toth, 1944), Experiment Perilous (Jacques Tourneur, 1944), Jane Eyre (Robert Stevenson, 1944), Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944), Dragonwyck (Joseph Mankiewic, 1946), The Two Mrs Carrols (Peter Godfrey, 1947), The Spiral Staircase (Robert Siodmak, 1946), Secret Beyond the Door (Fritz Lang, 1948), Caught (Max Ophuls, 1949), and Under Capricorn (Alfred Hitchcock, 1949) (Hanson, 2007: 40).

ReFeRenCes

Appignanesi, Lisa. 2008. Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors.

New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

Bailey, Matthew. 2004. “The Snake Pit Not coming to a Theatre Near You.” Accessed July 16, 2013. http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/snakepit/

Bly, Nellie. 1888. Ten Days in a Mad House, Kindle edition.

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Carroll, Noël. 1987. “The Nature of Horror.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46(1): 51–59.

Crowther, Bosley. 1948. “‘Snake Pit,’ Study of Mental Ills Based on Mary Jane Ward’s Novel, Opens at Rivoli.” New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/
movie/review?res=9901E5DF143CE733A25756C0A9679D946993D6CF

Cvetkovich, Ann. 1992. Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Doane, Mary Anne. 1987. The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Doll, Susan. n.d. “The Snake Pit.” Turner Classic Movies. Accessed July 1, 2013.

http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/90607/The-Snake-Pit/articles.html

Erb, Cynthia. 2006. “Have You Ever Seen the inside of One of Those Places?: Psycho, Foucault, and the Postwar Context of Madness.” Cinema Journal, 45(4): 45–63.

Fishbein; Leslie. 1979. “ The Snake Pit (1948): The Sexist Nature of Sanity.”

American Quarterly 31(5): 641–65.

Fleenor, Juliann ed. 1983. The Female Gothic. Montreal: Eden Press.

Gabbard, Krin and Glen. 1987. Psychiatry and the Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Golden, Catherine. 1992. The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on “The Yellow Wallpaper.” New York: Feminist Press.

Hanson, Helen. 2007. Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and The Female Gothic Film. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

“Herded like Cattle.” 1948. Time 52(25): 71.

Hollinger, Karen. 1992. “Listening to The Female Voice in the Woman’s Film.” Film Criticism 16(3): 34–52.

Jancovich, Mark. 2011. “Vicious Womanhood: Genre, the ‘Femme Fatale’ and Post-
war America.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 19(2): 100–14.

———. 2009. “‘Thrills and Chills’: Horror, the Woman’s Film and the Origins of Film Noir.” The New Review of Film and Television 7(2): 157–71.

———. 2008. “Female Monsters: Horror, the ‘Femme Fatale’ and World War II.”

European Journal of American Culture 27: 133–49.

———. 2007. “Crack-Up: Psychological Realism, Generic Transformation and the Demise of the Paranoid Woman’s Film.” Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies. Accessed June, 2013 http://irishgothichorrorjournal.homestead.com/Crack-upJancovich.html.

Maisel, Albert Q. 1946. “Bedlam 1946.” Life (6 May).

McCoubrey, Carmel. 2000. “Dr. Gerard Chrzanowski, Innovative Psychoanalyst, Dies at 87.” New York Times (New York) 12 November.

Miller, Frank. n.d. “The Snake Pit.” Turner Classic Movies. Accessed July 1, 2013.

http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/90607/The-Snake-Pit/articles.html

Mosdell, D. 1949. “Film Review.” Canadian Forum (February): 255.

Newitz, Annalee. 2006. Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture. Durham: Duke University Press.

Remington, Peter. 2011. “Twelve Pages of Madness: Developments in Cinema’s Narration of Insanity.” At the Interface/Probing the Boundaries 63: 143–60.

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Roffman, Peter, and Jim Purdy. 1981. The Hollywood Social Problem Film: Madness, Despair, and Politics from the Depression to the Fifties. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Rosenham. D. L. 1973. “On Being Sane in Insane Places.” Science 179(4070): 237–56.

Semarne, Veda. 1994. “The Snake Pit: A Woman’s Serpentine Journey toward (W)holeness.” Literature Film Quarterly 22(3): 144–50.

“Shocker.” 1948. Time 52(25): 46.

Shortland, Michael. 1987. “Screen Memories: Towards a History of Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis in the Movies.” The British Journal for the History of Science 20(4): 421–52.

Tay, Sharon Lin. 2003. “Constructing a Feminist Cinematic Genealogy: The Gothic Woman’s Film beyond Psychoanalysis.” Women: A Cultural Review 14(3): 263–28.

Waldman, Diane. 1984. “‘At Last I Can Tell It to Someone!’: Feminine Point of View and Subjectivity in the Gothic Romance Film of the 1940s.” Cinema Journal 23(2): 29–40.

Walker, Janet. 1993. Couching Resistance: Women, Film and Psychoanalytic Psychiatry. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ward, Mary Jane. 1946. The Snake Pit. Toronto: Random House.

Zambreno, Kate. 2012. Heroines. Cambridge, MA. London: Semiotext(e).

FiLMogRApHy

Bedlam. Directed by Mark Robson. RKO, 1946. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2008. DVD.

Gaslight. Directed by George Cukor. Warner Bros., 1944. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2004. DVD.

Rebecca. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Selznick International/United Artists, 1940.

New York, NY: Criterion Collection, 2001. DVD.

The Snake Pit. Directed by Anatole Litvak. Twentieth Century Fox, 1948. Beverly Hills, CA: Twentieth-Century Fox Home Video, 2004. DVD.

Chapter 12

The Demise of the Cinematic Zombie

From the Golden Age of Hollywood
to the 1940s

Louise Fenton

The word “zombie” inspires images of the living dead. Shuffling decaying corpses seeking human flesh. This was not the early representation of the zombie. This chapter examines the rise of the cinematic zombie in the 1930s to a culturally contextualized entity in 1940s horror and its subsequent demise at the end of the decade. These early representations of the living dead are an integral part of Vodou and Haiti, and throughout this chapter will be discussed within the more popularized term of Voodoo. The zombie evolved during the Golden Age of Hollywood in the 1930s; however, it was the zombie of the 1940s that placed the living dead in the imagination of mass audiences. It was during the 1940s that the zombie featured in a number of movies in a variety of guises, from the almost comedic offering of King of the

Zombies (Jean Yarbrough, 1941) with a Nazi zombie master, through to The Face of Marble (William Beaudine, 1945), which sees the living dead being created by science. This chapter observes how the zombie began its appearance as part of Haitian culture in the 1930s, affirming its status in the early to mid-1940s and then, as it became more detached from its cultural context, falling out of favor.

In 1929 William Seabrook wrote The Magic Island. The most repeated accolade given to this publication was that it introduced zombies to English speaking audiences, and in many references it is given the credit for the first use of the word “zombie.” This is not accurate, as the word zombi was used in Moreau Saint-Méry’s A Civilisation that Perished: The Last Years of White Colonial Rule in Haiti (published in 1792) which describes zombis as a “Creole word that means spirit” ([1797–1998] 1985: 321). A Civilisation that Perished was written in French and was not widely read.

In 1886 George W. Cable wrote an essay, “Creole Slave Songs,” which
was published in The Century Magazine; this features the word zombi when 225

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describing “The Voodoos” (1886: 815). Then in 1890 the word zombi appears in Lafcadio Hearn’s Two Years in the French West Indies, an account of life in Martinique within a Creole society ([1890] 2001: 142). These early references do not link zombies with the living dead: the earliest accounts of the revival of the dead were made in Captain Mayne Reid’s 1883 novel The Maroon: A Tale of Voodoo and Obeah and, in 1912, Stephen Bonsal’s The American Mediterranean, which both describe the practice of raising a person from the dead but without the use of the word “zombie.” It was then William Seabrook’s book that brought together the living dead and the word

“zombie” in 1929, positioning it within Vodou and Haiti.

The Magic Island was to be the direct influence for the first Voodoo zombie movie in the “talkie” era, White Zombie (Victor Halperin, 1932), which
resulted in Voodoo and zombies being introduced to mass cinema audiences, transforming the imagined into visual horror. It is important to note that these early zombie offerings were entwined with Voodoo and so it is not possible to discuss the zombie in isolation from this context.

The literary representations of Vodou culture, including zombies, since the mid-nineteenth century were instrumental in creating Voodoo in the imagination of readers of popular fiction and nonfiction. The progression from page to screen was inevitable. These representations lie predominantly in the horror genre during the earlier years before being taken up by the comedy and thriller genres later in the twentieth century. This chapter considers the productions of Britain and America; however, it should be noted that there were many other countries adding to the horror genre and the sub-genre of zombie movies.

The silent era provided the foundation for the horror genre to build upon and zombies were to feature as subject matter from early in this stage of cinematic production. The audience demand for new movies surpassed expectation, and the studios needed to increase their production. To satisfy the demand they were constantly seeking material. The publication of The Magic Island in 1929 and its subsequent success provided an opportunity for zombies and Voodoo to be entered into cinematic representations at the start of the “Golden Age” of Hollywood.

ZoMbies in THe goLDen Age oF HoLLywooD

Rick Worland describes the period 1931–1939 as “one of the most fruitful and important periods of the American horror film coming soon after the arrival of sound and the Crash of 1929” (2007: 55). It could also be argued that the 1940s were then just as important as they consolidated the horror genre in the public imagination. The 1930s did have a strong impact because

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of their historical place, following the Great Depression; however, increased studio output led to a wider scope within the horror genre throughout the

1940s. Mark Jancovich (2002) credits some of the 1940s films as “having
significance” due to the conflicts they highlight between “modern rational America and a traditional and superstitious old world” when they bring the horror of the exotic to the “normal and everyday” (2002: 3). This is important to note, as this chapter considers the cultural context of the zombie being overlooked in favor of associating the zombie with contemporary societal horrors towards the end of the 1940s. The Great Depression did have an impact and Hollywood had to scale back production; it was at this time that there was an increase in production from studios dubbed the “Poverty Row”

studios. These were companies, such as Monogram and Republic, which
were producing low budget movies from the end of the silent era through to the 1950s. The Depression was a period of economic crisis and unemployment, but audiences flocked to the cinema as a way of escape. It was the only luxury for many, and the demand for movies was high.

The first mention of Voodoo in a “talkie” came in the 1930 production of The Sea Bat (Wesley Ruggles). This film was set on a fictional island called

“Portuga.” The opening credits describe the film’s mise-en-scène: “Through the night . . . the weird chant of Voodoo worship. Through the day . . . the weird industry of Sponge Diving.” The Voodoo content is minimal and zombies were not to feature within this context.

The first full-length Voodoo movie that was to incorporate zombies was White Zombie in 1932. This was a low-budget movie that borrowed sets from many of the previous Gothic horrors such as Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931)

and Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931), and it was made entirely on the Universal Studios lot. The movie was based loosely on a play called Zombie (1932) by Kenneth Webb, which was influenced by William Seabrook’s
book, The Magic Island.

Many scholarly references to White Zombie identify The Magic Island as the influence and inspiration for the narrative. Yet, although The Magic Island was the basis for the play which was to inspire the film, there was no acknowl-
edged link between the film and the book. Gary Rhodes (2001) discusses an
interview with Victor Halperin, the film’s director, in which Halperin recalled the origins of the story and the script for White Zombie being developed with verification from U.S. Marines who were based in Haiti. There is no mention of The Magic Island or any record of Halperin or his writer, Garnett Weston, consulting with the Marines, so the only true credit to the story rests with Victor Halperin himself (Neilson in Rhodes, 2001).

“Voodoo” was a word in wide use and, although White Zombie is about Voodoo, the word is not used to describe the beliefs within the movie. However, zombies are part of the narrative from the onset. The opening scenes show

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a burial at crossroads with the diegetic sounds of chanting and drumming, and we see the main characters, Neil (John Harron) and Madeline (Madge Bellamy), inside the carriage. The details in this setting added “authenticity”

to the subject, as there were burials at crossroads in rural Haiti in an attempt to stop the Bokors1 raising the dead to create zombies. The driver explains that the gathering in the road is a funeral. Neil apologizes to his fiancée for

“not such a cheerful introduction for you to Our West Indies.” His adding the colonial reference to the West Indies (Haiti had achieved independence many years before) is indicative of the Western socio-cultural sentiment that believed Haiti was still a colony despite having independence for over a century. Haiti was a place definitely not belonging to “Us” and certainly not

“Ours.” As O’Callaghan (2004) suggests, there was a fear of the ideas and

“anti-European sentiments” moving from “Them” to “Us” (2004: 90). It is this fear that may have instigated the reference to Haiti belonging to “Us,”

of being “Ours,” creating for viewers the security of knowing that ultimately there was a “civilised” structure in place of European rule. As Homi Bhabha ([1994] 2005) discusses when referring to the question of “otherness,” colonial discourse must “construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction” ([1994] 2005: 101).

Zombies are identified by the carriage driver who explains to Neil and Madeline that “they are the living dead, they are corpses made to work in the sugar fields at night.” The character of the carriage driver was played by an actor named Clarence Muse. Muse was an African American actor/composer, and although his part was a stereotypical trade for a black character, a labor-ing job, there is nothing demeaning about him. He wears smart clothes and is well spoken within the narrative. It was his account of zombies within the narrative that gave an explanation to the audience, some of whom may not have understood what a zombie was. This description of the zombie derived from literary descriptions and unusually links them directly to Haiti later in the narrative. This link would be lost in the years that followed as the zombie evolved into a flesh-eating creature with little or no associations with Voodoo, Vodou or Haiti. The zombies in this film are mute, a trend that was to continue until the 1960s.

The film’s location is identified as Haiti by the Doctor (Joseph Cawthorn), contextualizing the zombies and ritualistic practices. When he is asked within the narrative by Neil if he believes in zombies, he responds: “Haiti is full of nonsense and superstition with all of it mixed up in a lot of mysteries. Turn your hair curly. I’ve been a missionary here for twenty years and at times I don’t know what to think.” The character of the Doctor is also a missionary and so combines both the colonial and spiritual institutions within Haiti.

This dichotomy is present in I Walked with a Zombie where the cinematic

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representations of Voodoo are at times ridiculing and infantilizing the practices, as Vodou was not deemed a religion at the time of these productions.

This movie makes several remarks relating to slavery, highlighting the racist attitude of the time, and to the ambivalent feelings towards Haiti. When referring to the zombies in his factory, the zombie master, Murder Legendre, tells Mr Beaumont (Robert Frazer) that “You could make use of men like mine. They don’t mind long hours.” Later, when discussing his options on how to rescue Madeline with the Doctor, Neil is told “There are superstitions on Haiti that the natives brought back from Africa,” and Neil responds with the line “Surely you don’t think she’s alive in the hands of natives? Better dead than that!” This fear of “natives” is evident in a number of early films including the first mention of Voodoo in a “talkie” in The Sea Bat. “Native”

was a term applied to any culture other than Western culture and the essence and justification of colonialism and Empire was that of “civilising savages.”

There is a constant reminder throughout White Zombie of harmful superstitions, bringing the fear of the exotic other to the American homeland. It is worth considering here that America occupied Haiti in 1915 and so this event would be in the living memory of many of the viewing public, reinforcing this notion of a land that might have been “ours.” The zombies in the film are both black and white with some in blackface. They all respond to commands, are dressed in ragged clothing and walk slowly, not shuffling here, but with direction. Despite the racist undercurrent to White Zombie, the film treated Voodoo in a much less demeaning way than some that were to follow and firmly placed zombies within their cultural context. It allowed the religion some credibility even though it did represent it as an evil and harmful practice.

White Zombie was a box office success, if not a hit with the critics, and it remains key that the Voodoo in this film provides one of the only representations that placed the religion in Haiti. It is also one of the few films that linked zombies with Haiti and Voodoo. Victor Halperin did go on to direct another horror film in 1936, Revolt of the Zombies, a title that offered promise of wholesale social upheaval on the part of the racialized zombie. This followed on from White Zombie and yet did not feature Haiti or Voodoo. There is much cultural confusion within this film as the narrative features an international, and mainly colonial, expedition to Cambodia to destroy a spell that enables the creation of zombies during World War I. This materializes not in the form of creating the living dead, but of creating a state of hypnosis. This was a weak follow up to what was arguably one of the best Voodoo films ever made, as it abandoned the Caribbean cultural context of the zombie. The creator of the zombies does link to the fact that Haiti was a French colony as he, Priest Tsiang (William Cromwell), is a chaplain of a French Colonial Regi-ment (though of Asian origin, so a tenuous link). There was a constant shift in how the zombie was created during this decade that was to continue into

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the 1940s. The zombie appeared as the resurrected dead, the mind-controlled human or the scientifically created monster, always mute.

Ouanga (George Terwilliger, 1936) was a British production in the sense
that it was an American backed picture produced in Britain. The story was based around a plantation owner, Klili (Fredi Washington), who is also a Voodoo priestess. When she discovers that her neighbor, Adam (Philip Brandon), (whom she desires) becomes engaged to Eve (Marie Paxton) she sends a ouanga to cast a death spell on his fiancée. When this fails to work she sends two zombies to kidnap Eve and return her for a sacrificial Voodoo ceremony. The zombies are not menacing in any way as they walk silently without threat, and the Voodoo dialogue is limited. There is an attempt to link the Ouanga Voodoo with Haiti; the film is set on a plantation called “Paradise Island” in the West Indies and within the film there is a written narration that informs the viewer: “After a visit to New York Adam Maynard starts back to his Haitian Plantation.” This film was remade for the race movie circuit under the new title The Devil’s Daughter (Arthur Leonard, 1939). The only Voodoo remake to date, The Devil’s Daughter had an all-black cast and yet, sadly, it failed to improve on Ouanga. In many ways it was more misrepresentational of Voodoo than the previous film. The film was set in Jamaica and interestingly Voodoo was changed to Obeah, the syncretic religion of Jamaica. There is an apparent fear of zombiefication; the character of servant Percy Jackson (Hamtree Harrington) believes his soul is being protected by having it transferred into a pig which he then guards. The transfer of the soul is completed with a fake ceremony run by the character of Sylvia (Ida James). The religion is here once again dismissed as superstition and shown to be fraudulent, along with the zombies. The zombies in this movie are once again largely non-threatening, silent but feared.

THe ZoMbie in THe 1940s

The figure of the zombie continued to shift away from the Vodou and

Haitian origins as it entered the 1940s. It had been contextualized and had also featured as a method of mind-control during the 1930s within the few movie productions to feature zombies in this decade. During the 1940s the zombie increasingly became a metaphor for the horrors and fears of society. It remained a mute creature, devoid of the ability to think or act independently, and allowed the movie producers the diversification away from Haiti and Voodoo and into new realms of creation.

The first zombie film of the 1940s was The Ghost Breakers (George Marshall,

1940) which featured the comic talents of Bob Hope. Brian Senn suggests that
the film has “proven itself to be one of the funniest horror-comedies of all

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time” (1998: 232). Although the Voodoo and zombie content is minimal, there are some comedic moments that highlight the zombie’s presence in its sparse appearance. The zombie, played by Noble Johnson of King Kong (Merian C.

Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933), has a brief appearance before being locked away. There is a description of zombies within the narrative when the character of Carlson states, “A zombie has no will of its own. You see them sometimes, walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring,” to which Hope replies “You mean like Democrats?” This is an interesting remark, as America had a Democratic president at this time, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had received little opposition in the run up to his election. The zombie did lend itself to being a comedic character. The humorous narratives could be directed at the benign zombie presence, the “straight man” necessary to any comedy narrative.

Monogram Pictures was the most prolific of the studios during the 1940s to contribute to the genre, producing three Voodoo films between 1941
and 1946. The subject matter of these films varied but was based around a central Voodoo theme. The first of this decade, King of the Zombies (Jean

Yarborough, 1941) reflected the socio-political climate of this era and tells a tale of a Nazi attempting to create a zombie army by using the power of a Voodoo priestess. He is eventually thwarted by the British. It is difficult to view this movie as a serious horror effort due to the number of comedic lines.

It utilized a similar storyline to the 1936 movie Revolt of the Zombies (Victor

Halperin, 1936) with the attempted creation of a zombie army. The zombies are again mind-controlled here, rather than the living dead.

White Zombie was one of the best Voodoo films ever made because it illustrated the critical potential for this sub-genre of horror, another film in this vein is 1943’s I Walked with a Zombie. Val Lewton ran RKO’s horror unit for three years between 1942 and 1945 producing some of the best films of the decade. His first, very successful, film Cat People (1942) was followed by I Walked with a Zombie. Both films were directed by Jacques Tourneur and the team of Lewton and Tourneur was a formidable force in the 1940s cinematic industry. Lewton had integrity and believed in the films he was making so when he was informed by the RKO executive, Charles Koerner, that his second feature was to be based on an American Weekly article called I Walked with a Zombie he reportedly was dismayed (see Siegel, 1973).

Lewton had worked with David O. Selznick from 1933 as story editor, writing scenes for films including Tale of Two Cities (Jack Conway, 1935) and Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) before moving to RKO in the 1940s. Lewton did not wish to compromise his integrity and so decided that if he had to make the film he would base it on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

Although based on the Brontë novel the story was reworked extensively and bears little resemblance to its inspiration. His variation on the material may

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have been an inspiration for the future response to Jane Eyre by Jean Rhys’s postcolonial interpretation in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966).

The narrative of I Walked with a Zombie is based around the arrival on a Caribbean island of a nurse, Betsy (Frances Dee), who has been employed to take care of plantation-owner Paul Holland’s (Tom Conway) wife, Jessica (Christine Gordon), who is described as a “mental case.” Jessica had fallen in love with her husband’s half brother, Wesley Rand (James Ellison). Voodoo is an integral part of the story from the outset. Betsy is soon made aware that Jessica has been turned into a zombie and is encouraged by the maid to seek help at a Voodoo ceremony. Betsy takes Jessica to the ceremony and the journey features visual Voodoo elements. There is a sacrificial goat sus-pended from a tree and the striking, staring figure of Carrefour (Darby Jones), a black zombie who is guardian of the crossroads, and who lets them pass without incident. The sacrificial goat seen hanging from a tree in this section of the film bears a striking resemblance to one of the photographs in the 1931
publication The White King of La Gonave (Faustin Wirkus), a book which would have been in wide circulation when I Walked with a Zombie was made and one that is based on the American Occupation of Haiti.

At the ceremony Betsy finds Jessica’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Rand (Edith Barrett), exploiting the beliefs of the locals by posing as Damballah, one of the Voodoo spirits. Jessica is subsequently proven to be a zombie when she is stabbed but fails to bleed. The Voodooists wish to rescue Jessica from her state and they send Carrefour to return her to the ceremony but Mrs. Rand intervenes. It then transpires that it was Mrs Rand who was responsible for the zombiefication of Jessica, having held her responsible for strife between her sons. The zombie here is, again, the result of a curse and not of the reanimated dead. The film features the iconic figure of a Voodoo doll being used to draw Jessica back to the ceremony, the doll is seen with a string around it and as it is pulled Jessica rises and heads back to the Voodooists. It becomes clear that the intention of the Voodooists was to end the zombie curse on Jessica, rendering them a mysterious but ultimately benevolent force. This is achieved by the use of the Voodoo doll: when the Bokor (the Voodooist who practices the dark side of the religion) is seen at the ceremony piercing it with a needle, Wesley Rand is seen stabbing Jessica (and so ending the curse). These actions render the supernatural implications ambiguous. Wesley could be viewed as much Jessica’s deliverer as the Bokor. Wesley carries Jessica’s corpse into the ocean watched by Carrefour, and when both bodies are washed up it leaves Paul and Betsy free to pursue their developing relationship.

This is one of the most atmospheric films ever made in the horror genre, and undoubtedly one of the strongest movies on Voodoo. Lewton meticulously created the sets and employed Voodoo experts such as LeRoy Antoine to advise on authenticity as he had written a book on Haiti in 1938, The Voice of Haiti. Voodoo is treated sensitively for the most part in the film without

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human sacrifice or overzealous dancers; it is shown as a religion integral
to the lives of the inhabitants on this island in the Caribbean. Siegel (1973)

writes of the research that was undertaken for I Walked with a Zombie, commenting that Lewton found every book he could on the subject to ensure the cast and crew had a basic (although a somewhat biased) knowledge of Voodoo. This film had good intentions and put the mechanisms in place to present a serious representation of Voodoo.

Unfortunately, as was reflective of the time, there were a number of elements maintaining the “Us” and “Them” aspects found in White Zombie.

Mrs Rand, a medical doctor, displays disdain for the Voodooists and demeans their beliefs; she pretends to be the voice of a spirit presenting them as gull-ible which does momentarily undermine the otherwise positive representation of Voodoo. There is, however, a refreshing representation of the zombies in this film. Carrefour is a docile black zombie who is not feared and Jessica is a cursed white woman turned into a zombie, again, not feared, as would be the case in Haiti.

The tag line for I Walked with a Zombie was “SHE’S ALIVE . . . YET

DEAD! SHE’S DEAD . . . YET ALIVE!” with no mention of Carrefour;
instead the emphasis was on what Voodoo had done to the “beautiful white woman,” which shows no real diversion from the years of prejudice prior to this production. Throughout the film Carrefour does not look or “gaze” at the white characters, but fixes his gaze somewhere beyond them. Both of these points emphasise the relations of power explored by Foucault ([1972–1977]

1988), that there is a system of domination and still a real possibility of resis-
tance. As bell hooks (2008) explores, “slaves were punished for ‘looking’ and
so this power/domination [within I Walked with a Zombie] exists within societal viewing, emphasising the fact that most black people would only ‘gaze’

at whites on screen and that white audiences would not wish to empathise with the black zombie” (2008: 198).

This film was followed later in the decade by Zombies on Broadway

(Gordon Douglas, 1945) which was made as a “comedy” parody of I Walked with a Zombie. RKO had made large profits with the earlier film and decided to exploit this success with another zombie venture that introduced audiences to the comedy duo of Alan Carney and Wally Brown. RKO decided to use some of the same characters from I Walked with a Zombie to play upon the earlier film’s successes . Darby Jones returned as an imposing zombie, the calypso singer Sir Lancelot sang the same tune with different lyrics and the film was set on the same fictional Caribbean island. The narrative is much different with the two main characters seeking a “real” zombie for a publicity stunt. The limited presence of Bela Lugosi as a “mad doctor,” Professor Paul Renault, lifts this film but the Voodoo content is minimal, focusing more on the creation of zombies rather than placing them within their cultural origin.

Lugosi’s character has set up a zombie-producing company on a Caribbean

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Island which is where the two comedic leads are heading. There is one ceremonial sequence which promises to be an atmospheric representation but unfortunately it is overshadowed by the “comedy.” Brown and Carney are in blackface disguise, falling over and generally distracting from the narrative and zombie content. The title of this film was changed for British audiences to Loonies on Broadway. According to Senn, this was because the British

“frowned on horror” during World War II (1998: 79).

Monogram also produced a zombie film called Bowery at Midnight,
directed by Wallace Fox in 1942. This film features Bela Lugosi as two characters, a gangster and a psychologist. As a murderous gangster, he hides his victims’ bodies in the Bowery Mission unaware that his sidekick is re-animating the dead but there is no mention of Voodoo or Haiti. The zombies in this movie are the resurrected dead rather than mind-controlled hoards.

Monogram’s Voodoo Man (William Beaudine, 1944) continues with the
zombie theme, with a narrative that revolves around Bela Lugosi as a “mad doctor” again, Dr Richard Marlowe, who is kidnapping young women in an attempt to restore life to his zombiefied wife, Evelyn (Ellen Hall), through a ceremonial chant. There is only one zombie in this production and that is the white wife of Lugosi’s character.

Val Lewton went on to produce one of the last zombie films of the 1930s and 1940s for RKO with the 1945 film Isle of the Dead. This film rejected the association of zombies with Voodoo in favor of the more sensational; it links zombies with a vampiric demon. The island of the film was based on the painting of the same name by Arnold Böcklin and provided a haunting backdrop. This painting has been inspirational throughout cultural production as well as for RKO’s film, as it inspired Sergei Rachmaninov’s (1908) twenty-one-minute symphony and the 1963 novel by Roger Zelazny, all taking the same title.

Monogram went on to produce The Face of Marble (William Beaudine, 1946), a movie that combines science and Voodoo with experimental ways of raising the dead, arguably the last of the 1940s zombie offerings. By the mid-1940s, cinematic horror productions were in decline with no further representations of Voodoo or zombies for over a decade. This could arguably be a response to World War II, or what was perceived of World War II audiences, especially as the British were thought to be too sensitive for horror at this time.

CineMATiC DeCLine

The zombies of the 1930s were grounded initially in a Caribbean cultural context and it was this integrity that producers such as Val Lewton wished

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to explore during the 1940s. The zombie of the 1940s diversified to become a metaphor for the horrors of war and was in keeping with the cultural context of the 1940s in their lack of voice and agency. The horror within these zombie films came from the Caribbean cultural origin; it was embedded in the fear of the other, the exotic finding its way from over “there” to “here.”

The American Occupation of Haiti (1915–1934) and the literary publications it inspired would have strengthened the idea of the exoticism and of the old-world superstitions of Haiti within the mind of the audiences.

Despite a number of movies showing the zombies retaliating towards
their zombie master, the zombie maintained its persona as a slow moving, mute creature. The zombies that were able to retaliate were those created by mind-control but while under control of a master they were not able to act independently.

The post-war 1940s represented a decline in the kinds of horror mon-
sters that had featured predominantly during the depression and war years perhaps because of the real-life horrors that were unfolding. The death toll from the war totaled millions, the Nazi holocaust and atomic bombing of Japan provided new terrors, all of which impacted on the production output from Hollywood. America still led the movie industry, and although it was encountering an economic boom, there were other tensions, especially with the Soviet Union who were now a nuclear force. The focus of American fear had shifted; the horror film was being replaced or hybridized with the new genre of science fiction.

There was also an impact from what is now known as “The Paramount

Case” of 1948. This was the U.S. Supreme Court decision that the five big Hollywood studios had been monopolizing movie theaters and movie distribution to the detriment of their competitors. Following the box office success of the mid-1940s, audiences began to decline in the post-war years. In the late 1940s television broadcasting began with American households embracing this new technology into the 1950s. The American family was less likely to go out to the cinema with less disposable income and they now had entertainment at home. This meant that fewer films were being released and the monster horrors of the 1940s were no longer relevant to the society facing nuclear and perceived alien attack.

This was an important time in the evolution of the cinematic zombie. It firstly contextualized the zombie within its Caribbean culture and then began to explore the idea of the zombie as metaphor. The movies made during the war years of the 1940s exploited the fear of the Nazi regime, of zombie armies, and mind control. The productions of Lewton gave the zombie credibility and substance, lending his own integrity to the zombie.

The fact that the zombie was contextualized in early cinematic representations gave it credibility and strength and it could be argued that the removal

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of its origins led to the cinematic demise of the zombie in the 1940s. That was until its reinvention decades later when in 1968 George A. Romero created the cannibalistic mindless killers that we know as zombies today in the zombie film Night of the Living Dead. It was Romero’s revival of the zombie genre that emphasizes the importance of the zombie within the 1930s and 1940s horror movies. The zombies in Night of the Living Dead appear in a “hypnotic trance” which is the same as those in both White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie. Romero’s zombies gain strength in numbers and become a revolutionary force, the intention of narratives such as in Revolt of the Zombies and King of the Zombies. The zombie of the 1940s led the way for the decades that followed, despite its temporary demise.

noTe

1. A Bokor is a Houngan or Mambo, a Priest or Priestess within the Vodou religion who is believed to practice both light and dark magic. Bokors are understood to be able to create zombies.

ReFeRenCes

Bhabba, Homi. (1994) 2005. The Location of Culture. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

Bonsal, Stephen. 1912. The American Mediterranean. New York: Moffat Yard.

Bowman, Laura, and LeRoy Antoine. 1938. The Voice of Haiti. New York: Clarence William.

Cable, George W. “Creole Slave Songs.” The Century Magazine. 35.6 April (1886): 815.

Hearn, Lafcadio. (1890) 2001. Two Years in the French West Indies. Oxford: Signal Books.

hooks, bell. 2008. Real to Reel. London: Routledge.

Jancovich, Mark. 2002. Horror, The Film Reader. London: Routledge.

Lorimer, Douglas A. 1978. Colour, Class and the Victorians: A Study of English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Leicester: Holmes and Meirer.

McElvaine, Robert S. 1993. The Great Depression: America 1929–1941. New York: Three Rivers Press.

Moreau Saint-Mery, M. L. E. (1797–1798) 1985. A Civilisation That Perished: The Last Years of White Colonial Rule in Haiti. Translated, abridged, and edited by Ivor D. Spencer. Lanham MD: University Press of America.

Neilson, Raymond J. 1978. “Interview with Victor Halperin.” Arkansas: AETN-TV
in Gary D. Rhodes, White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

O’Callaghan, Evelyn. 2004. Women Writing the West Indies, 1804–1939: A Hot Place, Belonging to Us. Abingdon NJ: Routledge.

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Pitts, Michael R. 2005. Poverty Row Studios, 1929–1940: An Illustrated History of 55

Independent Film Companies. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company.

Reid, Captain Mayne. 1883. The Maroon: A Tale of Voodoo and Obeah. New York.

Rhodes, Gary D. 2001. White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company.

Seabrook, William. 1929. The Magic Island. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Senn, Brian. 1998. Drums of Terror: Voodoo in the Cinema. Baltimore, MD: Midnight Marquee Press Inc.

Siegel, Joel E. 1973. Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror. New York: Viking Press.

Wells, Paul. 2000. The Horror Genre: From Beelzebub to Blair Witch. London and New York: Wallflower.

Worland, Rick. 2007. The Horror Film. Oxford: Blackwell.

Zelazny, Roger. 1963. Isle of the Dead. London: Arrow Books.

FiLMogRAgpHy

Bowery at Midnight. Directed by Wallace Fox. Monogram, 1942. Digiview, 2004.

DVD.

The Ghost Breakers. Directed by George Marshall. Paramount, 1940. Universal City, CA: Universal Home Video, 2002. DVD.

I Walked with a Zombie. Directed by Jacques Tourneur. RKO, 1943. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2005. DVD.

Isle of the Dead. Directed by Mark Robson. RKO, 1946. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2005. DVD.

King of the Zombies. Directed by Jean Yarbrough. Monogram, 1941. Narberth, PA: Alpha Video, 2001. DVD.

Night of the Living Dead. Directed by George A. Romero. Image Ten, 1968.

[Millennium Edition] New York, NY: Elite Entertainment, 2002. DVD.

Ouanga. Directed by George Terwilliger. George Terwilliger Productions, 1936.

Medford, OR: Sinister cinema, 2002. VHS.

Revolt of the Zombies. Directed by Victor Halperin. Edgar/Victor Halperin Productions, 1936. [ The Terror, Revolt of the Zombies] Minneapolis, MN: Mill Creek Entertainment, 2006. DVD.

The Sea Bat. Directed by Lionel Barrymore, Wesley Ruggles. MGM, 1930. [ Horror Classics: 50-Movie Pack] Minneapolis, MN: Mill Creek Entertainment, 2005.

DVD.

Voodoo Man. Directed by William Beaudine. Monogram, 1944. Floral Park, NY: The Fang, 1996. VHS.

White Zombie. Directed by Victor Halperin. Edgar/Victor Halperin Productions, 1932. New York, NY: Kino Lorber, 2013. BluRay.

Zombies on Broadway. Directed by Gordon Douglas. RKO, 1945. [ Karloff & Lugosi: Horror Classics] Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2009. DVD.

Chapter 13

Fears new and old

The Post-War American Horror Film

Gary D. Rhodes

Numerous histories of the American horror film have suggested that the genre came to a temporary close at the end of World War II, so much so that some of them choose the year 1945 as a chronological endpoint for classic horror
film era.1 Evidence for such a position rests largely on a perceived dearth of
new horror film production in Hollywood in the late 1940s. While it is undeniable that during those years Hollywood produced few horror movies of the type popular between 1931 and 1945 (meaning films with a concentration on monsters and/or mad scientists, and a reliance on particular film personalities such as Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Lon Chaney Jr.), the traditional historical narrative remains fraught with enough misunderstandings to require a re-examination of the post-war period.

To begin, it is important to consider the major shifts that were then underway in Hollywood. In the months following World War II, the American
film industry achieved great economic success. As film historian Thomas Schatz has written, “Hollywood enjoyed its best year ever” (1997: 285) in 1946. The industry looked towards greater and greater profits, and why not?

Troops returning home from the European and Pacific Theaters could only mean a significant increase for domestic ticket sales. For the fiscal year ending on November 2, 1946, Universal Studios reported the biggest profits in its lengthy history. 2 The so-called Poverty Row studios were no exception.

Monogram’s profits also increased to record levels.3 And by the end of
the year, the Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) had grown confident enough in its role in the marketplace to drop low-budget films from its
program.4

However, as 1946 came to a close, the American film industry began to undergo serious changes. Trade publications noted decreased movie attendance in early 1947, a problem that continued into the summer. Lower ticket 239

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sales meant lower box office receipts, even as ticket prices were rising. All of this came at a time of increasing operational and production costs at the
studios (Schatz, 1997: 285). If 1946 became one of Hollywood’s most suc-
cessful years financially, 1947 would prove to be one of its worst, and it would set a trend that persisted for the rest of the decade. Rising production costs and labor troubles collided with declining audience attendance, all in an era of congressional investigations over alleged Communist infiltration of Hollywood, a film trade war with England, and a Supreme Court ruling that forced the major studios to sell their theater chains (Schatz, 1997: 4). Here is why Schatz terms the decade one of “boom and bust,” marking “the most
troubled period in movie industry history” (Schatz, 1997: 285).

What did that mean for the American horror film? In 1945, the situation appeared tenuous. On the one hand, in September 1945, Variety predicted that

“balanced films” would replace movie “cycles.” 5 But on the other hand, new horror film releases populated movie theaters throughout 1946, with the genre quite vibrant for well over a year after World War II. It would not be until 1947 that the numbers of new horror movies—certainly those of the type produced between 1931 and 1945—would decrease dramatically, a result caused not by the end of the war, but rather the aforementioned turmoil in Hollywood.

The need to decouple a simplistic and parallel link between changes in the horror movie with the end of the war is important, but it alone does not account for two forms of growth that the genre experienced in the mid-to-late 1940s.

One of these involved the massive reissue programs undertaken by various Hollywood studios that caused literally dozens of horror movies produced between 1931 and 1945 to return to movie screens during the late 1940s. The result helped further canonize the classic monsters of Universal horror films, as well as the various sequels in which such characters appeared during the war.

The same was true of particular horror film stars. While Bela Lugosi made few films after 1945, his earlier horror films, including those made for poverty-row studios, returned to post-war theater screens with much regularity.

The other issue that the genre faced in 1945 and the years that followed had to do with the very meaning of the word “horror.” Years earlier, certainly by the end of 1932, “horror” concretized as the film genre’s name, much as other genres had one-word monikers like “musical” or “gangster.” It served Hollywood quite well in the years that followed, representing a clear narrative tradition in the space of six letters and evoking the aforementioned kinds of film plots, characters, and movie stars. But that singular usage of the word

“horror” became plural as the war came to an end, as journalists applied it first to cinematic images of the Nazi death camps and then—in tandem with given studio publicists and exhibitors—to a number of adult-oriented fictional films featuring not the old monsters or actors, but instead suspenseful narratives with psychological themes. For the first time since its widespread usage

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in the early thirties, the boundaries of the term “horror movie” grew noticeably, the result complicating not only the way that such films were perceived at the points of production and exhibition, but also at the point of reception, as the reaction to footage of the wartime atrocities reveals.

Reexamining the post-war American horror film with the use of primary sources allows for the construction of a different and more accurate historical narrative than has been offered in the past, introducing a necessary degree of revisionism to longstanding beliefs about the period from 1946 to 1950, an era during which movie theaters regularly screened horror movies that were both new and old.

posT–wAR pRoDuCTions

Admittedly, Hollywood produced fewer horror movies of the type popular during the war in the late 1940s, but their declining numbers did not begin with the surrender of Germany (May 8, 1945), Japan (August 14, 1945), or even with the calendar year 1945. By contrast, the horror movie continued unabated for the entirety of 1946. For example, during that year, American audiences saw:

1946: Monogram’s The Face of Marble (William Beaudine, released in January), PRC’s Strangler of the Swamp (Frank Wisbar, January), PRC’s

The Flying Serpent (Sam Newfield, February), PRC’s The Mask of Diijon

(Lew Landers, March), Universal’s House of Horrors (Jean Yarbrough, March) and The Spider Woman Strikes Back (Arthur Lubin, March), PRC’s

Devil Bat’s Daughter (Frank Wisbar, April), Republic’s The Catman of

Paris (Lesley Selander, April), Universal’s She-Wolf of London (Jean

Yarbrough, May) and The Cat Creeps (Erle C. Kenton), Republic’s Val-
ley of the Zombies (Philip Ford, May), and PRC’s The Brute Man (Jean Yarbrough, October).

As the year came to a close, industry trade publications reviewed Warner

Bros. new film The Beast with Five Fingers (Robert Florey), 1946.6 These
movies were in addition to such horror comedies as Monogram’s feature film

Spook Busters (William Beaudine, released in August 1946) with the Bow-
ery Boys, and Columbia’s short subject A Bird in the Head (Edward Bernds, released in April), as well as a number of horror films that had been released the prior year, but which still remained in general distribution, including Universal’s House of Dracula (Erle C. Kenton, 1945).

Certainly it is true that changes to the horror movie and its audience were increasingly noticeable, but these had little if anything to do with the end

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of the war. Nor did they necessarily have much to do with ongoing attacks from parents and moral groups. For example, in late December 1945, a
letter to the editor of the Christian Science Monitor wrote with alarm that several young children became “hysterical” at one horror film screening, their older and “hardened” ten-year-old counterparts promptly ordering them to “shut up.” The author proceeded to argue that exhibitors did not actually have to screen horror movies, and so it was the imperative of good citizens to make their complaints known. Otherwise, “horror on the screen
will continue as long as we permit it to be profitable” (Breaks, 1945: 18).

A number of women in Columbus, Ohio, made similar complaints during
early 1947, as did the Minneapolis Parent Teacher Association in 1947. 7 But the American horror movie had proven resilient against such attacks since at least 1932.

Theatre manager reports published in Motion Picture Herald from 1946
suggest something else was at work. For example:

House of Dracula: We say this is definitely our last horror film. There seems to be nothing gained by frightening the children away.

—Winema Theatre, Scotia, California, May 4, 1946

House of Dracula: Used this for a Saturday midnight show and this is where it belongs. Wouldn’t recommend it for any other time.

—Sparks Theatre, Cooper, Texas, May 25, 1946

House of Dracula: About a year ago or so, a chiller-diller like this would be very good for our theatre, but today it is strictly [a] one-day showing and not any too good even for one day. The producers are making entirely too many chillers.

Again we say when our patrons who like action, thrill, and westerns don’t buy chillers it’s time for a considerable curtailment of this type of picture.

—Fountain Theatre, Terre Haute, Indiana, September 28, 1946

At first, such accounts suggest that the horror movie was losing ground even with younger patrons who had frequented them during the first half of the decade, an argument that could be evidenced with the small number of such films released in 1947 (such as Scared to Death [Christy Cabanne]) and 1948 (such as The Creeper [Jean Yarbrough] and The Unknown Island [Jack Bernhard]). The lack of new production extended to a lack of new production aimed at children.

Indeed, a survey of the film industry press in the late 1940s seems to reveal more unmade horror movies than new product in release. Curt

Siodmak—the screenwriter of such films as The Wolf Man (George Waggner,

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243

1941)—and Lon Chaney Jr. attempted to start their own production com-
pany in 1948 to produce films featuring characters “more horrible than any yet seen on the screen.”8 But nothing came of the venture. That same year, Film Classics announced that Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi would costar in The Strange Case of Malcolm Craig, but the film was never produced.9 Bela

Lugosi also told one journalist that “there is enough material in the original novel [ Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897)] for half a dozen pictures,” but no studio produced any of them that year, or in the years that immediately followed. 10

In retrospect, Universal-International’s Abbott and Costello Meet Franken-
stein (Charles Barton, 1948) might well signal the horror movie’s post-war
decline and even (temporary) death, in large measure because it paired popular monsters from earlier years with a film comedy team. Such a view was not unknown in 1948 when the film was released. For example, the New York Star wrote: “It’s heart-warming to see all our favorite monsters once more, each inexorably expressing his individuality, all at the same time. It’s kind of like a class reunion. They look a little older now, and a little tired. Dracula seems to creak a bit with arthritis as he emerges from his coffin these days,
and his bite has lost some of its depth.”11 Perhaps the damning phrase in this
review is “once more,” as if the subsequent disappearance of these monsters from the screen was a clear expectation.

Theatre manager reports from across the United States made to the film industry were generally positive, except in cases where viewers interpreted it as a horror film rather than a comedy:

“One of the best and most entertaining in the Abbott and Costello series. A good draw and a pleased audience.”

—Gray Theatre, Gray, Ga. 12

“Just about their best, I reckon, and lots of people came to see them. We played a midnight preview on this which also drew well.”

—Eminence Theatre, Eminence, Ky. 13

“Very good at the box office. A little too scary for the little ones, but the high school kids really enjoyed it.”

—Grove Theatre, Blooming Grove, Tex. 14

“I wonder if it is worth it—all those howling kids, screams, and broken seats.

Did an above average business, but it wasn’t Abbott and Costello at their best.

Had more walkouts on this than any picture we’ve ever played. This is the last

‘horror’ picture we will ever book.”

—Williamette Valley Theatres, Albany, Ore. 15

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“The shrieks and screams could be heard in the street. Small children jammed the foyer. Babies cried. Women scratched all the skin from their husbands’

hands and the PTA descended in mobs, demanding to know why we played a

‘horror’ picture on Saturday. If we get out of this one without bodily harm, we will be plain lucky. Spent most of my time drying tears and allaying hysteria among the children. Wow!”

—Shastona Theatre, Mount Shasta, Calif. 16

As a result of such reactions, Universal-International planned more Abbott
and Costello comedies (including the film that became Abbott and Costello

Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff [Charles Barton, 1949]), but not any horror
films featuring Dracula, the Wolf Man, and Frankenstein’s monster.17 The studio abandoned the old monsters, another apparent sign that the horror movie was under siege in the late 1940s, even if its decline did not begin until 1947.

Reviving THe pAsT

A poll of movie theater managers published in 1949 resulted in the following analysis: “There is small place for them in most theaters, and the special horror shows and accompanying sensational advertising have given them a black eye. . . . Most exhibitors think the zombies should be locked up in a
closet and kept there.”18 That same year, a poll of average Americans found men and women putting “horror, murder, gangster pictures first on their list of dislikes.”19 Here seems to be an indicator as to why the numbers of new horror movies decreased from 1947 to 1950. By contrast, after interviewing Lugosi in 1947, a Boston journalist told readers that the “studios are being swamped with requests for Lugosi and Karloff pictures” (Adams, 1947). At first, given Lugosi’s limited film output after World War II, it is tempting to view such a statement as nothing more than the actor’s own wishful thinking and flair for publicity, channeled into the press thanks to a willing reporter.

To be sure, Lugosi would have had little knowledge of how many letters the studios received on any subject.

That said, there seems to be a good deal of truth to the fact that many filmgoers in the late 1940s did want to see horror movies, including a group that provided their key audience during the war and that may have well been under-represented in the aforementioned polls: children. Perhaps some were frightened by horror movies, even when they were tempered with comedy from the likes of Abbott and Costello, but many still wanted to watch such films. And the simple fact is that they did get to see them. Moviegoers were in fact bombarded by a vast number of horror movies during the years 1947

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245
to 1950, though the overwhelming majority were reissues of films produced during the war or even in the thirties. Some appeared in spotty releases, and some appeared only on spook show bills or at Halloween.

However, a large number of horror movies had major releases throughout the United States during those years. For example, these included at least twenty-five horror movies starring Bela Lugosi. Twenty-five, all in the space of just three years, even though Lugosi made only one new serious horror movie ( Scared to Death) and only one horror comedy ( Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein) during the second half of the decade. In other words, none of these twenty-five Lugosi movies at movie theaters were new; they were all reissues. The back catalogs of studios like Universal and Monogram saturated theatres with old horror movies to the extent that they generally satisfied whatever demand existed for them, cheaply and efficiently. Put another way, why hire and actor like Bela Lugosi and produce a new horror film when an old one would literally fit the bill?

Reissues were particularly appealing to studios in 1947 and in the
years that immediately followed. As previously mentioned, the high tide of Hollywood’s economic success in 1946 receded rapidly. According to Thomas Schatz, “the American movie industry went into an economic tail-spin and a sustained fall from social grace” during and after 1947 (1997).

Box office receipts fell sharply due to declining attendance, with moviegoers spending an increasing percentage of their discretionary income on other kinds of leisure activities, including bowling, night baseball games, and night classes at colleges and universities. While moviegoing amounted to 25 percent of the money Americans spent on recreational activities dur-
ing the war, by 1950 the number dropped in half to 12.3 percent (Schatz,

1997: 295). The end result: the entire film industry felt great economic
pressure.

At the same time, exhibitors perceived a shortage of new film product, something that led to a pronounced increase in the importation and distribution of foreign films. For example, many British films enjoyed great success at American theatres in the late 1940s. In fact, England’s Eagle-Lion purchased the low-budget American company PRC in order to gain greater
access to the U.S. marketplace (Schatz, 1997: 195).

Along with obtaining product from other countries, studios realized that healthy profits could be had from reviving their own old films. It made good economic sense, at least in the short term. In April of 1947, for example, Motion Picture Herald reported that seven of the eleven producer-distributor companies—including MGM, Paramount, RKO, 20th Century Fox, Universal, Warner Bros., and PRC—would release twenty-nine “hit pictures” from previous seasons during the spring and summer of that year. 20 One studio executive noted that the “trend towards reissues [had] been brought about by

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Gary D. Rhodes
the excessively high production costs which [had] practically doubled since 1941,” adding that “the margin of profit from a reissue is sometimes even greater than that received from a new picture.” 21 Universal’s Vice President agreed, deciding to re-release some of their back catalog as double features packages.

In March 1947—the same month that one wire service article noted that ten “stock” film series, including “Frankenstein, Andy Hardy, and Dracula,”

were “out of production”—Universal announced that it would reissue

Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931) and Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) on a
double bill.22 The two films played in Los Angeles in April of that year, and
continued to appear on theater screens throughout the summer and autumn.

As one exhibitor reported:

Played this double feature one day to capacity business. It will scare them, especially Dracula.

—Roxy Theatre, Hinckley, Minn. 23

At a number of theaters, the dual bill played as a midnight show.24 And at least a few theaters booked Dracula without Frankenstein. 25

The success of such reissues brought even more of the same in 1948. In February of that year, Hollywood Reporter announced that Hollywood had scheduled 130 re-releases, the “greatest number of repeats for a single year’s
program in motion picture distribution history.”26 The practice continued in 1949, despite warnings from some in the industry that reissues would eventually cause more problems than they solved, meaning that they could eventually result in a backlash from moviegoing audiences because they would
grow bored or even feel cheated by paying to see old films.27

Consider again the case of actor Bela Lugosi. Realart Pictures, Inc., of New York City reissued many of his Universal films in 1948 and 1949. His Monogram films of the war era also returned to the screen. The following breakdown provides a partial list of the Lugosi films screened in the post-war era: 1947: Phantom Ship aka The Mystery of the Mary Celeste (Denison Clift, 1935), The Human Monster aka The Dark Eyes of London (Walter Summers, 1939), The Devil Bat (Jean Yarbrough, 1940), The Corpse Van-
ishes (Wallace Fox, 1942), Ghosts on the Loose (William Beaudine, 1943),

The Ape Man (William Beaudine, 1943), Return of the Ape Man (Phil

Rosen, 1944), and The Body Snatcher (Robert Wise, 1945). 28

1948: Son of Frankenstein (Rowland V. Lee, 1939), Black Friday (Arthur

Lubin, 1940), The Wolf Man (1941), The Black Cat (Albert S. Rogell,

1941), The Ghost of Frankenstein (Erle C. Kenton, 1942), Voodoo Man

(William Beaudine, 1944).29

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247

1949: Murders in the Rue Morgue (Robert Florey, 1932), The Raven

(Lew Landers, 1935), Invisible Ghost (Joseph H. Lewis, 1941), Black

Dragons (William Nigh, 1942), Bowery at Midnight (Wallace Fox,

1942), The Corpse Vanishes (Wallace Fox, 1942), The Ape Man (1943),

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (Roy William Neill, 1943), Ghosts on
the Loose (1943). 30

In this world of reissues, however, Bela Lugosi was not a special case.

Many horror films starring Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr., and others also appeared at American movie theaters during the same years. While hardly helpful to the careers of individual actors in Hollywood, the revival of old movies meant that horror was a consistent cinematic presence in the late 1940s, a factor that has been largely ignored by historians who have generally (and incorrectly) equated the decline in new production with the genre’s disappearance from theater screens.

CoMpLiCATing THe pResenT

Prior to the institution of reissue programs by Hollywood studios and companies, the genre grew due to an evolving use of the term “horror movie.”

Such complications began in the spring of 1945 during the final days of the war. The Allied liberation of German death camps resulted in many things, not least of which were terrifying nonfiction images. Public screenings of the film footage resulted in part due to General Eisenhower, who believed that Americans needed to see “what the enemy had done.” As Motion Picture Herald noted, audiences who viewed the Nazi films “have seen all the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse riding at last over the brink of a fetid hell.” 31

Much of the American press labeled footage of the Nazi atrocities as

“Horror Films.” A Gallup poll revealed that 60 percent of the American public believed the Nazi “horror films” should be shown in theaters, and indeed
they were seen in many cities (Gallup, 1945). In St. Louis, for example,

81,500 persons attended 44 screenings, which had originally been scheduled for only twelve performances. 32 And increased theater attendance occurred in
numerous parts of the country when these particular “horror films” appeared. 33

Continued reports of similar “horror films” appeared in the press in 1946, including details of confiscated footage shot by the Nazis. In late February of that year, for example, the Los Angeles Times described footage screened at Nuremberg that showed images of “German soldiers laughing while one of them swung an axe to behead helpless Yugoslavs, of S.S. men swinging corpses after hangings, and of ferocious dogs and starving hogs devour-ing other victims were shown today on [a] motion picture screen to the

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international military tribunal.”34 After mentioning such films as The Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1919) and Dracula (1931), another journal-
ist declared that, “In all the grim record of man’s inhumanity to man there is little to match the wholesale crimes of which the last batch of Nuremberg
defendants now stand convicted.”35 Such connections between horror mov-
ies and the Nazi death camps even extended beyond recorded footage. For example, a 1947 article in Daily Variety compared the experiences of an old
man at Maideneck as being “like a movie of horror” (Jolson, 1947: 6).

At roughly the same time that audiences read about and saw the death
camp footage, the film industry press began to describe yet another kind of new horror movie. In April 1945, Variety wrote that Universal—the key studio producing horror films from 1931 to 1945—would be using “psychological goose pimples” as the basis for a few of their new “chillers,” rather
than relying on the old “monsters.”36 One year later, Hollywood Reporter announced that “horror pix” were gaining “heavier adult patronage,” adding that they were “winning universal appeal” thanks to bigger budgets and
higher standards.37 Here the discussion centered not on films like The Flying Serpent or Valley of the Zombies, but on motion pictures of a different type, those that were more psychological or suspenseful.

Hollywood Reporter specifically cited such 1946 releases as RKO’s The Spiral Staircase (Robert Siodmak) and Bedlam (Mark Robson), the latter produced by Val Lewton and starring Boris Karloff. The trade also drew atten-
tion to Columbia’s The Walls Came Tumbling Down (Lothar Mendes, 1946).

In like fashion, Daily Variety told readers that 20th Century Fox’s Dragon-
wyck (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1946) would gain a “ready audience among the
horror film fans.”38 Such an elastic understanding of “horror” could well have
allowed the Hollywood Reporter to name other movies in general release during 1946, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (which had premiered during the final days of 1945), 20th Century Fox’s Shock (Alfred L. Werker), and Monogram’s Suspense (Frank Tuttle), as well as a number of foreign films that appeared on American screens, including the Swedish-made The Girl and the Devil (Hampe Faustman) and the British-made Dead of Night (Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, and Robert Hamer) and Frenzy (Sjöberg, Alf) . 39

Others working in the film industry also understood this expanded meaning of the word “horror.” In 1946, for example, Curt Siodmak wrote that,

“Almost every melodrama contains scenes of horror, though the A-Plus
producer would never accept that term for his million-dollar creation. When horror enters the gilded gate of top production, it is glorified as a ‘psychological thriller.’ But a rose by any other name . . .” (1946). Even if some of those producers eschewed the word “horror,” others did not. An article in a 1946
issue of Liberty magazine took pains to detail the different kinds of screen

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249
horror that existed, going so far as to say: “Horror can be a great many things, from the psychological thriller to the strictly monster tale. The witch scene in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs [William Cottrell, David Hand,

Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Perce Pearce, and Ben Sharpsteen, 1937] and the whale in Pinocchio [Norman Ferguson, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, Ben Sharpsteen, 1940] were nothing
but horror” (Wechsberg, 1946).

An industry trade publication offered a similar view in 1946, publishing the following fanciful tale to make the point:

Henry Horsecollar, the horror fan, sat in the glum shadows of the film house, throbbing with suspense. Dracula had won a ghastly decision over the Wolfman and was prowling around to clamp a strangle hold on the Cat Man of Paris.

Henry sat, spellbound, with his eardrums straining. He was waiting to hear the guy in the seat behind him start chewing another mouthful of popcorn. Psychological mysteries have been popping up all over the screen, and now comes the psychological western. Maybe the boys will chase each other in circles instead of going thataway. It will be a tough job to “psych” a horse. He has horse sense.

(Phair, 1946: 2)

Surveying the upcoming season of releases in late December 1946, Film Daily told readers that there would definitely be “fewer psychological mysteries” on the screen the following year. 40 While that prediction was true in
many respects, trade publications continued to identify numerous suspense and mystery films as being “horror” movies or at least containing elements
of that genre.41

For example, Daily Variety told readers that Universal’s A Woman’s

Vengeance (Zoltan Korda, 1947) “approximates the shudder thrills of a
horror story.”42 The same publication spoke about the “horror” elements in Warner Bros.’ Cry Wolf (Peter Godfrey, 1947).43 Similarly, the New York Journal-American declared Paramount’s Sorry, Wrong Number (Anatole

Litvak, 1948) and Warner Bros.’ Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948) to be “horror movie[s]” the following year. 44 Other such films at American theaters during this period included Pine-Thomas’ Fear in the Night (Maxell Shane,

1947), United Artists’ The Red House (Delmer Daves, 1947), M.R.S.’ Inner Sanctum (Lew Landers, 1948), SRO’s Portrait of Jennie (William Dieterle, 1948), Eagle-Lion’s The Spiritualist (Bernard Vorhaus, 1948), and Warner Bros.’ The Woman in White (Peter Godfrey, 1948). Many earlier American
films had featured similar kinds of psychological mysteries and suspense themes, but it was only after World War II that the term “horror” became regularly used in both film trade publications and the mainstream press to describe them.

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ConCLusion

No greater misconception exists about the history of the American horror film than the prevalent belief that such movies disappeared from theater screens when World War II came to a close. The year 1946 saw a large number of new horror film releases of a type similar to those popular from 1931 to 1945.

While production of such movies did diminish heavily during the years 1947
to 1950, theaters regularly screened horror film reissues, as well as new kinds of “horror movies” that ranged from nonfiction footage of wartime atrocities to fictional narratives focused on suspense and psychological themes.

Releases of such films would continue in the 1950s, a period in which Hollywood did not recover from the economic problems that took hold in 1947 and which were in fact exacerbated by the ever-increasing popularity of television. Reissue programs continued, most notably a nationally distributed
double feature of Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931) in 1952. And the
expanding boundaries of “horror” came to include a wealth of science-fiction films that became extremely popular throughout the decade. Writing about

RKO’s science fiction film The Thing from Another World (Christian Nyby,

1951), Walter Winchell told readers: “previewers say The Thing makes Dracula look like a petunia” (1951: B13). Such a comment suggests a view that both films could be meaningfully compared, that they were part of the same category, the same genre.

Put another way, rather than viewing the horror movie as dying with the end of World War II and then reappearing in the fifties, we should see those years as part of an ongoing and evolving process. The horror movie changed during and after 1945, but it never disappeared from American theaters. Quite the opposite.

noTes

1. Carlos Clarens’s landmark text An Illustrated History the Horror Film (New York: Capricorn, 1967) represents an early example of this view, as he largely ignored the era from 1946 to 1950. A similar approach appears in Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas, and John Brunas’ book Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1990, rev. 2007). Other examples include Reynold Humphries’s The American Horror Film: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002) and Rick Worland’s The Horror Film: An Introduction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006).

2. “Universal Profit in Year Record High $4, 565, 219.” Motion Picture Herald 1 February 1947.

3. “Mono. 44 Weeks Net Doubles to $318, 824.” Film Daily 12 June 1946;

“Monogram Had $216, 999 Profit for 26 Weeks.” Motion Picture Herald 22 February 1947.

Fears New and Old

251

4. “Drop Low Budget Pix from PRC’s Program.” Film Daily 26 November 1946.

5. “Balanced Films Replace ‘Cycles.’” Variety 5 September 1945.

6. See, for example: “Five Fingers All Thumbs; Mr. D.A. Pre-Sold by Radio.”

Hollywood Reporter 20 December 1946.

7. “Hit Murder Pictures with Other Films.” Motion Picture Herald 8 February 1947; “Horror ‘Vigilantes’ Stir Up Actions in Minn. Nabe Houses Aid P.T.A.” Variety 12 Feb. 1947: 1.

8. Thomas, Bob. “Hollywood Blows Hot for Chillers.” Oakland Tribune 3 March 1948.

9. “Classics Sets 34 New Films for 1949, Against 10 in 1948.” Motion Picture Daily 24 June 1948; “Film Classics to Have 26 Pictures.” Motion Picture Herald 7 August 1948. Pittsburgh Press 9 August 1948.

10. Ibid.

11. “Frankenstein Gets Gold in N.Y. Despite Notices.”

12. “Universal.” Motion Picture Herald 2 October 1948.

13. “Universal.” Motion Picture Herald 25 December 1948.

14. “Universal.” Motion Picture Herald 11 December 1948.

15. “Universal.” Motion Picture Herald 18 June 1949.

16. “Universal.” Motion Picture Herald 19 February 1949.

17. “Universal Plans 24 Next Season.” Motion Picture Herald 21 August 1948.

18. “Allied s Consensus of Tastes.” Variety 16 Feb. 1949: 5.

19. “Fortune Poll Shows Pix Are Losing Out to Radio.” Daily Variety 25 February 1949: 1, 12.

20. “Seven Majors Releasing 29 Reissues This Season.” Motion Picture Herald 26

Apr. 1947.

21. Ibid.

22. “Better Movies.” Seattle Times 9 March 1947.

23. “Universal.” Motion Picture Herald 25 October 1947.

24. The Record-Argus (Greenville, PA) 7 November 1947.

25. Kingsport News (Kingsport, TN) 11 November 1947. [In another curious example of theater programming, the West End in Chicago booked Dracula (1931) on a double bill with House of Frankenstein (1944) in September 1947. See: The Garfieldian (Chicago, IL) 11 Sept. 1947.]

26. “Industry Schedules 130 Re-Releases for this Year.” Hollywood Reporter 9 February 1948.

27. “Reissues Are Bad Policy, Says Broidy.” Motion Picture Herald 29 January 1949.

28. Naugatuck Daily News (Naugatuck, CT); Advertisement. Gastonia Gazette (Gastonia, NC) 6 December 1947; Corsicana Daily Sun (Corsicana, TX) 16 October 1947; Albuquerque Journal (Albuquerque, NM) 1 June 1947; Dallas Morning News 2 February 1947; Berkshire Evening Eagle (Pittsfield, MA) 22 July 1947.

29. Dallas Morning News 24 August 1948; Cleveland Plain Dealer 14 May 1948; Dallas Morning News 31 October 1948; Dallas Morning News 20 May 1948; Dallas Morning News 7 September 1948; Daily Hayward Review (Hayward, CA) 30 October 1948.

30. “Reissues.” Boxoffice 3 December 1949.

31. “Horror and Newsreels.” Motion Picture Herald 12 May 1945.

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32. “St. Loo Blueprints Nazi Atrocity Pix for All U.S.” Variety 13 June 1945.

33. “Horror Pictures Shock Patrons, But None Protests.” Motion Picture Herald 12

May 1945.

34. “Tribunal Shown Nazi Horror Film.” Los Angeles Times 27 February 1946.

35. “From the Nazi Nightmare.” Dallas Morning News 23 August 1947.

36. “U’s Madness Vice Monsters.” Variety 11 April 1945.

37. “Horror Pix Win Heavier Adult Patronage at BO.” Hollywood Reporter 4 April 1946.

38. “Trade Showing.” Daily Variety 18 February 1946: 3.

39. “The Girl and the Devil.” Motion Picture Herald 26 Oct. 1946; “Dead O’

Night Brit Sleeper; Queen Royal Burleycutie.” Motion Picture Herald 28 June 1946;

“Frenzy.” Film Daily 1 August 1946.

40. “Fewer Psychological Mysteries on Screen in ‘47.” Film Daily 26 December 1946.

41. For other discussions regarding the use of terms like “horror” and “mystery”

in film marketing of the period, see: Jancovich, Mark. “The Meaning of Mystery: Genre, Marketing, and the Universal Sherlock Holmes Series of the 1940s.” Film International 3.17 (2005): 34–45; “‘Thrills and Chills’: Horror, the Woman’s Film, and the Origins of Film Noir” New Review of Film and Television Studies 7.2 (2009): 157–71; and Jancovich, Mark. “Two Ways of Looking: The Critical Reception of 1940s Horror.” Cinema Journal 49.3 (2010): 45–56.

42. “Film Preview.” Daily Variety 16 December 1947: 3.

43. “Trade Showings.” Daily Variety 1 July 1947: 3.

44. Qtd. in Advertisement. Daily Variety 25 October 1948: 281; Qtd. in Advertisement. Daily Variety 21 September 1948: 7.

ReFeRenCes

Adams, Marjorie. 1947. “Bela Lugosi Glad of Respite from Horror-Inspiring Roles.”

Boston Globe (Boston, MA). 17 April.

Albuquerque Journal (Albuquerque, NM). June 1, 1947.

“Allied s Consensus of Tastes.” Variety (New York), Feb. 16, 1949: 5.

Berkshire Evening Eagle (Pittsfield, MA). July 22, 1947.

Breaks, Eleanor S. 1945. “Combating Horror Pictures.” Christian Science Monitor (Boston, MA). 29 December: 18.

Clarens, Carlos. 1968. An Illustrated History of the Horror Film. New York: Capricorn Books.

“Classics Sets 34 New Films for 1949, Against 10 in 1948.” Motion Picture Daily (New York), June 24, 1948.

Corsicana Daily Sun (Corsicana, TX). October 16, 1947.

“Daily Variety.” Daily Variety (Hollywood, CA), September 21, 1948: 7.

“Daily Variety.” Daily Variety (Hollywood, CA), October 25, 1948: 281.

Dallas Morning News (Dallas, TX). February 2, 1947.

“Dead O’ Night Brit Sleeper; Queen Royal Burleycutie.” Motion Picture Herald (New York), June 28, 1946.

Fears New and Old

253

“Drop Low Budget Pix from PRC’s Program.” Film Daily (New York), November 26, 1946.

“Fewer Psychological Mysteries on Screen in ’47.” Film Daily (New York), December 26, 1946.

“Film Preview.” Daily Variety (Hollywood, CA), December 16, 1947: 3.

“Fortune Poll Shows Pix Are Losing Out to Radio.” Daily Variety (Hollywood, CA), February 25, 1949 (1): 12.

“Frenzy.” Film Daily (New York), August 1, 1946.

“From the Nazi Nightmare.” Dallas Morning News (Dallas, TX), August 23, 1947.

Gallup, George. 1945. “Public Says U.S. and Germans Should See Nazi Horror Films.” Washington Post (Washington, DC). 20 May.

Gastonia Gazette (Gastonia, NC). December 6, 1947.

“The Girl and the Devil.” Motion Picture Herald (New York), October 26, 1946.

“Hit Murder Pictures with Other Films.” Motion Picture Herald (New York), February 8, 1947.

“Horror and Newsreels.” Motion Picture Herald (New York), May 12, 1945.

“Horror Pictures Shock Patrons, But None Protests.” Motion Picture Herald (New York), May 12, 1945.

“Horror Pix Win Heavier Adult Patronage at BO.” Hollywood Reporter (Los Angeles, CA), April 4, 1946.

“Horror ‘Vigilantes’ Stir Up Actions in Minn.’ Nabe Houses Aid P.T.A.” Variety (New York), February 12, 1947: 1.

Humphries, Reynold. 2002. The American Horror Film: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

“Industry Schedules 130 Re-Releases for this Year.” Hollywood Reporter (Los Angeles, CA), February 9, 1948.

Jancovich, Mark. 2005. “The Meaning of Mystery: Genre, Marketing, and the Universal Sherlock Holmes Series of the 1940s.” Film International 3 (17): 34–45.

———. 2009. “‘Thrills and Chills’: Horror, the Woman’s Film, and the Origins of Film Noir.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 7 (2): 157–71.

———. 2010. “Two Ways of Looking: The Critical Reception of 1940s Horror.”

Cinema Journal 49 (3): 45–56.

Jolson, Al. 1947. “Restricted.” Daily Variety (Los Angeles, CA). 16 June: 6.

Kingsport News (Kingsport, TN). November 11, 1947.

“Mono. 44 Weeks Net Doubles to $318, 824.” Film Daily (New York), June 12, 1946.

“Monogram Had $216, 999 Profit for 26 Weeks.” Motion Picture Herald (New York), February 22, 1947.

“Seven Majors Releasing 29 Reissues This Season.” Motion Picture Herald (New York), April 26, 1947.

“Film Classics to Have 26 Pictures.” Motion Picture Herald (New York), August 7, 1948.

“Reissues.” Boxoffice (Beverly Hill, CA), December 3, 1949.

“Reissues Are Bad Policy, Says Broidy.” Motion Picture Herald (New York), January 29, 1949.

Phair, George. 1946. “Retakes.” Daily Variety (Los Angeles, CA) . February 21: 2.

Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA). August 9, 1948.

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The Record-Argus (Greenville, PA). November 7, 1947.

Schatz, Thomas. Boom or Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

“Better Movies.” Seattle Times (Seattle, WA), March 9, 1947.

Siodmak, Curt. 1946. “In Defense of the Ghouls.” The Screen Writer 1 (9) (Feb): 1–6.

“St. Loo Blueprints Nazi Atrocity Pix for All U.S.” Variety (New York), June 13, 1945.

Thomas, Bob. 1948. “Hollywood Blows Hot for Chillers.” Oakland Tribune (Oakland, CA) 3 March.

“Trade Showing.” Daily Variety (Hollywood, CA), February 18, 1946: 3.

“Trade Showings. Daily Variety (Hollywood, CA), July 1, 1947: 3.

“Tribunal Shown Nazi Horror Film.” Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, CA), 1946.

February 27.

“U’s Madness Vice Monsters.” Variety (New York), Apr. 11, 1945.

“Universal.” Motion Picture Herald (New York), October 25, 1947.

“Universal.” Motion Picture Herald (New York), October 2, 1948.

“Universal.” Motion Picture Herald (New York), December 11, 1948.

“Universal.” Motion Picture Herald (New York), December 25, 1948.

“Universal.” Motion Picture Herald (New York), February 19, 1949.

“Universal.” Motion Picture Herald (New York), June 18, 1949.

“Universal Plans 24 Next Season.” Motion Picture Herald (New York), August 21, 1948.

“Universal Profit in Year Record High $4, 565, 219.” Motion Picture Herald (New York), February 1, 1947.

Weaver, Tom, Michael Brunas, John Brunas and Michael Brunas. 2007. Universal Horrors the Studio’s Classic Films, 1931–1946. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.

Wechsberg, Joseph. 1946. “Horrors!” Liberty. 24 August.

Winchell, Walter. 1951. “Walter Winchell . . . in New York.” Washington Post (Washington, DC) . April 20: B13.

Worland, Rick. 2006. The Horror Film: A Brief Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.

FiLMogRApHy

A Woman’s Vengeance. Directed by Zoltan Korda. Universal, 1947.

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Directed by Charles Barton. Universal, 1948.

Universal City, CA: Universal Home Video, 2000. DVD.

Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff. Directed by Charles Barton.

Universal, 1949. Universal City, CA: Universal Home Video, 1994. DVD.

The Amazing Mr. X [aka The Spiritualist]. Directed by Bernard Vorhaus. Eagle-Lion 1948. Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2006. DVD.

The Ape Man. Directed by William Beaudine. Monogram, 1943. Narbeth, PA: Alpha Video, 2002. DVD.

The Beast with Five Fingers. Directed by Robert Florey. Warner Bros., 1946.

Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2013. DVD.

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Bedlam. Directed by Mark Robson. RKO, 1946. Burbank, CA: Turner Entertainment/

Warner Home Video, 2005. DVD.

The Black Cat. Directed by Albert S. Rogell. Universal, 1941. [ Universal Classic Movie Archive] Universal City, CA: Universal Home Video. 2007. DVD.

Black Dragons. Directed by William Nigh. Monogram, 1942. Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2013. DVD.

Black Friday. Directed by Arthur Lubin. Universal, 1940. Universal City, CA: Universal Home Video, 2005. DVD.

The Body Snatcher. Directed by Robert Wise. RKO, 1945. Burbank, CA: Turner Entertainment/Warner Home Video, 2005. DVD.

Bowery at Midnight. Directed by Wallace Fox. Monogram, 1942. Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2013. DVD.

The Brute Man. Directed by Jean Yarbrough. PRC, 1946. Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 1999. DVD.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Directed by Robert Wiene. Decla Film-Gesellschaft, 1920. Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 1996. DVD.

The Cat Creeps. Directed by Erle C. Kenton. Universal, 1946.

The Catman of Paris. Directed by Lesley Selander. Republic, 1946.

The Corpse Vanishes. Directed by Wallace Fox. 1942. Chatsworth, CA: Westlake Entertainment, 2006. DVD.

The Creeper. Directed by Jean Yarbrough. Twentieth Century Fox, 1948.

Cry Wolf. Directed by Peter Godfrey. Warner Bros., 1947. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2010. DVD.

Dead of Night. Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, and Robert Hamer. Ealing Studios, 1945. Troy, MI: Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2003.

DVD.

The Devil Bat Directed by Jean Yarbrough. PRC, 1940. Narberth, PA : Alpha Video Distributors, 2002. DVD.

Devil Bat’s Daughter. Directed by Frank Wisbar. PRC, 1946. Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 1999. DVD.

Dracula. Directed by Tod Browning. Universal, 1931. Universal City, CA: Universal Home Video, 2006. DVD.

Dragonwyck. Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Twentieth-Century Fox, 1946.

Beverly Hills, CA: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2008. DVD.

The Face of Marble. Directed by William Beaudine. Monogram, 1946.

Fear in the Night Directed by Maxell Shane. Pine-Thomas Productions, 1947.

Narberth, PA: Alpha Video, 2003. DVD.

The Flying Serpent. Directed by Sam Newfield. PRC, 1946. Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 1999. DVD.

Frankenstein. Directed by James Whale. Universal, 1931. Universal City, CA: Universal Home Video, 2006. DVD.

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Directed by Roy William Neill. Universal, 1943.

Universal City, CA: Universal Home Video, 2001. DVD.

Frenzy [ aka Torment]. Directed by Alf Sjöberg. Svensk Filmindustri, 1944. Irvington: Criterion Collection, 2007. DVD.

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The Ghost of Frankenstein. Directed by Erle C. Kenton. Universal, 1942. Universal City, CA: Universal Home Video, 2001. DVD.

Ghosts on the Loose. Directed by William Beaudine. Monogram, 1943. New York: Goodtimes DVD, 2001. DVD.

The Girl and the Devil. Directed by Hampe Faustman. Scandia Films, 1945.

House of Dracula. Directed by Erle C. Kenton. Universal, 1945. Universal City, CA: Universal Home Video, 2004. DVD.

House of Horrors. Directed by Jean Yarbrough. Universal, 1946. Universal City, CA: Universal Home Video, 2009. DVD.

The Human Monster [aka The Dark Eyes of London] . Directed by Walter Summers.

John Argyle Productions, 1939. Narberth, PA: Alpha Video, 2002. DVD.

Invisible Ghost. Directed by Joseph H. Lewis. Monogram, 1941. Narberth, PA: Alpha Video, 2003. DVD.

The Mask of Diijon. Directed by Lew Landers. PRC, 1946.

Murders in the Rue Morgue. Directed by Robert Florey, Universal, 1932. Universal City, CA: Universal Home Video, 2012. DVD.

Phantom Ship [aka The Mystery of the Mary Celeste]. Directed by Denison Clift.

Hammer Film Productions, 1935. Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2002.

DVD.

Pinocchio. Directed by Norman Ferguson, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, and Ben Sharpsteen. Disney, 1940. Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, 2009. DVD.

Portrait of Jennie. Directed by William Dieterle. Selznick International Pictures, 1948. Santa Monica, CA: MGM Home Entertainment, 2004. DVD.

The Raven. Directed by Lew Landers, Universal, 1935. Universal City, CA: Universal Home Video, 2012. DVD.

The Red House. Directed by Delmer Daves, United Artists, 1947. Narberth, PA: Alpha Video, 2003. DVD.

Return of the Ape Man. Directed by Phil Rosen. Monogram, 1944. Hellfire Video, 2006. DVD.

Rope. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Warner Bros., 1948. Universal City, CA: Universal Home Video, 2000. DVD.

Scared to Death. Directed by Christy Cabanne. Golden Gate Pictures, 1947.

Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2013. DVD.

She-Wolf of London. Directed by Jean Yarbrough. Universal, 1946. Universal City, CA: Universal Home Video, 2004. DVD.

Shock. Directed by Alfred L. Werker. Twentieth-Century Fox, 1945. Beverly Hills, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2006. DVD.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Directed by William Cottrell, David Hand, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Perce Pearce, and Ben Sharpsteen. Disney, 1937.

Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, 2009. DVD.

Son of Frankenstein. Directed by Rowland V. Lee. Universal, 1939. Universal City, CA: Universal Home Video, 2001. DVD.

Sorry Wrong Number. Directed by Anatole Litvak. Paramount, 1948. Hollywood, CA: Paramount, 2002. DVD.

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Spellbound. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Twentieth-Century Fox, 1945. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2008. DVD.

The Spider Woman Strikes Back. Directed by Arthur Lubin. Universal, 1946.

The Spiral Staircase. Directed by Robert Siodmak. RKO, 1946. Culver City, CA: Metro Goldwyn Mayer Home Entertainment, 2005. DVD.

Spook Busters. Directed by William Beaudine. Monogram, 1946. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video. 2013. DVD.

Strangler of the Swamp. Directed by Frank Wisbar. PRC, 1946. Chatsworth, CA: Distributed by Image Entertainment, 1999. DVD.

Suspense. Directed by Frank Tuttle. Monogram, 1945. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video. 2009. DVD.

The Thing from Another World. Directed by Christian Nyby, RKO, 1951. Burbank, CA : Warner Home Video, 2003. DVD.

The Unknown Island. Directed by Jack Bernhard. Albert Jay Cohen Productions, 1948. Chatsworth, C: Image Entertainment, 1999. DVD.

Valley of the Zombies. Directed by Philip Ford. Republic, 1946.

Voodoo Man. Directed by William Beaudine. Monogram, 1944.

The Walls Came Tumbling Down. Directed by Lothar Mendes. Columbia, 1946.

Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures, 2014. DVD.

The Wolf Man (George Waggner. Universal, 1941. Universal City, CA: Universal Home Video, 1999. DVD.

The Woman in White. Directed by Peter Godfrey. Warner Bros., 1948.

Part IV
poveRTy Row

Chapter 14

Hypodermic needles and evil Twins

The Poverty Row Wartime Horrors
of Sam newfield

Paul Corupe

Working in virtually every film genre—westerns, film noir, jungle movies, war pictures and horror—Sam Newfield has been called the most prolific sound director of all time. Cranking out as many as twenty films per year under strict time and budgetary restrictions, Newfield’s most remarkable output remains four horror films he made for Poverty Row studio Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) in the mid-1940s, in the midst of World War II.

In The Mad Monster (1942), Dead Men Walk (1943), The Monster Maker

(1944), and The Flying Serpent (1946), Newfield transcends the limitations
of Poverty Row studio conditions to achieve a striking authorship as he reconfigured earlier horror films into new, starkly gloomy wartime monster movies. Moreover, Newfield’s 1940s horror films were inspired by the
shocking Nazi scientific experimentation and torture that was taking place in Europe, giving these works a dynamism missing in almost all his other work.

Though the directors who toiled under Poverty Row’s fast-paced production schedules and budget restrictions are rarely considered as auteurs, there are exceptions. Edgar G. Ulmer, for example, has been heralded for the way he used PRC’s threadbare atmospheres to his advantage in films like Detour (1945). A comparative unknown who preferred to stay out of the public eye, Newfield managed similar achievements in his horror efforts, which combine accomplished effects work and a distinctive atmosphere of despair to achieve a consistency of cinematic styles and themes.

While relatively little is known about Newfield, film historian Wheeler Winston Dixon identifies him, along with Ulmer, as one of “PRC’s more important directors” as well as “one of the more mysterious figures in film history”

(1986: viii). Working under a variety of names, including Sam Neufeld, Sam Newfeld, Sherman Scott, and Peter Stewart, Newfield made mostly
westerns for various small studios throughout the 1930s. These pre-war films 261

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are competent, if unremarkable—even Newfield’s most infamous works, the all-midget film The Terror of Tiny Town (1938) and all-African American western Harlem on the Prairie (1937), fail to rise above gimmicky premises.

While it is often believed that, at Poverty Row studios, “no one really cared what was ‘in the can’ as long as you had at least fifty-four minutes of pro-
gramming” (Dixon 1986: vii), the work of Newfield, like Ulmer, proves that
this was not always the case; signs of authorship can arise even in PRC’s fast-paced, commercially focused environment. Publicly denouncing the Third Reich via his films several years before America joined the war, Newfield seems to have been personally inspired by the plight of European Jews at the hands of the Nazis, an outrage that surfaces throughout his films. The victims in Newfield’s horrors often evoke the Jewish prisoners used as human guinea pigs for unsafe medical testing and eugenics experiments by concentration camp physicians like Dr. Josef Mengele, who believed party leader Rudoph Hess’s assertion that Nazism was “nothing more than applied biology”

(Lifton 1986: 31). In sharp contrast to many other Poverty Row works, these
films directly reference real-life atrocities taking place behind Nazi lines, with recurring images of mad scientists torturing subjects by injecting them with dangerous substances using hypodermic needles—a particular challenge since the Hays Code deemed that depictions of surgery at the time had to be

“treated within the careful limits of good taste” (Bynum 2008).

In 1939, Newfield and his brother, prolific producer Sigmund Neufeld, were hired by a small studio, Producers Distribution Corporation (PDC), to make a film that would inform much of Newfield’s work in the horror genre.

Released at a time when it was not unusual for Nazi-produced films with anti-

Semitic themes to play in American theaters (Waldman 2008: 1), Newfield’s

Hitler - Beast of Berlin shows the first signs of its director’s topical engagement in a story about members of a heroic anti-Nazi resistance group who are incarcerated in a concentration camp. Released before the United States became officially involved in World War II in 1941, Hitler - Beast of Berlin was one of the first films critical of the Third Reich, and quickly came under protest from U.S.-based Bundists, a pro-Nazi German-American organiza-
tion, who managed to get the film banned in New York (Paszylk 2009: 44).

Intended to be a spy thriller, Hitler - Beast of Berlin is also an earnest warning about the Nazi party’s state-sanctioned torture and experimentation. The U.S. press had reported on Nazi violence against Jews in Germany as early as 1933 (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), with Time magazine reporting in early 1939 that “Germany’s 700,000 Jews have been tortured physically, robbed of homes and properties, denied a chance to earn a living, chased off the streets” ( Time, 1939). The American press covered state-sponsored euthanasia and sterilization programs aimed at the infirm
and, increasingly, Jews, throughout the 1930s (Lifton 1986: 9–10), as well as

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Hitler’s 1939 statement that “a new world war would mean the annihilation of the Jewish race” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum).

There is only one scene in Hitler - Beast of Berlin that directly refers to violence against Jews, but it is the film’s most memorable; a first-person shot of a man being whipped by a Nazi officer anticipates many of the elements that Newfield drew on for his horror films, but it also features an atmosphere of approaching, inescapable doom that makes his heroes seem destined for a dire fate even when they escape. It is in this way that Dixon observes that the actors in Newfield’s films “do not so much appear in his films as they are trapped in them, entombed in their frames for cinematic eternity”

(Dixon, 2007).

Shortly after the release of Hitler - Beast of Berlin, Sigmund Neufeld took over PDC, which changed its name to PRC in 1940. Newfield became PRC’s house director, where he continued to make almost exclusively westerns,
usually for less than $40,000 over six to ten days (Davis 2012: 50). Like the
other Poverty Row studios, PRC kept costs for their westerns low by filming outside to avoid more expensive studio shooting, casting actors no longer in demand from the big studios (such as Newfield’s Billy the Kid series with 1930s star Buster Crabbe) and recycling gunfights and chase sequences from
previous films (Tzioumakis 2008: 9). Though Newfield’s dependency on
gambling didn’t appear to directly affect his filmmaking, his prolific output was at least due in part to a constant need for more money. Newfield’s nephew notes that “He ran up like big gambling debts, and my dad [Sigmund]

would have to bail him out. He gambled on anything at all [ . . . ] it became
an addiction. It ruined him” (Dixon, 2007).

Under Newfield’s brother’s direction, PRC soon became known as “an
informal haven for many gifted Jewish artists escaping from the Nazis, such as Edgar G. Ulmer, Franz Wysbar (who ‘anglicized’ his name to ‘Frank

Wisbar’) and the brilliant cameraman Eugen Schüfftan” (Dixon, 2007).

Perhaps partially inspired by the personal stories of those peers who escaped the Nazis, Newfield began to mark out a more personal direction than is visible in his cowboy programmers. As Dixon notes, “the low budgets and ultrashort shooting schedules afforded a certain personal creative freedom, which directors like Ulmer [and] Newfield capitalized on” (1986: vii).

Some scholars have argued that during World War II horror films avoided mention of the bloody, unpleasant warfare happening overseas. Specifically, it’s been said that in the case of the war, “real horrors overwhelmed fake movie scares and made them irrelevant except as purely escapist, increas-
ingly puerile entertainment” (Worland 1997: 47). However, Newfield’s
horror films took advantage of the freedom of Poverty Row to revisit the themes of Hitler - Beast of Berlin, only cloaked in the familiar tropes of established horror films to make them more palatable for audiences and

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would-be censors. In doing so, Newfield’s four wartime horror films made during this period exhibit the Andrew Sarris’s hallmarks of the auteur: (1) the technical competence of a director as a criterion of value; (2) the distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value; and (3) interior meaning is extrapolated from the tension between a director’s personality and his material (1962/63: 7). Although Sarris’s criteria have been challenged over the years, it is under this definition that Ulmer became one of the only Poverty Row directors to achieve this distinction for his PRC films Detour (1944) and Bluebeard (1944). In discussing Ulmer, Sarris himself notes the fact “that a personal style could emerge from the lowest depths of Poverty Row [as] a tribute to a director without alibis,” and comments that Ulmer is

“one of the minor glories of the cinema” (1968: 143). Further, only a few of Ulmer’s more than fifty directorial efforts remain celebrated, suggesting that a director can be considered an auteur based on the strength of a fraction of his filmography. Many of Ulmer’s PRC programmers like Tomorrow We Live (1942) and My Son the Hero (1943) are usually excluded from critical discussions of his work. Though Newfield favored a somewhat faster approach than Ulmer that minimized the number of needed set-ups, Newfield, too, managed to exhibit Sarris’s premises of auteurism in a specific portion of his output by supporting his personal attacks on Nazi pseudo-science with an ominous atmosphere of dread, whether fully intentional or not.

Following the success of PRC’s first horror film, 1940’s The Devil Bat (Yarbrough 1940), Newfield’s The Mad Monster (1942) was the first of

PRC’s horror films made after the United States officially entered World War II on December 8, 1941. Released just a few months after Universal’s The Wolf Man (George Waggner, 1941) hit theaters, The Mad Monster sees the reclusive Dr. Cameron (George Zucco) inject his dim-witted handy-man Pedro (Glenn Strange, later the titular monster of Universal’s House of Frankenstein [Erle C. Kenton 1944]) with a needle containing specially treated wolf’s blood that turns him into a werewolf. Though Cameron has plans to create an entire army of lycanthropes to fight the Nazi enemy armies, he first begins to manipulate Pedro to enact deadly revenge on those who ridiculed his scientific theories.

An undisguised variation on The Wolf Man narrative with a mad scientist twist, The Mad Monster is a bit of a hybrid Frankenstein creature itself, cleverly and unashamedly referencing well-known scenes from Universal horror classics (and a few others) that came before. Zucco, whose overbearing, menacing acting style works well in Newfield’s horror films, previously appeared in Universal’s The Monster and the Girl (Stuart Heisler, 1941) and The Mummy’s Hand (Christy Cabanne, 1940). As Tom Weaver notes, The Mad Monster is also “one of the few Poverty Row horror films of the 1940s
to feature a ‘conventional,’ Universal-style monster” (Weaver, 1999: 78).

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Newfield further injects unmistakable references to the man/beast transformations of Island of Lost Souls (Erle C. Kenton, 1932), the relationship between master and servant in Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931), and the drowned child in Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931). These conscious references resituated in a wartime setting are meant both to appeal and comfort audiences by offering slight variations on ideas they’ve seen before, but also to enrich the experience by acknowledging “their interrelation with the con-
temporary oeuvre” (Waltje 2005: 62).

Further, Zucco’s Dr. Cameron has been described as “a cross between

Dr. Frankenstein and Adolph Hitler” (Paszylk 2009: 45) and as having a
similar personality as Hitler, since “both are outcasts who seek the destruc-
tion of those they felt denied them the realization of their goals” (Matthews

2009: 155). And there is a unique connection between Hitler and wolves that

Newfield may be hinting at throughout the film too. Historian Robert G. L.

Waite claims that, “Hitler was fascinated with wolves. As a boy he was well pleased with his first name, noting that it came from the old German ‘Athal-wolf’—a compound of Athal (‘noble’) and Wolfa (‘wolf’). And ‘noble wolf’

he sought to remain. At the start of his political career he chose ‘Herr Wolf’

as his pseudonym,” and notes “In the Ukraine his headquarters were Werwolf (Werewolf)” (1977: 26). In bestowing these nicknames, among others, David Skal notes Hitler’s “fetish for transforming people and things into wolves”

(2001: 212), just like Cameron.

Although ostensibly creating a supersoldier for the Allied forces, Cameron’s method of testing his werewolf serum—by giving experimental, potentially harmful injections to a subject he considers inferior—echoes the Nazi experiments on Jews in concentration camps at the time, which included skin grafts
and surgery on patients given no anesthesia (Waite 1977: 23). Indeed, Dr.

Cameron is just the first of Newfield’s horror protagonists to seek aberrant control over the natural world, in this case to use a blood transfusion to induce a man to devolve into a wolf. Specifically, The Mad Monster seems to point to “certain pitfalls of fiddling with science (even the scientists who seem thoughtful and practical are sometimes tempted to do crazy things, seemed to be his warning)” while simultaneously operating as “an homage to 1931’s Dracula and Frankenstein” (Paszylk 2009: 44).

At seventy-seven minutes in length, at least ten minutes longer than
most Poverty Row horrors, The Mad Monster is quite ambitious compared to its peers, and seems to verify that Newfield was interested in more than just meeting the bare minimum requirements of Poverty Row commercial
product. There are also several surprising technical touches—in particular, the film’s opening lap-dissolve werewolf transformation has been singled out as “one of the most ambitious special effects attempted by [Poverty Row
films of the 1940s]” (Weaver, 1999: 80). And though Newfield can’t match

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the lush look of Universal’s horror classics, he abandons the generic outdoor settings of his westerns to create a noticeably dark atmosphere, draping his scenes with decaying nature, including hanging vines, dead trees and damp, foggy marshland that provide “an eerie backdrop [ . . . ] a dismal ambiance
which adds to the grim flavor of the film” (Weaver, 1999: 79).

It is this “flavor,” established in Hitler - Beast of Berlin, that infuses all of Newfield’s wartime horror films. Newfield’s sparse use of lighting and static, lengthy takes only highlights the sense that, despite small victories, evil is essentially unstoppable. While perhaps reflecting Newfield’s own anxieties over what would happen if Hitler’s message of anti-Semitism were successful, at least some of this bleak atmosphere appears to stem from the hectic shooting conditions at PRC—it wasn’t unusual for Poverty Row directors to minimize action that might require another camera set up or another take if an actor made a mistake. This time-saving technique generally tends to result in long, dialogue-heavy sequences with few cuts that gives films like The Mad Monster a slower pace than their big studio counterparts as well as a distinctive moodiness. As has been noted, the “elimination of stage business [ . . . ] gives most ‘B’s’ a strange, almost cryptic air of flatness and unreality [but] the best of the ‘B’ directors developed a kind of visual
shorthand to turn these minimal resources into expressive devices” (Flynn
and McCarthy, 1986: 83).

Although Ulmer worked at PRC at the same time as Newfield, there’s a
pronounced difference between these director’s films that stems from their respective approaches on set. Ulmer coped with PRC’s tight shooting schedules by doing as many close-ups as possible on the last day of production, cutting directly in the camera to reduce set-ups to allow the editor enough
options to give the film a faster pace (Bogdanovich, 1986: 63). Newfield, on
the other hand, preferred to rely on long master shots, minimizing his use of close-ups, saving them only for specific actions within a scene such as “a door
opening, a gun firing, a safe being cracked” (Dixon, 2007).

Newfield used his time-saving techniques to his advantage in The Mad Monster. Dixon has noted that Newfield’s films possess an “air of hermetic finality in their execution which is, for better or worse, his alone” (2007).

Weaver agrees that the “economy that permeates the film could almost be mistaken for creepy atmosphere” (1999: 75). With minimal cuts and camera movement, Newfield often frames the characters so they appear small and vulnerable in a shadowy, largely static frame, as though an encroaching evil is poised just off camera. While the gloomy hopelessness that these shots tend to portray give his westerns a dour, flat flavour, it’s an approach that perfectly suits the uncanny atmosphere of Newfield’s horror films, which aside from possibly The Flying Serpent, are more about the grotesquery of human evil than scary monsters lurching into frame to threaten potential victims.

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Newfield expanded his horror world with Dead Men Walk (1943) the fol-
lowing year, a film that shares The Mad Monster’s fog-choked backwoods setting and at least some of its wartime urgency. After already drawing heavily from The Wolf Man with Dead Men Walk, Newfield goes back further into Universal’s vault to create “a disguised retread of Universal’s Dracula”

(Weaver 1999: 98), going so far as to recruit Dwight Frye, who played

Renfield in that film, as Zolarr—a graveyard-stalking hunchbacked assistant that combines elements of his Dracula character with Fritz, his character in Frankenstein. Featuring a script by Fred Myton (of Terror of Tiny Town), Dead Men Walk brings back favorite PRC horror heavy Zucco, who is once again noteworthy as Dr. Lloyd Clayton, a respected doctor who murders his twin brother Elwyn (also Zucco in his only double role) when he discovers he’s a Satanist dabbling in the black arts, a plot device also used in RKO horror producer Val Lewton’s film of the same year, The Seventh Victim (Robson 1943). But, acting on instructions left behind by Elwyn, Zolarr exhumes his master and brings him back to life as a vampire. Elwyn plots his revenge on his twin brother by destroying everything he holds dear, especially their mutual niece Gayle (Mary Carlisle), until Lloyd discovers his designs on her and tries to put Elwyn back in his grave once and for all.

Newfield introduces some distinct variations on Hollywood vampire
mythology here—Elwyn can disappear into a ghostly apparition at will and must be killed by fire—but otherwise the majority of the film plays out like Dracula, with Elwyn making frequent visitations to Gayle’s room at night and enlisting help to remove her protective crucifix. But Frankenstein seems to be the model for the final reel battle where Lloyd faces his brother in a fight while the room around them erupts in flames until both of them—and Zolarr, stuck under a fallen pillar—are consumed by fire. It is a spectacular finish for a Poverty Row film. Some of Dead Men Walk’s other technical achievements are almost as accomplished as this fiery finale. Although much of the twin effect is accomplished by using a double, Newfield draws on PRC’s effects department to raise the film beyond expectations with a handful of split screen effects that puts two images of Zucco in the same frame, a costly but acceptably convincing effect that shows Newfield was interested in more than just finishing Dead Men Walk as quickly and inexpensively as possible.

As opposed to the lycanthropy-inducing blood transfusions in The Mad Monster, Dead Men Walk has Lloyd propose a series of transfusions to aid the ailing Gayle, unaware that her lethargy and pale pallor are caused by Elwyn feasting on her blood each night. When the injections don’t have much effect, Galye’s fiancé (Nedrick Young) tells the local authorities that he believes Lloyd’s experiments are to blame for her condition, that his hypodermic needles contain some kind of deadly poison. Although Lloyd’s transfusions are a legitimate attempt to help Gayle, they are largely ineffective; a hopeless

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attempt to stop Elwyn’s evil campaign of revenge. However, the suspicion about Lloyd’s real intentions is another clear indication of the deep mistrust of medical science (and especially the contents of hypodermic needles), that runs through all of Newfield’s horror films. In addition, the film may refer to certain experiments by notorious Nazi physician Dr. Mengele. Known as the

“Angel of Death,” Mengele was reportedly fascinated by twins, for whom he had a “passion to learn everything about [their] similarities and differences,”

and considered them “his most treasured specimens” (Posner and Ware,

2000: 38).

Borrowing elements from another familiar horror classic, the previous year’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Victor Fleming 1941), Newfield has Lloyd and Elwyn embody the dual nature of the mad scientist figures in countless horror films, including The Mad Monster’s Dr. Cameron. Lloyd’s practical, logical approach—even though it often fails—is in stark contrast to Elwyn’s impulsively violent and vindictive personality. The final physical struggle between Lloyd and Elwyn further illustrates this internal struggle against the temptation for evil (or the “crazy things” noted by Paszylk). Using the familiar plot points of past horror film classics, Newfield shows how authentic scientific research is inextricably linked to the potential for misuse.

With far more scenes shot inside the studio than in The Mad Monster, Dead Men Walk incorporates expressionistic lighting and architectural flourishes in his sets to give the film a slightly lusher feel. The graveyard scenes, as Zolarr retrieves his master’s body and prowls around the Clayton family mausoleum, are particularly creative, ominous sets drooping with dying vegetation that could almost be the same sets that Zucco prowled as Dr. Cameron. Yet still, the tragic plot plays out with the support of Newfield’s usual oppressive, fated tone. Critics have singled out the look of this film for its “dark,
unhealthy atmosphere” (Weaver, 1999: 101) while noting that many scenes

“retain a certain sinister appeal in the grim uncertainty of their visual execu-
tion” (Dixon, 2009: 26). This overwhelming fatalism is especially effective in
the finale as Lloyd sacrifices himself to stop his brother, a conclusion that is less horrific than disheartening, as it results in the death of all three principal characters.

PRC moved into the roomier Fine Arts Studio in 1943 before Newfield
started his next film, The Monster Maker, which notably benefits from spacious new sets. Another variation on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the film features not only one of PRC’s most brutal premises, but is perhaps Newfield’s most intertextual work, reconfiguring “unmistakable elements from Universal’s The Raven and MGM’s Mad Love” (Weaver, 1999: 146), as well as contain-
ing direct allusions to Murder in the Rue Morgue’s killer gorilla, Lugosi’s scene at the opera in Dracula and dialogue that mentions Dr. Frankenstein.

More importantly, The Monster Maker is firmly rooted in wartime horrors

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and remains Newfield’s most plainly stated attack on the perils of unchecked scientific experimentation. The plot, in which a doctor injects a deadly disease into the body of his unconscious victim, was deemed by critics as especially unpleasant at the time. On the film’s release, The Hollywood Reporter stated that the film is “as stomach turning as the most ardent neurotic could wish
for” (Weaver, 1999: 101), while even modern film writers like Tom Weaver
note that the “grisly theme and . . . [J. Carroll] Naish’s slimy performance”

make The Monster Maker “ostensibly unpalatable” (Weaver, 1999: 145).

Unfortunately Zucco must have been busy that week of shooting as another horror cinema alumnus, J. Carrol Naish, takes over as The Monster Maker’s resident mad scientist. He appears as Markoff, an unlikable doctor on the cusp of discovering a cure for acromegaly, a rare condition in which the body continues to pump out growth hormones past puberty resulting in a gradual deformation of the body, turning Markoff into a medically created monster.

Notably, acromegaly also afflicted one of Universal’s horror film stars of the 1940s, Rondo Hatton, whose thick, enlarged facial features made him a brief horror icon beginning with his portrayal of The Creeper in the following year’s The Pearl of Death (Neill 1944). Notably, after Hatton’s death, Universal sold his final film, The Brute Man (Yarbrough 1946), to PRC after
his death in 1946 because of embarrassment at exploiting his disfigurement.1

At the beginning of the film, Dr. Markoff spies from his opera box seats Patricia (Wanda McKay), a young girl that bears an uncanny resemblance to his dead wife. Despite Patricia’s rebuffs, Markoff is determined to marry her. She asks her concert pianist father, Anthony Lawrence (Ralph Morgan) to pay a visit to Markoff to warn him to stop bothering her, but the doctor knocks him unconscious and injects him with a hypodermic needle containing a sample of acromegaly that he has modified to accelerate the deformation of the body. Once Anthony discovers that his hands and face are becoming deformed, he again confronts Markoff, who explains that he will not provide a cure until Patricia agrees to marry him.

Although perceived by critics as crude in its content, The Monster Maker is one of Newfield’s most convincing technical achievements. Dixon notes that “as he consolidated his hold on PRC’s top directorial spot, Newfield gathered around him a crew of skilled technicians whom he could rely upon
to knock out the day’s work with speed and efficiency” (Dixon, 2007). New-
field and his team were able to achieve a consistent atmosphere of dread and improve on the general pace and effect of his films. But it’s the acromegaly makeup by Maurice Seiderman that is the most notable aspect of this production. A veteran of RKO, Seiderman rarely received on-screen credit, but is best known for the reshaped foam plastic facial features he created for Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) to age Orson Welles, and the studio’s horror efforts, like The Hunchback of Notre Dame (William Dieterle, 1939)

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(“Maurice Seiderman, 82, Inventor And Hollywood Makeup Artist” 1989).

Seiderman again uses foam plastic to gradually distort Morgan’s features, concocting one of the most startling achievements in makeup in any Poverty Row film.

The Monster Maker feels far ahead of its time in its ability to truly unsettle the viewer. Newfield and PRC’s willingness to exploit a real life, horrific medical condition is a direct reference to real Nazi experiments, which saw concentration camp detainees injected with diseases to see how they might react.

At the beginning of the 1940s, “the horrors of eugenics were, at least publicly, diminishing in the United States as they accelerated in Nazi Germany. This shift is addressed in a handful of late 1930s and early 1940s B horror movies”

(Smith, 2012: 236), who points to The Monster Maker and The Mad Monster as films that illustrate that “in Germany, medical experimentation on inno-
cents goes to increasingly horrific extremes” (Smith, 2012: 236). The Monster Maker is the only film of its time to explore the horrors of deliberate infection with a deadly disease, a theme that appears in more recent films like Resident Evil (Paul W.S. Anderson, 2002) and Antiviral (David Cronenberg, 2012).

The angry confrontation between Anthony and Dr. Markoff after the injection is perhaps the most interesting sequence in the film, a barely lit office scene that hangs heavy with despair as Anthony enters and slowly removes a scarf to reveal the debilitating effects of the acromegaly—the progress of which has left him unable to play the piano. Shot with only a few brief close-ups and surrounded by a deep darkness, the scene evokes a distinct sadness behind Anthony’s accusations against Markoff that arouses more sorrow than fear, revealing the true tragedy of Markoff’s misuse of scientific advance-ment. Though Newfield returns Anthony to his regular form in the final scene, there’s little comfort in this resolution since acromegaly is, in reality, an inescapable, incurable condition that is usually fatal. It is appropriate that Newfield’s first film made since the U.S. government discovered that Germans had implemented a policy to exterminate Jews in the summer of 1942

(United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) was the first film in which mad doctors use medical science not to transform, but to actually kill.

By the time that Newfield was preparing his final contribution to the horror genre, The Flying Serpent (1946), the world had changed—World War II had
ended in defeat for the Germans and the Nuremberg trials had revealed the full extent of the Nazi medical experimentation to worldwide condemnation.

If The Flying Serpent is any indication, Newfield’s own fears had considerably subsided, too, knowing that for many Jewish survivors, the worst was over. For The Flying Serpent, Newfield borrows a plot not from one of the Universal classics of the 1930s, but a much more recent popular hit, PRC’s The Devil Bat in which Bela Lugosi’s mad inventor trained the titular creature to attack and murder anyone sprayed with a special perfume, allowing him

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to take revenge on those who cheated him financially. Putting his own personal stamp on the film, however, Newfield adapts the story to his usual rural location, in this case New Mexico, and updates the monster to Quetzalcoatl, the mythical Aztec “feathered serpent.” Zucco is back again as Professor Forbes, an expert in ancient history who stumbles on a hidden cave that holds Montezuma’s treasure, protected for centuries by the Quetzalcoatl. Familiar with the legend of the beast, Forbes knows that he can kill off any enemies simply by slipping a Quetzalcoatl feather into their clothing or belongings, and the creature will attack, ripping out their throat and drinking their blood.

As Lugosi did in The Devil Bat, Forbes uses the creature to his advantage to kill off rival researchers, the local sheriff, and a snoopy bird expert. But he can’t seem to get a feather into the hands of mystery writer and radio personality Richard Thorpe (Ralph Lewis), who is on to Forbes’s nefarious scheme.

Eventually, the professor loses control over the bird when Quetzalcoatl finds his master holding a feather, and swoops in for the kill.

While mostly lacking the insistent political subtext and dynamism of
his earlier horror films, The Flying Serpent continues Newfield’s talent for including special effects work that surpasses the expectations for Poverty Row films, with an impressive puppet Quetzalcoatl, as well as an Aztec temple matte painting and aerial attacks that Tom Weaver calls “a hell of a lot better than anything Universal, who supposedly led the horror field, contributed to horror history in 1946” (1999: 241). Compared to the effects work in The Devil Bat, which mixed close-up footage of a real bat with an oversized prop awkwardly propelled along a wire, the Quetzalcoatl appears much more detailed, sturdier and menacing.

Although there are no direct references to medical experiments in the film, Newfield still manages to tie The Flying Serpent’s themes back to his previous work in the genre. Forbes’s (failed) attempts to control the Quetzalcoatl seem to follow the way Newfield’s earlier works couch criticism of Nazi Germany in familiar horror tropes. Although no needles make an appearance, the film still appears to refer to Nazi attempts to manipulate eugenics and plays out the same revenge fantasy as The Mad Monster and The Monster Maker. Like Dr. Cameron’s desire to master evolution to create an unstoppable werewolf army, Professor Forbes attempts to exact an unnatural control over the natural world by compelling a wild mythical beast to assassinate his enemies. In both cases, these characters pay the ultimate price for meddling with nature, as they lose control over their subject, which eventually kills them. The connection is even more implicit since Zucco plays Forbes with the same maniacal fervor as he did Cameron; the characters are very similar in the way they’re presented.

Besides featuring the reappearance of Zucco in another role as a crazed academic out for revenge, The Flying Serpent also seems to take place in

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the same, interconnected backwoods world as Newfield’s previous films. At one point, Forbes even quips to another character who believes the film’s deaths are caused by Quetzalcoatl that “the next thing you know, you’ll be believing in werewolves and devil worshippers.” A common device used by horror filmmakers including, for example, Tod Browning in his film Mark of the Vampire (1935), this winking in-joke to Newfield’s previous films The Mad Monster and Dead Men Walk that acknowledges The Flying Serpent takes place in the same shadowy world. However, the stylistic inspiration that marks Newfield’s earlier wartime horror films seems to be absent from The Flying Serpent. Although Newfield manages to recreate an ominous atmosphere in the scenes shot within the Aztec cave, many of Quetzalcoatl’s attacks happen in daylight so that the dark-colored prop bird can actually be seen by the audience. This time, any feeling of approaching doom mostly comes from the unpredictability of the beast’s attacks—Quetzalcoatl could be anywhere, potentially able to swoop down into the frame at any minute.

Still, without a direct political target to rail against, the film lacks the immediacy and power of its predecessors. Tellingly, once the war was over and the Nuremberg trials established a code to stop these atrocities from happening again, Newfield was never inspired to return to the horror genre.

Whether driven by his need to create, or just an overwhelming desire to head to the horse-racing track, Newfield may have been one of Hollywood’s busiest directors, but he is also one of its most unsung. These four films clearly show that Newfield was an accomplished craftsman who produced the finest work possible under difficult shooting conditions. Although many of Newfield’s films may have only been made to satisfy the basic requirements of B-horror programmers that were ubiquitous in the 1940s, The Mad Monster, Dead Men Walk, The Monster Maker, and The Flying Serpent stand out against his other work as personal statements that, thanks to his ability to draw on real World War II horrors and reconfigure them within a bleak atmosphere, create a discernible interior meaning.

Reconfiguring the raw elements of horror film’s past into personal critiques on Nazi pseudo-science, Newfield’s ominous shooting style combines with, and supports, the depictions of the abuse of medical science. Newfield uses these films as his own fantasies of having Nazis ultimately pay for their medical experiments at the hands of those they wronged, but this comeuppance is often unsatisfying due to the dim, static shots that suggests that evil is always out there, just out of reach. Whereas Universal’s popular monster franchise sequels of the 1940s have tended to overshadow similar horror work by smaller studios in the early part of the decade, these four wartime films display a more impressive personal engagement with the subject. Although more accomplished than Newfield’s other work, they’re still largely joyless exercises in revenge that disturb viewers by thriving on their

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oppressive atmosphere. In this way, Newfield’s horror cinema mirrors the unfortunate truth that real-life terror is more about tragedy and loss in the wake of World War II than hastily applied monster make-up and misdirection that seemed to dominate popular perceptions of 1940s horror films.

noTe

1. See Cory Legassic’s chapter in this book for a reading of this transfer of The Brute Man from Universal to Poverty Row.

ReFeRenCes

“Adolf Hitler: Man of the Year, 1938.” 1939. Time Magazine. (January 2) Online source: http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,760539,00.html. Last accessed February 17, 2013.

Bogdanovich, Peter. 1986. “Interview with Edgar G. Ulmer.” Producers Releasing Corporation: A Comprehensive Filmography and History. Ed. Wheeler Dixon.

Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Bynum, Matt. 2008. “The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 (Hays Code).”

ArtsReformation.com. Online source: http://www.artsreformation.com/a001/hays-
code.html. Last accessed March 7, 2013.

Davis, Blair. 2012. The Battle for the Bs: 1950s Hollywood and the Rebirth of Low-budget Cinema. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Dixon, Wheeler. “Fast Worker: The Films of Sam Newfield.” Senses of Cinema.

45 (2007). Online source: http://sensesofcinema.com/2007/feature-articles/sam-
newfield/. Last accessed December 9, 2012.

———. 2009. Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

———. 1986. “Introduction . ” Producers Releasing Corporation: a Comprehensive Filmography and History. Ed. Wheeler Dixon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Flynn, Charles and Todd McCarthy . 1986. “‘B’ Movie Structure . ” Producers Releasing Corporation: A Comprehensive Filmography and History. Ed. Wheeler Dixon.

Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Lifton, Robert J. 1986. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books.

Maltin, Leonard. 2003. Leonard Maltin’s Movie & Video Guide 2004. New York: Plume.

Matthews, Melvin E. 2009. Fear Itself: Horror on Screen and in Reality During the Depression and World War II. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

“Maurice Seiderman, 82, Inventor And Hollywood Makeup Artist.” 1989. The New York Times (22 July) Online source: http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/22/obituaries/
maurice-seiderman-82-inventor-and-hollywood-makeup-artist.html. Last accessed

January 27, 2013.

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Paszylk, Bartomiej. 2009. The Pleasure and Pain of Cult Horror Films: An Historical Survey. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Posner, Gerald L., and John Ware. 2000. Mengele: The Complete Story. New York: Cooper Square Press.

Sarris, Andrew. 1968. The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968.

New York: Dutton.

———. 1962/63. “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962.” Film Culture. 27 (Winter).

Skal, David J. 2001. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. New York: Faber & Faber.

Smith, Angela M. 2012. Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press.

Tzioumakis, Yannis. 2008. “Edgar G. Ulmer: The Low-End Independent Filmmaker Par Excellence.” Edgar G. Ulmer: Detour on Poverty Row. Ed. Gary D. Rhodes.

Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The United States and the Holocaust.”

Holocaust Encyclopedia. Online source: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article

.php?ModuleId=10005182. Last accessed 4 February.

Waite, Robert G. L. 1977. The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press.

Waldman, Harry. 2008. Nazi Films in America, 1933–1942. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Waltje, Jörg. 2005. Blood Obsession: Vampires, Serial Murder, and The Popular Imagination. New York: Peter Lang.

Weaver, Tom. 1999. Poverty Row Horrors!: Monogram, PRC and Republic Horror Films of the Forties. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Worland, Rick. 1997. “OWI Meets the Monsters: Hollywood Horror Films and War Propaganda, 1942 to 1945.” Cinema Journal. 37 (1) (Fall).

FiLMogRApHy

Dead Men Walk. Directed by Sam Newfield. PRC, 1943. Hollywood, CA: Alpha Video, 2002. DVD.

The Flying Serpent. Directed by Sam Newfield. PRC, 1946. Hollywood, CA: Image Entertainment, 2002. DVD.

Hitler - Beast of Berlin. Directed by Sam Newfield. Sigmund Neufeld Productions/

Producers Distributing Corporation (PDC), 1939. Hollywood, CA: Alpha Video, 2006. DVD.

The Mad Monster. Directed by Sam Newfield. PRC, 1942. Hollywood, CA: Alpha Video, 2004. DVD.

The Monster Maker. Directed by Sam Newfield. PRC, 1944. Hollywood, CA: Alpha Video, 2002. DVD.

Chapter 15
of Apes and Men

(and Monsters and girls)

The Ape Film and 1940s Horror Cinema

Blair Davis

Horror cinema of the 1930s and 1940s has taken on the designation of

“classic horror” in many popular and scholarly film circles. Not all horror films from this period are heralded as individual classics, however, with preference routinely given to entries from the first half of the 1930s. Describing it as a “tired genre” in the 1940s, Carlos Clarens states, “in the hands of second-rate craftsmen” horror films from this decade “were to carry on merely as the poorest kind of escapism, debasing and ultimately parodying the marvelous creations of ten years before” (1967: 101–102). He describes horror films from Universal and Columbia as being “quickly ground out” in the 1940s, and how their “producers correctly figured out that there would always be an audience for this type of film, heedless of critical scorn. In this backwater, the horror movie stagnated” (1967: 101–102). 1 Even a book that outright declares its affection for the era of classic horror cinema such as Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films, 1931–1946 inadvertently demonstrates a bias favoring 1930s horror films over those from the 1940s. The book begins by contextualizing the horror genre for modern fans who might view the older Universal films as passé:

To today’s generation of jaded slasher movie fanatics, the horror film had its roots in Herschell Gordon Lewis’ slice-and-dice epics of the early ’60s.

The more broadminded among them hearken back to the halcyon days of the Technicolored Hammer shockers of the ’50s. What both of these camps fail to realize is that the horror movie, as a popular American entertainment, owes its most substantial debt to the vintage Universal classics of the early ’30s. These timeless films, once revered by nearly all horror fans, have nowadays all too often been contemptuously dismissed as too temperate and too removed from
today’s morbid preoccupation with entrails and prosthetics. (Brunas, Brunas and

Weaver, 1990: 1)

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While admirably seeking to elevate the critical and cultural status of classical horror cinema, this passage reveals subtle distinctions inherent in the process of canonization that has developed among horror film fans regarding the genre itself. Here, the films of the “early ’30s” (presumably 1931 to 1934, since the years 1935 and 1936 would be considered mid-decade) are designated as the precursors of trends in the horror genre decades later, despite the fact that the output of horror films was actually greater at many studios in
the 1940s than it was previously.2 With their emphasis on the development
of trends in “popular American entertainment,” the “debt” described is significant not only in terms of recurring narrative, thematic, or visual patterns, but also for the social/industrial contexts and audience reception factors surrounding how genre cycles develop and rematerialize. With the horror film cycle of the 1940s lasting several years longer than that of the early-to-mid 1930s, the cultural and industrial significances of this era’s horror cinema should not be ignored.

The critical bias (conscious or otherwise) that downgrades 1940s horror cinema perhaps results from needing to make qualitative distinctions in light of how the genre is often dismissed as relatively inconsequential. Andrew Tudor describes horror as a “very limited genre,” noting that “Seldom has a genre been wrung so dry” (1974: 205, 207), while Andrew Sarris describes how “[t]he creeping disease of facetiousness crippled the genre” (1998: 82).

If 1940s horror cinema therefore remains largely undervalued, then the phenomenon of the “Ape film” is one symptom of why the genre is not taken as seriously in this decade when compared to the horror films of the early-to-mid 1930s. That cycle ended just as the Poverty Row studios such as Monogram Pictures that defined low-budget horror filmmaking in the 1940s were getting started. In turn, horror stars like Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi transitioned back and forth in the 1940s between the majors and Poverty Row to make such B-movies as The Ape (William Nigh, 1940), The Ape Man (William

Beaudine, 1943), and Return of the Ape Man (Phil Rosen, 1944), films that
are not typically celebrated by either scholars or fans.

Yet the first horror cycle of the early 1930s contained several films that are well remembered because of—not despite—the presence of apes or ape-like creatures: Murders in the Rue Morgue (Robert Florey, 1932), Island of Lost

Souls (Erle C. Kenton, 1932), and of course King Kong (Ernest B. Schoedsack
and Merian Cooper, 1933). Why then is a particular narrative element of hor-
ror cinema celebrated for its use in one decade but largely ridiculed for its use in the next? More importantly, does such neglect overlook any key films in the 1940s that might otherwise have seen the critical re-evaluation that Val Lewton’s horror films have enjoyed? This essay will therefore examine the 1941 Paramount film The Monster and the Girl (Stuart Heisler)—with its central premise of an executed man’s brain having been transplanted into

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an ape’s body—as a case study of the ape film phenomenon and of the difficulties affecting the reception of 1940s horror cinema. The Monster and the Girl is indeed a film deserving of critical reassessment, and by examining the rhetoric, discourse and imagery of the film’s original press kit in order to determine how the ape film was positioned for exhibitors, critics and audiences in the early 1940s, a clearer understanding of why this particular sub-genre of 1940s horror cinema has been critically and popularly neglected can emerge.

THe 1930s, Ape FiLMs, AnD soCiAL DARwinisM

While appearing sporadically throughout the silent era, 3 apes and ape-men became a common element in the horror genre in the early1930s. As the popularity of Dracula and Frankenstein led to the rise of the horror genre cycle in 1931, the following years saw several films in which apes or ape-
like creatures were prominent. The Poverty Row thriller The Monster Walks

(Frank R. Strayer, 1932) features an Old Dark House plot with an ape kept in
a cage for medical experiments. The ape is seemingly involved in a series of murders, but instead kills the real murderer in the film’s climax. The following year saw the debut of the most famous cinematic ape, King Kong (1933),
followed by Son of Kong (Ernest B. Schoedsak, 1934) as well as numer-
ous remakes and sequels (both American and international) in subsequent decades. Murders in the Zoo (A. Edward Sutherland, 1933) features several jungle animals used to commit a series of murders, although apes play a less direct role in these violent acts. In one scene, however, the film’s villain (Lionel Atwill) interacts with a chimpanzee while praising the feral nature of his cargo of wild animals: “I love them. Their honesty, their simplicity, their primitive emotions. They love, they hate, they kill.”

Island of Lost Souls depicts a new race of hybrid beast-men created by the mad Dr. Moreau, many of which are extremely ape-like in both appearance and mannerisms. The dynamic between primal urges and civilized behaviors is invoked when Moreau asks sternly of his creations “What is the law?” As

“The Sayer of the Law,” Bela Lugosi (wearing layers of fur and makeup) replies: “Not to spill blood. That is the law. Are we not men?” The distinctions between beasts and humans are also prominent in Murders in the Rue Morgue in which Lugosi stars as Dr. Mirakle, whose carnival side-show exhibit features a caged ape named Eric. Mirakle seeks to prove the kinship of human beings to apes, declaring that “Erik’s blood shall be mixed with the blood of man!” This latter example demonstrates that its evolutionary subtext is central to understanding the phenomenon of the ape film, with Darwinist themes featured both directly and indirectly in many 1930s horror films. In The Monster Walks, the ape’s presence is explained because its owner was

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a scientist—“an exponent of the Darwinian theory. He believed that they were our ancestors,” one character explains. Darwinism was a divisive social
topic in the decades leading up to 1930s.4 Lawyer Clarence Darrow’s efforts
in the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 lead to subsequent public debate over whether evolution should be taught in public schools (and about the overall relationship between science and religion in society). In his 2011 article

“Gorillas in the House of Light,” David Ashford examines the construction of the Gorilla House in the London Zoo in the early 1930s as a symptom of British society’s fascination with the biological differences between animals and human beings—what he calls a “crisis of humanism.” “The gorilla can be seen to have possessed extraordinary resonance in the early twentieth century,” says Ashford, serving as “a symbol for a crisis of faith in the Cartesian definition of the human being” (2011: 202).

The phenomenon which became known as “Social Darwinism was a
determinism, a kind of naturalistic Calvinism in which human beings were subjected to their environment rather than the will of God,” writes Edward Mitchell (1995: 204). In turn, many subsequent horror films exploring the relationships between humans and apes can be read in light of this pressing social issue. David J. Skal argues, for instance, that Lugosi’s frequent appearance in “mad science movies with evolutionary themes” demonstrates the

“powerful Darwinian subtext” of 1931’s Dracula:

Even near the end of his life, Lugosi made personal appearances in his trademark Dracula costume, leading around a “gorilla” on a chain for the entertainment of children who had no knowledge whatsoever of Charles Darwin, Bram Stoker, or the scientific or philosophical debates of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, they responded enthusiastically to the pairing of an elegant vampire in a tuxedo with a hairy, hunkering ape. Somehow, it was understood, Count Dracula was the essential threshold figure between the human and animal realms. (1998: 171) Similarly, Edward Lowry and Richard de Cordova argue that King Kong

“can be seen as a popular illustration of Social Darwinist metaphors,” with its

“prehistoric imagery (especially the clashing dinosaurs) and the condensation of the jungle and the city [displaying] the Darwinian metaphor of the struggle for existence as the sign of modern, competitive, urban (read ‘economic’) life” (2004: 213, 237). 5 Other films are more direct in using Darwinism and
skip metaphors altogether. Dr. Mirakle’s sideshow exhibit in Murders in the Rue Morgue sees him using a large poster illustrating the different phases of evolution, with thirteen images ranging from celled organism, fish, liz-ard, ape and finally to man walking upright. “Here . . . is the story of man,”

says Mirakle. “It is the triumph of chaos. There was the seed which rose and grew into the tree of life. Life was the ocean. Fins change into wings.

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Wings into ears. Crawling reptiles grew backs. Aeons of ages pass. Then came a time when a four-legged thing walked upright,” he says while pointing to Eric the ape in his cage. “Behold, the first man!” cries Mirakle, much to the side-show crowd’s outrage.

Indeed, Murders in the Rue Morgue plays upon the sensational possibilities of evolutionary rhetoric and imagery in staging this scene as part of a carnival exhibit, hoping that theatrical audiences will also be somewhat shocked in keeping with the horror genre’s general intent to startle, alarm and frighten (as well as frequently push the boundaries of moral decency and public taste).

In its review of the film, Variety seemingly attempts to frame the evolutionary angle for exhibitors who might question the film’s content: Mirakle is described as a “looney scientist” and “an evolution bug who seeks to prove a vague fact by mixing the blood of his captive Gorilla with that of Parisian women” (1932: 24). By reducing evolution to a “vague fact,” the review attempts to quell any debate over the film’s blatant invocation of Darwinian theory. Only a few years later, however, film producers would be more careful in how they represented evolution on screen.

The horror cycle declined in 1936, only to resurface again three years later after a successful double-bill reissue of Dracula and Frankenstein (James Whale, 1932) in 1938. By this point the Motion Picture Production Code (or

“Hays Code”) was in full force, limiting how certain subjects and images could be portrayed. In turn, most film producers were unwilling to risk presenting controversial subjects such as evolution in their horror films in blatant ways. One of the “General Principles” guiding all of the Code’s requirements is that “Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.” The code also states: “The treatment of low, disgusting, unpleasant, though not necessarily evil, subjects shall be guided by the dictates of good taste and a proper regard for the sensibilities of the audience,” and that “No film or episode may throw ridicule on any religious
faith” (Lewis, 2002: 303–306). Given that beliefs surrounding “natural law”

are central to the evolutionary debate, 6 and that moral distinctions between what might be considered “low” and “evil” are culturally determined, the risk of offending the religious sensibilities of some audience members would change the way in which film producers approached subjects with Social Darwinist overtones as the 1930s progressed.

“wHo’s Zoo” in 1940s HoRRoR CineMA

Hollywood would certainly continue to make ape films, but their evolutionary aspects were typically metaphoric rather than the blatant approach used in Murders in the Rue Morgue. The milieu in which apes appeared on screen,

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however, looked decidedly different in the 1940s, as horror films were regularly assigned significantly lower budgets than they had been the decade prior. Universal quickly found that the new horror entries produced between 1939 and 1940 consistently ran over budget, becoming “problem films” for the studio. This led to “tighter shooting schedules and even tighter budgets”

beginning in the Spring of 1940 (Feramisco, 2003: 2–3). More specifically,
the lower budgets of 1940s horror films meant that sets, props and costumes became more minimal than in years past. With this frequently came modern urban settings rather than nineteenth-century rural ones, city streets and apartment buildings rather than European villages and castles, sparse laboratories with more practical equipment rather than elaborate wall-to-wall electrical devices. This shift in the settings of many major studio horror films invokes several questions to do with how apes are understood on screen: are the evolutionary overtones of these ape films more problematic when they are set in a present-day urban environment as opposed to a film like Murders in the Rue Morgue which is set in Paris, France, in 1845? Are apes in 1930s horror films therefore more appealing because of the frequently pastoral settings used? In turn, is the presence of apes in the modern, urban settings of 1940s horror cinema more absurd because of the obvious juxtaposition between the primal and civilized society? King Kong is certainly celebrated for this dynamic, yet it appears to serve as an exceptional case.

Or, is it simply the fact that the ape films of the 1940s are somehow inferior to their predecessors (be it for narrative, aesthetic, or other reasons)? Apes and ape-like creatures had a steady presence throughout the horror cycle of 1939–1946, including such titles from major and Poverty Row studios as: The Gorilla (Allan Dwan, 1939, 20th Century Fox); The Ape (1940, Mono-
gram); Son of Ingagi (Richard C. Kahn, 1940, Hollywood Pictures Corporation); The Monster and the Girl (1941, Paramount); Dr. Renault’s Secret

(Harry Lachman, 1942, 20th Century Fox); The Ape Man (1943, Monogram);

Captive Wild Woman (Edward Dmytryk, 1943, Columbia); Return of the Ape Man (1944, Monogram); Jungle Woman (Reginald Le Borg, 1944); Jungle Captive (Harold Young, 1945). But are these films indeed worse on the whole than the ape films of the 1930s?

The performances, for instance, of key horror stars whose careers span both decades are often singled out as suffering in the 1940s by comparison with their earlier work. Lugosi is frequently taken to task in modern film criticism for his roles in such films as The Ape Man and Return of the Ape Man—
describing the former, Arthur Lenning writes, “No one—save Lugosi—could
have possibly taken this piece of trash seriously” (2003: 319).7 Similarly,

Barry Monush states: “There is often a feeling of condemnation and derision towards the actor for his limitations and, particularly in the latter half of his career, his bad choice of films,” and that Lugosi “hit some kind of peak of

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camp as the half-simian scientist in The Ape Man” only to find himself “sink-ing further with Return of the Ape Man” (2003: 442).

Such criticisms, however, should be contextualized within the industrial patterns of filmmaking in this era. Monogram Pictures and Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC)—the Poverty Row studios that Lugosi frequently
worked for in the 1940s—did not exist in their then-current forms during the first horror cycle of the 1930s, with the double bill market not fully taking hold until the middle of that decade. 8 Lugosi and Karloff each appeared in both major studio and Poverty Row films in the late 1930s and into the 1940s; Karloff signed a contract with Monogram for six pictures (the last of which was The Ape) but still worked for Universal and Warner Bros., while Lugosi moved frequently between Monogram, PRC, Universal and Columbia. As such, both actors appeared in horror films of wide budgetary range in the 1940s. Lugosi had frequently appeared in Poverty Row features and serials in the 1930s, including Chandu the Magician (Marcel Varnel, William Cameron Menzies, 1932), Murder By Television (Clifford Sanforth, 1935) and Postal Inspector (Otto Brower, 1936), but there was often a distinct difference between the types of roles played therein—usually mysteries and thrillers—as compared with those in his major studio performances in such horror films as The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934), Mark of the Vampire (Tod Browning, 1935), and The Raven (Lew Landers, 1935).

By transitioning back and forth between major and minor studio horror films, these actors obviously encountered different production methods; smaller budgets at Poverty Row studios resulted in faster shooting schedules, fewer retakes, and less elaborate sets and makeup effects, among other factors. To expect the production values of Karloff and Lugosi’s major studio horror films in their minor studio efforts is not only an exercise in futility, it disregards the entire industrial structure of the classical Hollywood studio system and the vital supporting role of studios such as Monogram therein. For many modern viewers, Lugosi is seen as frequently “choosing” terrible films in the 1940s that no one could take seriously. The Ape Man enjoyed strong reviews upon release, however, with the film’s fiscal limitations not being a significant factor in its reception. Variety described it as “expertly figured for its market,” with “moments of well sustained suspense to add the proper horror touch” (1943: 3).

While modern critics like Monush and Lenning see Lugosi as reaching
the “peak of camp” in an irredeemable “piece of trash,” audiences at the time actually enjoyed the film’s deliberately playful elements. “Hoke factors are stressed without apology,” noted Variety, adding that while it may be

“Corny” (quoting a line of dialogue from the film using this word), it is “just what the intended market demands” (1943: 3). The Chicago Tribune similarly noted, “It is a pleasure to record that this is a number in which none of the

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players take themselves or their duties too seriously. There is no suggestion of burlesque—but the light touch is everywhere—and the audience loves the clever blending of the humorous and the horrific” (1945: D5). 9 What many modern audiences dismiss for its ridiculousness is therefore precisely what period audiences enjoyed about The Ape Man.

The surface qualities of its low-budget production values and outlandish plot therefore seemingly prevent many from properly evaluating the film, any metaphoric value its narrative might hold, or any potential social relevance of its evolutionary themes. As The Chicago Tribune pointed out in 1943, a larger cycle of beastly horror films was underway in Hollywood in the early 1940s: “If you think certain types of movies don’t run in cycles, one studio recently came out with ‘The [sic] Cat People.’ Now we have ‘The Ape Man,’

‘Frankenstein,’ [Meets] ‘The Wolf Man,’ ‘The Leopard Man,” and not to be outdone, another is now making ‘Animal Kingdom.’ Pretty soon, film factories will be issuing a ‘Who’s Zoo in Hollywood’” (1943: D6). Cat People

(Jacques Tourneur, 1942) and The Leopard Man (Jacques Tourneur, 1943)

have been celebrated for their less overt use of animal imagery (and the horrific potential thereof), while The Ape Man has been ridiculed for Lugosi’s hirsute performance. In turn, ape films as a whole from the 1940s have been neglected while other cinematic beasts from this decade have subsequently met with both critical and popular success: Cat People was remade in 1982
by Paul Schrader, and received multiple votes in the 2012 Sight and Sound

“Greatest Films Poll,” while The Wolf Man (George Waggner, 1941) was
remade in 2010 by Joe Johnston, and has appeared in numerous American Film Institute “Top 100” lists. If any of these ape films are to be somehow reclaimed, the process should begin with a closer examination of The Monster and the Girl, a film with compelling production values, close connections with film noir, and perhaps the most convincing performance ever given by a man in an ape suit.

Re-evALuATing THE mOnSTER AnD THE GIRL

The 1941 Paramount horror film The Monster and the Girl (Stuart Heisler) is an unheralded B-film, a neglected example of the horror genre in the 1940s, and a genuinely thrilling and stylish film. It also happens to ask its audience to cheer for a revenge-driven gorilla with a human brain transplant (apparently the largest factor in the film’s popular and critical disregard). Having previously written about the film as an example of the ways in which the horror
genre is an overlooked contributor to the development of film noir,10 I will note again here that the film contains remarkable cinematography and often sordid urban settings in the noir style. Director Stuart Heisler would go on to

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make The Glass Key for Paramount the following year, while cinematographer Victor Milner subsequently shot several noir films. This creative pedigree has unfortunately not aided the film’s critical reputation, as The Monster and the Girl remains largely unknown in most cinematic circles.11

On the whole, The Monster and the Girl has not been treated well by film fans or scholars since its release. To be sure, the film has its occasional advocates: Reynold Humphries offers some strong analysis of the film in The Hollywood Horror Film, 1931–1941: Madness in a Social Landscape, seeing the film’s primary significance in how it (along with 1941’s The Face Behind the Mask) offers “negative portrayals of contemporary American society where enchantment turns rapidly to disenchantment” (2006: 174). 12

Similarly, the horror-fan-oriented magazine Monsters From the Vault featured an article entitled “A Walk in the Dark: Why The Monster and the Girl is the Ultimate ‘Forgotten Horror,’” in which Steve Kronenberg and Tom Weaver lament how the film “has received scant, nearly non-existent attention from fans and writers” despite it featuring “a strong, no-nonsense storyline, effective performances, and indelibly haunting cinematography” (2000: 7).

More common, however, are the brief and largely dismissive accounts of the film. R. G. Young’s The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film, a reference book dedicated to the fringes of cinematic respectability, quickly describes the film as being just a “standard horror-thriller” (2009: 410). In his book Hollywood Cauldron, horror scholar Gregory William Mank describes how Paramount’s

“infrequent forays [into the horror genre in the 1930s] were interesting,” and that “Paramount’s ’40s output was curious as well—such as Dr. Cyclops, horror’s first full-Technicolor feature, and the nasty The Monster and the Girl, both 1940 films” (1994: 22). The rhetoric here is ambiguous—“curious”

and “nasty”? It is unclear exactly what is meant by these terms; the word

“curious” might certainly be applied to the technical innovation of Technicolor when first added to a particular genre, in so far as the novelty factor involved. “Nasty,” however, might seem to imply a lack of either moral or aesthetic worth, neither of which I would assign to The Monster and the Girl.

Indeed, the film has much to praise in terms of cinematic construction.

It features an elaborate flashback structure in early scenes, well before the technique became an established storytelling convention of film noir. The use of sound is consistently effective, particularly in how sound effects, diegetic music and even prolonged periods of silence are handled. Its atmospheric visuals rival that of most noir films of the period, with its use of low-key
lighting aiding in the film’s suspenseful qualities.13

Also key to the film’s effectiveness is the central performance by Charles Gemora as the gorilla. Gemora specialized in ape roles, donning a gorilla outfit in dozens of films between the late 1920s and early 1950s. The costume used in The Monster and the Girl, however, is perhaps the most realistic that

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Gemora ever wore,14 further aided by his uncanny ability to move like a real gorilla (he regularly studied their movements at the San Diego Zoo). In one scene, he scales a tree and follows his victim silently, his movements always appearing graceful and instinctual, aiding in the realism of the performance.

Gemora’s portrayal of the ape here is certainly superior to the one he played in Murders in the Rue Morgue, not only for the quality of the gorilla costume but also for the very fact his character is not a gorilla in that film. During Gemora’s scenes in Rue Morgue, medium and long shots of him wearing the gorilla suit are intercut with close-ups of Eric the chimpanzee, creating a bewildering juxtaposition between a real ape species and the imitation of another ape species via these edits. This conflict is avoided entirely in King Kong, which doesn’t use either a suit or a real ape but rather the elaborate special effects of Willis H. O’Brien and Marcel Delgado (including stop motion using armatures—puppets with “articulated metal skeletons” as well as a large bust of Kong’s head and large metal armature covered with bear fur for his hand) (Burns, 2004: 11–12). In a 1965 interview, codirector Merian C. Cooper said, “I never used a man inside of King Kong itself. Obviously it would look phony” (2004: 24).

Verisimilitude is therefore a key ingredient in the success of the cinematic ape. While audiences might not have believed that Kong was a real ape, the strategies used to avoid it looking like a “phony” ape were clearly convincing enough to audiences. In turn, Paramount invoked the popular imagery of King Kong in their press kit for The Monster and the Girl, depicting a large gorilla towering over a city skyline while holding the body of a woman who has fainted in one hand. The image is a drawing, however, rather than pho-torealistic, raising the further issue of whether any actor in a gorilla costume can hope to appear credible on screen. It is here where The Monster and the Girl’s press kit reveals some telling contradictions about how Hollywood represented apes, and whether the image of an actor in an ape suit is compelling or ridiculous.

The press kit alternately suggests marketing efforts that either flaunt the gorilla’s visage, or else try to sell the film on the mystery of the monster’s identity. One promotional strategy used for the film’s Los Angeles premiere involved “a man in a monkey suit . . . parading the streets during lunch hours and shopping time” while chasing after a “thinly clad girl” near the Paramount Theatre. Exhibitors are encouraged to “check your local costuming shop for the ape suit” or else rent one from a New York costume shop for $7.50 per week. Another marketing strategy to “Add an extra sock to your trailer” for the film suggests: “Hold the trailer while a girl, in startling evening dress, dashes up the side aisle and screams. Throw a green spot on her and on a man in gorilla costume who chases her down the aisle and across the stage into the wings. The gorilla should grab her in stage center and carry

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her off into the wings in his arms. Have one usher shout, ‘The Monster!’

as the gorilla figure is seen; then a second usher yells, ‘and the Girl!’ and the two performers disappear. Start your trailer with split-second timing as the prologue ends.” By drawing explicit attention to the fact that an actor is wearing a costume (by using a spotlight to literally highlight the ape suit, for instance), such strategies play up the artificiality of the film’s monster in its promotional efforts in ways that other horror films typically do not. Hence, by the time audiences come to the actual film itself, Gemora’s realistic movements would have already been undercut by any number of lesser performers running around in less accurate gorilla suits.

Alternatively, the press kit also offers numerous suggestions emphasizing the mystery of the monster’s identity. One suggested radio spot reads: “They lived in the shadow of a nameless horror—but not for long! A vengeance-crazed beast marks men for murder and a city trembles! What is this terror?

Whom will it strike next? See Paramount’s ‘The Monster and the Girl,’ top thriller of the year.” A more questionable strategy is the suggestion to start a “Whisper Campaign” by spreading a rumor “that there is a monster loose in some deserted wood nearby. . . . You might have scattered tipsters phone city desk with weird complaints about large chunks of meat disappearing and huge muddy footprints on porches and roofs. These can be planted for photographing to make it look better. You might actually have a ‘monster’

heard by setting up a howling device with loudspeakers in the midst of some deserted section.”

While this campaign would be better suited to smaller towns with such wooded areas close by, the press kit modifies the strategy for more urban areas: “Another angle on the ‘whispering campaign’ is to get a couple of fellows, or a man and a girl, to frequent crowded places—restaurants, street cars, elevators in public building, etc.—chatting loudly about ‘the monster who is loose in the city.’” Here, the notion of what the monster actually is remains vague, implying a murderer on the loose rather than the first example’s suggestion of a feral, carnivorous beast. By offering contradictory approaches to how to promote the image of the film’s title monster, the press kit demonstrates that Paramount’s marketing department was trying to hedge their bets as to whether audiences could be genuinely shocked by the gorilla’s horrific appearance if kept secret, or whether it was better to use blatant ballyhoo gimmicks to sell the gorilla in all its beastly glory.

Also offered are numerous prepared articles about the film (in the hopes that various newspapers in need of content might use them for promotional purposes). One article directly references the idea of evolution: “Movie audiences will see evolution stepped up thousands of years in just a few minutes in the laboratory of a scientific genius.” This is based on a line from the film delivered by George Zucco as the doctor who performs the brain

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transplant. While performing the surgery, he proclaims that giving the gorilla a human brain “will step him up a million years in the pattern of evolution.” 15

While not as sensational or as detailed as the example from Murders in the Rue Morgue, Zucco’s line of dialogue is still relatively controversial given the aforementioned limitations placed on how Social Darwinist ideas and metaphors could be presented in 1940s Hollywood cinema.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle preventing The Monster and the Girl from achieving wider renown is that it suffers from one of the most general titles possible for a horror film. Indeed, how many horror films of this era do not feature a monstrous threat and a damsel in distress? The title was insisted upon by the studio upon completion of the film’s production—the original title, “D.O.A,” presumably having been deemed more difficult to market to audiences. Producer Jack Moss initially resisted the title change, not wanting the film sold as just another entry in the horror genre. “Moss thought it was an art study in the macabre, but people who saw it in sneaks insisted it
was a fine horror flicker,” states one 1940 report (Chapman, 1940: 9). Ironi-
cally, Paramount did not fully market The Monster and the Girl as a horror film, but rather as a thrilling mystery (a description which also applies to 1949’s D.O.A. , which has become a canonical example of film noir). The press kit never directly describes The Monster and the Girl as a horror film, although it does draw connections between it and “Past Horror Hits” such as Frankenstein (1931), The Cat and the Canary (Elliott Nugent, 1939) and Dr. Cyclops (Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1940). Instead, the film is alternately referred to in the press kit as a “Thriller,” a “mystery shocker,” a “thrill-drama,” a “thriller mystery,” a “dramatic thriller,” a “shocker-drama,” a

“Thrill Film,” a “terror film,” a “Chiller,” and a “chiller-drama.” In turn, the various posters, lobby cards, and advertising inserts offered to exhibitors only indirectly present The Monster and the Girl as a horror film, using such rhetoric as: “1,000 Thrills”; “Shocking!”; “Marked For Death”; “Terror!”;

“Beware!”; “Watch Out!”

Whichever way the film was sold it proved quite successful at the box office, bringing in $16,685 in its premiere week at the Paramount Theatre in Los Angeles as part of a double bill with The Mad Doctor (Tim Whelan, 1941) (earning slightly more at that location than the following month’s Buck Privates [Arthur Lubin] with Abbott and Costello, and slightly less than The Lady Eve [Preston Sturges] starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda) ( Variety, 1941: 28). In its first week in Denver, the double bill was described as constituting “something new”—“Not only is the spook combo leading the town with a smash $14,000, but the bill has shown to more children than anything here in the past three months. Most of the moppets bring one or both parents, meaning that the house is getting patrons of all ages” ( Variety, 1941: 11).

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Reviews of The Monster and the Girl were similarly positive, with The Chicago Tribune calling it “weird and skeery [sic] no end” but full of “snappy dialog” [sic] and a cast full “of deep, dark men who know their melodrama.”

The review further adds that star Ellen Drew “depicts stark terror so realistically that I feel she is scheduled to slip into the boot of Fay Wray” (1941: 24).

Variety similarly calls the film “a chiller-diller that will send fans of goose-pimply melodrama from the theaters amply satisfied,” and “red meat for the bugaboo ticket buyers.” They further predict that audiences will identify with, and have pity for, the gorilla: “Audiences will probably figure the killing of the ape was unjust after he had rid the world of characters much more evilly-monstrous than he” (1941: 3). Such pathos was key to the success of King Kong, but has not helped The Monster and the Girl.

“I strongly suspect the writer of the screenplay has been reading ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’” notes the Tribune review (1941: 24). Perhaps so, but The Monster and the Girl has not enjoyed the same critical or popular reputation as the 1932 film based on that story. The Monster and the Girl is not just a strong example of the ape film and of 1940s horror cinema, it is a key piece of the classic horror film era overall that has been sadly neglected. It is especially remarkable in how it negotiates between horror and crime/film noir imagery, with its cross-genre implications worthy of further study. It is a film that I keep returning to, and one that my students regularly respond to with a mixture of curiosity and delight. Its marginal status within an already undervalued period in the history of the horror genre has made it extremely difficult for The Monster and the Girl to find the audience it deserves.

ConCLusion: THe 1950s AnD beyonD

By the late 1940s and into the early 1950s, the horror genre in its most straightforward form was largely relegated to Abbott & Costello comedies: Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948); Abbott & Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff (1949); Abbott & Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951); Abbott & Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953). Horror actors and the monsters they portrayed became the blatant object of mockery on screen, redefining as laughable what was once scary about these figures for a new generation of filmgoers. As the horror genre waned, this seemed to be the wrong time to produce a new independent horror film with the word

“gorilla” in the title. In Bride of the Gorilla (Curt Siodmak, 1951), Raymond

Burr plays a plantation owner who transforms into the title creature as the result of a voodoo curse, with the gorilla being largely suggested rather than shown outright. Despite being written and directed by horror veteran Curt Siodmak (here combining elements of The Wolf Man and I Walked With a

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Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943), both of which he wrote or co-wrote), the film did not lead to further ape-oriented horror efforts. Instead, the film’s independent production company, Jack Border Productions, followed the ris-
ing comedy-horror trend by releasing Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla

(William Beaudine, 1952), which saw Lugosi encounter a comedy duo
attempting to imitate Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

As the 1950s progressed, it would seem that the appearance of an ape
on screen was an occasion to ridicule its ridiculousness. One of the most
widely dismissed genre films of the 1950s is the sci-fi effort Robot Monster

(Phil Tucker, 1953), featuring the infamous villain Ro-Man—a monster
whose costume consists of a gorilla suit and a diver’s helmet, largely because producer-director Phil Tucker ran short on his costume budget and turned to a Hollywood costume shop for a cheap solution. I have often wondered if Ro-Man’s apparently comical appearance would be lessened had the helmet been placed on an actual robot outfit instead. Is it the impractical juxtaposition of gorilla and deep sea diver that audiences have found so comical? Is it the fact that alien physiology looks so similar to that of earth’s primates? Or is it merely that audiences accustomed to the growing trend of science-fiction films in the 1950s could no longer accept the costume remnants that had sup-plied the horror genre for the past two decades as a means of constructing their antagonistic alien invader? Robot Monster earned over a million dollars by being the first science-fiction film of the 1950s in 3-D, yet its subsequent critical reputation has suffered in large part because many people reject the gorilla suit for reasons of aesthetic inferiority and/or narrative plausibility.

Given their lack of presence in modern horror cinema, apes are apparently no longer something to be feared if we accept the notion that horror films are a forum in which social anxieties are worked through. The larger question, however, is at what specific point apes stopped being a credible threat on screen, and how we might correlate this with patterns of societal change.

With alien invaders replacing gothic monsters and killer apes by the early 1950s, does this mean that the debate over evolution was no longer a pressing social concern by the mid twentieth century (replaced, perhaps, by a fear of domestic and/or international instability given the role of McCarthyism and the Cold War in this era)?

Ape films were a regular staple of the horror genre for decades, and
yet ( King Kong aside) they have not enjoyed the same patterns of cyclical resurgence that many of the other monsters have enjoyed. Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, and others were re-imagined by Hammer Studios in the late 1950 and throughout the 1960s, and again by such directors as Francis Ford Coppola and Kenneth Branagh in the 1990s and into the present. Nor have ape films enjoyed the critical elevation of Val Lewton’s RKO horror output, despite the film noir parallels in both Cat People and The Monster

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and the Girl. If some see 1940s horror cinema as a generally less successful period in the genre’s history, then the ape film is an even more problematic entity within an already precarious cinematic phenomenon. As The Monster and the Girl demonstrates, however, the sub-genre of the ape film is more than just mere monkey business.

noTes

1. Mark Jancovich further notes that “there is almost a unanimous consensus in accounts of the genre written since the 1960s that the period [of 1940s horror cinema]

is dominated by the degeneration of the Universal tradition, and that the films of Val Lewton were the only significant creative contribution to the genre within the period”

(2010: 45).

2. Michael Brunas, John Brunas and Tom Weaver’s Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films, 1931–1946) lists the studio having produced 25 horror films (or films with strong horror overtones) in the 1930s, and 60 in the 1940s (1990: vii–viii).

3. See Gary L. Prange, “Ape Fiends of the Silent Era Part 1,” Monsters From the Vault, Vol. 11, No. 22, Summer 2006, and “Ape Fiends of the Silent Era Part 2,”

Monsters From the Vault, Vol. 11, No. 23, Spring 2007.

4. See Raymond Williams, “Social Darwinism,” Herbert Spencer: Critical Assessments, Ed. John Offer, Vol. II (London: Routledge, 2000) pp. 186–99.

5. Lowry and Decordova further suggest that “the city as a jungle” as portrayed in the film “is a source of bitterness and sorrow that at the very least reveals regret over the loss of innocence modern civil life entails as well as fear concerning what feels like slim prospects for surviving in such an environment.” While outside the scope of this present study, the evolutionary readings of King Kong have also been applied to racial analyses of the ape films (Edward Lowry and Richard Decordova, “King Kong: Ape and Essence,” Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, Ed. Barry Keith Grant (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2004). For further scholarship on the role of apes and race in 1930s and 1940s cinema, see Rhona J. Berenstein, “White Heroines and Hearts of Darkness: Race, Gender and Disguise in 1930s Jungle Films,” Film History, Vol .6, 1994, pp. 314–39; “King Kong and the Monster in Ethnographic Cinema,” The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle; Tommy Lott and John P. Pitt-man, “King Kong Lives: Racist Discourse and the Negro-Ape Metaphor,” Next of Kin: Looking at the Great Apes, MIT List Visual Arts Center Catalog (1995), pp. 37–43.

6. See, for instance, Phillip Clayton and Jeffrey P. Schloss’ Evolution and Ethics: Human Morality in Biological and Religious Perspectives (Grand Rapids: Wm B. Eerdsman Publishing, 2004).

7. Lenning is quite liberal in his application of the “trash” label to various 1940s horror cinema, further implying (by referencing a line of dialogue from the film) that the 1940 horror musical-comedy You’ll Find Out starring Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Peter Lorre is also a piece of cinematic “trash” (Arthur Lenning, The Immortal Count: The Life and Films of Bela Lugosi (University of Kentucky Press, 2003, p. 286).

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This is not to say, however, that this opinion wasn’t found within the film industry itself at the time, even among those producing horror films. Discussing his 1944 film Voodoo Man, producer Sam Katzman declared: “I have made a number of these films and I claim there must be something wrong with anybody who goes to see ’em . . .

Just look at me, making all this money with a fancy house and swimming pool. Do I deserve it? For making moron pictures?” (p. 332).

8. See Blair Davis, The Battle for the Bs: 1950s Hollywood and the Rebirth of Low-budget Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012) for more on the origins of Poverty Row cinema and the relationship between double-bills and B-films.

9. Note the play on the word ‘matinee’ in the author’s pseudonym, in keeping with the article’s irreverent writing style. The author also playfully describes Lugosi as “the Deft Touch, the Subtle Something, the Soupcon of Originality,” and as a “peeking, grinning, here-a-word-there-a-word gentleman.” This is not meant in a wholly dismissive sense; rather, Lugosi’s presence is described as giving The Ape Man “a refreshing touch of uniqueness” thanks to his inimitable acting style (Mae Tinee, “Light Touch is Everywhere in ‘The Ape Man,’” The Chicago Tribune, May 6, 1945, p. D5).

10. See Blair Davis, “Horror Meets Noir: The Evolution of Cinematic Style, 1931–1958,” Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear, Ed. Steffen Hantke (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004) pp. 191–212.

11. For at least the past decade, the film has only been available for purchase as an out-of-print 1990s VHS release. In 2012, The Monster and the Girl became available on DVD from the Universal “Vault Service”—manufactured on demand rather than being available as a regularly available title. This limited availability is a further symptom of the film’s marginalization.

12. Reynold Humphries, The Hollywood Horror Film, 1931–1941: Madness in a Social Landscape (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2006), p. 174.

13. See Davis, “Horror Meets Noir” for elaboration on how these aesthetic factors function in the film.

14. Gemora’s web biographer calls the costume his “most realistic suit.” “Gorilla Man,” Charlie Gemora, http://charliegemora.com/gorilla-man/?nggpage=5.

15. The discrepancy here between thousands of years and a million is unclear, unless perhaps: a) the marketing department believed that a shorter period of evolutionary change is somehow less offensive to those who don’t believe in evolution; or b) the marketing department wasn’t paying very close attention to the film’s dialogue.

ReFeRenCes

Ashford, David. 2011. “Gorillas in the House of Light.” The Cambridge Quarterly.

40 (3) (September).

Brunas, Michael, John Brunas, and Tom Weaver. 1990. Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films, 1931–1946. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

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Burns, Bob. 2004. “Kongversations: Part Two.” Monsters From the Vault. 10 (19) (Winter).

Chapman, John. 1940. “Looking at Hollywood.” The Chicago Tribune. (28 December).

Clarens, Carlos. 1967. An Illustrated History of the Horror Film. New York: G. B. Putnam’s Sons.

Clayton, Phillip, and Jeffrey P. Schloss. 2004. Evolution and Ethics: Human Morality in Biological and Religious Perspectives. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdsman Publishing.

Davis, Blair. 2012. The Battle for the Bs: 1950s Hollywood and the Rebirth of Low-budget Cinema. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

———. 2004. “Horror Meets Noir: The Evolution of Cinematic Style, 1931–1958.”

Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear. Ed. Steffen Hantke. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Feramisco, Thomas M. 2003. The Mummy Unwrapped: Scenes Left on Universal’s Cutting Room Floor. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

“Gorilla Man,” Charlie Gemora. Online source: http://charliegemora.com/gorilla-
man/?nggpage=5. Last accessed May 1, 2014.

Humphries, Reynold. 2006. The Hollywood Horror Film, 1931–1941: Madness in a Social Landscape. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, Inc.

Jancovich, Mark. 2010. “‘Two Ways of Looking’: The Critical Reception of 1940s Horror.” Cinema Journal. 39 (2) (Spring).

Kronenberg, Steve, and Tom Weaver. 2000. “A Walk in the Dark: Why The Monster and the Girl is the Ultimate ‘Forgotten Horror’.” Monsters From the Vault. 5 (10) (Winter/Spring).

Lenning, Arthur. 2003. The Immortal Count: The Life and Films of Bela Lugosi.

Louisville: University of Kentucky Press.

Lewis, Jon. 2002. Hollywood vs. Hardcore: How the Struggle Over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry. New York: New York University Press.

Lowry, Edward, and Richard Decordova. 2004. “King Kong: Ape and Essence.”

Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

Mank, Gregory William. 1994. Hollywood Cauldron: Thirteen Horror Films From the Genre’s Golden Era. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

“Merian C. Cooper and Fay Wray Speak Out on King Kong!” 2004. Monsters From the Vault. 10 (19) (Winter).

Mitchell, Edward. 1995. “Apes and Essences: Some Sources of Significance in the American Gangster Film.” Film Genre Reader II. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Monush, Barry. 2003. Screen World Presents The Encyclopedia of Hollywood Film Actors. Vol. 1. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Corporation.

Prange, Gary L. 2006. “Ape Fiends of the Silent Era Part 1.” Monsters From the Vault. 11 (22) (Summer).

———. 2007. “Ape Fiends of the Silent Era Part 2.” Monsters From the Vault. 11

(23) (Spring).

“Review: Murders in the Rue Morgue.” 1932. Weekly Variety. (16 February): 24.

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“Review: The Ape Man.” 1943. Variety. (22 February): 3.

“Review: The Monster and the Girl.” 1941. Variety. (6 February): 3.

Sarris, Andrew. 1998. “You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet”: The American Talking Film & Memory, 1927–1949. New York: Oxford.

Skal, David J. 1998. Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture.

New York: Norton.

“Spook Dual Whams Denver Kids, 14 G; ‘Nice Girl’ $10,500.” 1941. Variety.

(5 March): 11.

Tinee, Mae. 1941. “If Murder Is Your Film Dish, Here Are Two.” The Chicago Tribune. (2 April): 24.

———. 1945. “Light Touch is Everywhere in ‘The Ape Man.’” The Chicago Tribune. (6 May): D5.

Tudor, Andrew. 1974. Image and Influence: Studies in the Sociology of Film. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.

“Who’s Zoo in Hollywood.” 1943. The Chicago Tribune. (9 May): D6.

Williams, Raymond. 2000. “Social Darwinism.” Herbert Spencer: Critical Assessments. Ed. John Offer. Vol. II. London: Routledge.

“Year’s Take By L.A. First Runs Hits Skids to $4,925,000. . . .” 1941. Variety.

(October 29): 28.

Young, R. G. 2009. The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Corporation.

FiLMogRApHy

The Ape. Directed by William Nigh. Monogram Pictures, 1940. La Crosse, WI: Platinum Disc Corporation, 2003. DVD.

The Ape Man. Directed by William Beaudine. Monogram Pictures, 1943. Narbeth, PA: Alpha Video, 2002. DVD.

Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. Directed by William Beaudine. Jack Broder Productions Inc., 1952. Narberth, PA: Alpha Video, 2003. DVD.

Bride of the Gorilla. Directed by Curt Siodmak. Jack Broder Productions Inc., 1951.

Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2002. DVD.

Cat People. Directed by Jacques Tourneur. RKO Radio Pictures, 1942. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2005. DVD.

Island of Lost Souls. Directed by Erle C. Kenton. Paramount Pictures, 1932. Irvington, N.Y.: The Criterion Collection, 2011. DVD.

King Kong. Directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian Cooper. RKO Radio Pictures, 1933. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2006. DVD.

The Leopard Man. Directed by Jacques Tourneur. RKO Radio Pictures, 1943.

Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2005. DVD.

The Monster and the Girl. Directed by Stuart Heisler. Paramount Pictures, 1941.

Universal City, CA: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2012. DVD.

The Monster Walks. Directed by Frank R. Strayer. Ralph M. Like Productions, 1932.

Narberth, PA: Alpha Video, 2002. DVD.

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Murders in the Rue Morgue. Directed by Robert Florey. Universal Pictures, 1932.

Universal City, CA: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2005. DVD.

Murders in the Zoo. Directed by A. Edward Sutherland. Paramount Pictures, 1933.

Universal City, CA: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2009. DVD.

Return of the Ape Man. Directed by Phil Rosen. Monogram Pictures, 1944. Santa Fe, NM: Sci-Fi Station, 2000. DVD.

Robot Monster. Directed by Phil Tucker. Three Dimension Pictures, 1953. Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2000. DVD.

Son of Kong. Directed by Ernest B. Schoedsak. RKO Radio Pictures, 1934. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2012. DVD.

The Wolf Man. Directed by George Waggner. Universal Pictures, 1941. Universal City, CA: Universal, 2004. DVD.

Chapter 16

“The perfect neanderthal Man”

Rondo Hatton as The Creeper and the

Cultural Economy of 1940s B-Films

Cory Legassic

“The monster is born only at this metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, and a place.”

—Jeffrey Jerome Cohen in “Monster Theory: Seven Theses” (1996: 4)

The still image in figure 16.1, from a scene in Universal’s House of Horrors

(Jean Yarbrough, 1946), captures the moment where Marcel DeLange (Martin

Kosleck)—the struggling protagonist sculptor who has dragged an exhausted, drowning stranger (Rondo Hatton) to safety—is sculpting Hatton’s disfigured appearance, claiming him as “the perfect Neanderthal man.” DeLange later realizes that his nameless new houseguest is “The Creeper”—the serial killer of women subject to a major police hunt. DeLange’s sculpted recreation of The Creeper speaks to Hollywood’s ambivalent relationship to an iconic figure whose career was cut short by his death in 1946 from a heart attack related to his acromegaly—the disease which gave him his distinctive appearance. This chapter explores the conditions behind Universal Studio’s attempt to mold and feature Rondo Hatton as their new horror creation in the second “Creeper” film, Jean Yarbrough’s The Brute Man (1946), in
order to reveal how the freak body is ultimately tied to the shifting cultural economy of the 1940s. Though produced by one of the 1940s “little Major”

studios, The Brute Man became a “pick-up” film; in other words, it was subsequently sold shortly after Rondo Hatton’s death by Universal to Poverty Row’s Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) for distribution. The 1940s as a cinematic decade can be characterized in part by the 1940–1949

Anti-Trust Campaign that led to the demise of the studio system with the 1949 Hollywood Anti-Trust Act. The Brute Man’s status as a “pick-up” film stands as a highly revealing transaction that sheds light on how Hollywood studios were tapping into, more broadly, powerful discourses that would help 295

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a still from Universal Pictures’ House of Horrors (1946), starring rondo Hatton as the Creeper.

Figure 16.1 The Creeper (Rondo Hatton) Sits for a Portrait in Clay by Artist Marcel DeLange (Martin Kosleck). Pictured: RONDO HATTON/MARTIN KOSLECK)

shape shifting notions of liberal individualism through representations of the body—effectively overlapping discourses around “freakery” and exploitation with “class” and foreshadowing, I argue, a slowly emerging normative neoliberal subjectivity.

Neoliberal capitalist theory of the 1940s was being shaped by debates over anti-trust laws with emerging neoliberal scholars questioning the targeting of monopolies by the anti-trust campaign. I argue that the discursive structures that were powerful in the battle over the right to compete in the film industry would arguably play a role in the rise of neoliberalism to hegemony later in the twentieth century, as characterized by later scholars of neoliberalism such as Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (2009). Because the 1940s were under the heavy hand of a Keynesian model, the debates among Hollywood executives, notably around the anti-trust campaigns, make 1940s Hollywood an often forgotten site for the development of discourses that would be very productive to later neoliberal ideological narratives. While in the margins at the time, scholars at the Chicago School (that were later acknowledged as highly

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influential in the development of neoliberal theory) were working through the paradox of America being a big brother state at home, and a big brother corporation out in the world. According to Howard Zinn, “[t]he United States was trying in the post war decade to create a national consensus . . . whose aggressive policy abroad would be supported by conservatives, and whose welfare programs at home (Truman’s “Fair Deal”) would be attractive to liberals” (1990: 418).

Hollywood, with 1946’s Universal-International merger as a case in point, is caught between these two worlds and different ideologies. Neoliberal policies today serve the elite, and, in fact, have deepened the disparities between rich and poor, north and south, men and women, and have accelerated eco-logical devastation. “Freakery” and other discourses situated in relation to the body are crucial sites in the exploration of these growing disparities. Freak discourses are important within a genealogy of the narrative of neoliberal ideology in America and the new evolving liberal individualism of the late twentieth century as it pays greater attention to the body. While the distinction of classical liberalism between bodies and minds is still relevant, the body, with all of its markers of differences, has become a dominant site for organizing individuals across the globe. To explore the cultural economy of neoliberalism in America—to look at the ways discourses interlock to give an ideology its power—means to track the shape of discursive structures even as political and economic structures fluctuated between different models. The discourses of freak bodies that are important to neoliberal subjectivity today, where policies serve an evolving ideal neoliberal citizen with its attention to the body, can be seen at work with the trafficking of The Brute Man. Through recourse to critical disabilities studies scholarship, I discuss how Universal’s handling of The Brute Man reveals interlocked discourses of ability/disability in 1940s Hollywood as a discursive playground for further developing neoliberal ideological narratives in the decades to follow.

sCuLpTing THe CReepeR: “HoLLywooD’s
sTRAngesT Love sToRy”

It is tricky to piece together an impression of Rondo Hatton’s own perspective based on representations of him. Hatton never planned a career in Hollywood.

The Creeper face that has been immortalized through the Rondo Hatton

Awards1—its statue modeled after the sculpted bust of Hatton in House of Horrors—was not the face of a young Hatton who grew up in Hillsborough, Florida. Bill Abbott’s 1938 Tampa Morning Tribune article and Erma Taylor’s 1946 Pageant article bookend Hatton’s career in Hollywood and provide some of his only recorded interviews. Most Hatton fan bloggers

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emphasize the tragic irony of a handsome athlete who was physically transformed by acromegaly by (as most accounts suggest) exposure to German mustard gas in World War I. Acromegaly occurs when the pituitary gland, a small gland at the base of the brain, has a tumor which produces excessive growth hormones leading to a form of gigantism. In her July 1946 article

“Hollywood’s Strangest Love Story” celebrating Hatton’s achievements, Erma Taylor describes his transformation:

His face bones increased to nearly double their normal size, distorting his features into frightening proportions. His weight went up to 204 pounds, and much of the gain was in the extra bone and cartilage that deformed his face and feet, his head and hands. In one series of operations his cheekbones were taken out and replaced with metal. The lower jaw grew out so far his lower teeth extended at least an inch beyond his uppers, and it required several more operations and four sets of teeth before Rondo could chew again. No number of operations, however, could wholly alleviate the appearance or the excruciating pain. For a long time he was blind, and the ache in his bones, he once said, was like a migraine headache all over his body. (1946: 10)

Most people would describe Hatton’s plight in these terms—a suffering hybrid

“monster” somewhere between the Wolf Man and Frankenstein’s monster.

Hatton’s acromegaly is described in these ways almost as a curse: teen heart-throb suffers cruel and painful transformation into a “real life” Frankenstein monster. Just months following Hatton’s death, Taylor’s article recounts to readers how the face of the “ugliest man in pictures” got him his start. Taylor relays Hatton’s struggle with people’s reactions to his changing appearance and narrates his refusal to “stay out of sight” as leading him into a career as a reporter in Tampa. It was as a reporter that he met Hollywood director Henry King in 1929, while he was covering the filming of Hell Harbor (1930) in Tampa. Upon meeting Hatton, King was fascinated with Hatton’s appearance and reportedly insisted on casting him in a cameo. So, Hatton makes his first cinematic appearance as the “Dance Hall Bouncer” but declines pressured invitations from King to move to Hollywood. Based in Tampa, Hatton makes another appearance as a Jury member in Safe from Hell (William A.

Wellman, 1931). It was only when his doctor recommended he move to a
dryer climate, that Hatton wrote to King and relocated to California. In 1938, he appeared in King’s award-winning In Old Chicago as a bodyguard, as well as in Alexander’s Ragtime Band (Henry King, 1938), both considered “prestige” films that made the Film Daily’s “Ten Best” (Balio, 1993: 195). Hatton would stand out in the film not for his unremarkable, small role, but for his appearance, a hovering statuesque presence looming in the background. This use of Hatton foreshadows his role in Hollywood to come. In Old Chicago ushered in several years of mostly uncredited work among the Big and Little

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Major studios with roles such as a convict in Captain Fury (Hal Roach, 1939) and The Big Guy (Arthur Lubin, 1939), an “ugly man” in the ugly man contest in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (William Dieterle, 1939), a circus canvasman in Chad Hanna (Henry King, 1940), and the leper in The Moon and Sixpence (Albert Lewin, 1942), among others. Hatton made his first uncredited appearance in a Poverty Row production in 1943 as the hunchback in Republic Pictures’ Sleepy Lagoon (Joseph Santley), and his first credited appearance as an undertaker in Monogram’s 1944 Johnny Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Joe May).

Most of Hatton’s appearances across all tiers of studio production highlight a growing fascination with his appearance, and the types of roles he was assigned—silent and creepy—would come to define his function on the

Hollywood set. One could say that he was a creeper before he became The Creeper. Hollywood and its audiences were starting to recognize this figure, and his striking appearance would resonate with what Andrew Tudor argues in Monsters and Mad Scientists (1989) was a determined wartime focus on human monsters. Hatton’s presence in the studios may have even influenced other films such as Sam Newfield’s 1944 The Monster Maker, where a mad scientist concocts a formula that spreads acromegaly. Diane Long Hoeveler comments in “Frankenstein, Feminism, and Literary Theory” that the studios would conflate Hatton with his characters, dubbing him “the monster who needs no make up” (2003: 54). In his “Notes on the Terror Film,” Keith Hennessey Brown describes Hatton’s films in a context where audiences’

“inability to distinguish between ‘real’ and ‘reel’ would make this an instance of natural rather than art terror” (2006: footnote 6). The binary between the makeup monster and the no-makeup monster as a “real” monster might be a trap, however—both monsters are, as Cohen argues, cultural products.

Even though Hatton did undergo makeup on set, the perception that he needed no makeup is important here. It is no coincidence, for example, that Frankenstein’s (James Whale, 1931) makeup director, Jack Pierce, also had an important hand in creating the Creeper. I wish to highlight, though, the ways in which Rondo Hatton and the Creeper’s “realness” are discursively productive.

It is Universal, through Roy William Neill’s 1944 Pearl of Death chapter in the Sherlock Holmes series, that officially introduces and begins anchoring Hatton’s disfigured presence as The Creeper. In this film, Hatton is featured mostly in shadow, his face glimpsed only fleetingly, his body reduced to silhouette or glimpses of curled, grasping hands. Barry Brown recounts in his blog-biography of Hatton how one exhibitor, after showing a Hatton film for a week, wrote to the Motion Picture Herald that “his ape-like appearance on the screen brings a gasp from the audience” (2013). And a Variety critic notes: “Hatton’s facial features . . . run a close second to those of

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Frankenstein’s monster” (1946). Unlike Frankenstein’s monster—played
by Boris Karloff, but indicated in the opening credits only with a question mark—the idea that The Creeper very much had a name was important to a sense of his being constructed as a “real” monster. It was on the heels of Pearl of Death’s success that the New York Times announced on December 6 that,

“Rondo Hatton, a former newspaper man who has been playing bit parts for the last six years, is to be Universal’s new horror creation ‘The Creeper.’”

On April 25, 1945, Variety announced that Universal had signed Hatton on to a term-contract for The Creeper features (“Pictures: U Contract Roll Full,”

1945); as well, Hatton continued to drop in for other Universal roles such as Moloch the Brute in Jungle Captive (Harold Young, 1945), Bull Andrews in The Royal Mounted Rides Again (Lewis D. Collins and Ray Taylor, 1945), and Mario the “Monster Man” in the Sherlock Holmes chapter The Spider Woman Strikes Back (Arthur Lubin, 1946), among others.2 Despite

The Creeper’s threatening presence in Pearl of Death, the officially billed character of “The Creeper” first takes center stage in the 1946 Universal feature House of Horrors followed later that year by The Brute Man. The story of House of Horrors, however, actually takes place after the action in The Brute Man. Universal had produced, but not yet released, these two first Creeper feature films when, tragically, Hatton died on February 2, 1946, from a heart attack.

“THe peRFeCT neAnDeRTHAL MAn”:

A poLiTiCs oF DisFiguReMenT

Reading his popularity today against the lukewarm reception of his films at the time of their release, we can explore the tensions around Hatton’s constructed “realness” as part of a powerful discursive disfigurement that finds meaning in a period that Robert Bogdan (1988) historicizes as the fall of the freak “sideshow” culture that spanned the century leading up to the development of the studio system in the early twentieth century. Dominant discourses around “freaks,” disability and what Rosemarie Garland Thomson calls

“extraordinary bodies” (1997) were interlocked with other discourses around class, colonialism, and the shifting medical discourses in the century heading into the 1940s. These symbiotic discourses helped to organize a cultural economy in which Hollywood (and its audiences) could invest in Hatton as an iconic figure, and draw certain values from his disfigurement—economic, for sure, but also cultural value that privilege latent cultural norms which I argue help to foster a new liberal individualist subjectivity.

Recent scholarship has laid important and useful groundwork in contextualizing 1940s cinema. Rick Worland argues that World War II horror films

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“offer a unique insight into how a particular group of genre films illuminates the historical circumstances of its production” (1997: 48). A brief exploration of the legacy of the freakshow in U.S. culture is necessary to appreciate some of the important contexts behind The Brute Man as a pick-up film. What is the attraction to “extraordinary bodies” (Thomson, 1997)? In The Creatures Time Forgot, David Hevey suggests that:

[The] use of disabled people is the anchor of the weird, that is, the fear within.

They are used as the symbol of enfreakment or the surrealism of all society. The impaired body is the site and symbol of all alienation. It is psychic alienation made physical. The “contorted” body is the final process and statement of a painful mind. . . . The impairment of the disabled person [becomes] the mark, the target for a disavowal, a ridding of existential fears and fantasies of non-disabled people. (1992: 72)

If Hatton had been born a few decades earlier, before screens took over the entertainment industry, his “Henry King” might have been a circus manager, instead of a director, inviting him into the business of freakshows. Garland Thomson’s term, “extraordinary bodies,” helps us link “freak” bodies and disabled bodies with other socially constructed bodies (e.g., racialized, feminized, and queered), to situate “disability” and Hatton’s disfigured body as

“representational, taxonomical products that naturalize a norm comprised of accepted bodily traits, and behaviors registering social power and status”

(1997: 45). The freakshows of the nineteenth and early twentieth century were very different spaces from those created on Hollywood screens.

David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder provide the helpful conceptual framework of the “narrative prosthesis” to identify a pervasive discursive dependency on disability throughout art, literature and film. “Narrative prosthesis” is a term meant to characterize how disability, rather than being absented by storytelling in our culture, has been used throughout history “as a crutch upon which narratives lean for representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight” (2001: 49). How did Hatton’s disability, for example, serve a need for a “real” monster to suit the ideological anxieties of the 1940s? Tellingly, The Brute Man’s narrative was modeled in many ways after Hatton’s own story. Hatton’s character, Hal Moffet, was also a handsome star athlete who, at the height of his popularity, was severely disfigured.

While Hatton was reportedly disfigured in the war, Moffet is disfigured in a chemistry laboratory accident that was sparked by a jealous feud with a friend over a woman. Moffet becomes the serial-killing Creeper as a result, marking The Brute Man as a revenge story. While Hatton was himself obviously not a serial killer, the film’s framing as a revenge tale leads us to wonder what resentment and anger might lie under the surface of Hatton’s disfigurement.

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Contemplating Hatton’s appearance, and considering this framing, audiences may well have felt ambivalently about this new monster. Mitchell and Snyder describe a focus on “negative imagery” in critical disabilities scholarship that highlights often two poles of disability characterization—that of threat and pity (2001: 18). Rondo Hatton is a paratextual figure here where The Creeper works to elicit foremost feelings of threat (with arguably some feelings of pity for his character), whereas the actor’s persona, often through representations of him, such as the interviews and biographies referenced throughout this chapter, elicit foremost feelings of pity (and arguably implicitly feelings of threat). Drawing from the successful tension between pity and threat that one finds in Boris Karloff’s sensitive portrayal of the Monster in Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935), as well as the suffering Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney) in The Wolf Man (George Waggner, 1941), Hatton’s “realness” could serve as a narrative prosthesis for 1940s horror with its interest in human monsters whose difference causes both empathy and apprehension. The Brute Man is thus characteristic of a 1940s deepening interest in ontologically confusing monsters, evidence that the narrative prosthesis concept does not negate the subversive potential of such narrative constructs. The vulnerability within each of us to be marked by a disenfran-chising difference is itself monstrous.

To echo Cohen’s (1996) statement that the monster’s body is a “cultural body,” it is instructive to explore the productive parallels and contrasts between Universal’s 1930s Frankenstein monster and their 1940s figure of the Creeper. Hatton’s disfigurement is highly productive in a decade conflicted between the failing unfettered capitalism of classical liberalism and the Keynesian model of collective central planning. Mirowski and Plehwe’s anthology The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (2009) traces the birth of neoliberalism at the “Colloque Walter Lippman” in 1938 and crystalizing with the founding of the Mont Pèlerin Society in Vevey, Switzerland in 1947 (2009: 3). Neoliberalism was an emerging, though marginal, philosophy of the 1930s (alongside the maturing studio system) attempting to work out a “Third” or “Middle Way,”

where “capitalist referees” are needed to maintain an open economy that continues to shape a new liberal individualism and the “ideal citizen” within a competitive market—in what Mirowski and Plehwe characterize as the rise of neoliberalism to hegemony (2009: 3). Important to this discussion, their work acknowledges how anti-trust campaigns, as debates, were important laboratories for neoliberalism to shape itself before it emerges in the 1970s.

Where discourses help shape ideal neoliberal subjects, Garland Thomson identifies this “ideal” as the “normate,” the standard body, person, subject position around which structures and cultures are organized to support and empower (1997: 8). Her work outlines the ideology of liberal individualism

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by identifying four interrelated ideological principles that characterize this normate in our culture (and Hatton’s): self-government, self-determination, autonomy, and progress. She then exposes the problem of the body within this ideology:

Such a self-image parallels the national ideal in an individualist egalitarian democracy that each citizen is a microcosm of the nation as a whole. A well-regulated self thus contributes to a well-regulated nation. However, these four principles depend upon a body that is a stable, neutral instrument of the individual will. It is this fantasy that the disabled figure troubles. (1997: 42) The Brute Man suggests that there is a Creeper inside even the most normative American subject, and taps into anxieties around the vulnerability of 1940s American [Keynesian] subjectivity—where bodies are marked with ambivalence by institutions as sites of both pity and threat. As discussed in other chapters in this book (Woofter, DeGiglio-Bellemare, Herland), the 1940s is the decade of realism, psychoanalysis, and trauma, where the institutions of the Welfare State become more visible. The almost “sci-fi” technology of Henry Frankenstein in the 1930s, becomes the “real” university laboratory, where Hal Moffet is disfigured. The so-called “compassionate” institutions that are supposed to uphold the wounded/traumatized individual (the vet) become a threat in this context. I argue that the Hollywood Anti-Trust Campaign of the 1940s and the discourses surrounding the handing-over of The Brute Man to PRC was one of many exemplary discursive roots that would be important to neoliberal subjectivity in later decades. Hollywood’s trafficking of Hatton’s body becomes a site for critical analysis of 1940s Hollywood horror and American culture more broadly. The ease that Hatton’s appearance can be associated with “brutishness” reveals how physical anomalies are easily associated with psycho-social pathologies—sourcing out The Creeper’s homicidal tendencies does not require delving much deeper than the surface of the skin. Hatton’s “monstrous” body can be read as an ambivalent and revealing container for an era’s fears of how war changes us.

While wars are fought in the name of nations’ rights to self-government, self-determination, autonomy, and progress, those pillars of liberal individualism are paradoxically shattered within individuals who are transformed by wars, seemingly losing agency over their bodies, as is imagined in Hatton’s case of acromegaly. And the vulnerability and lack of control over one’s body is projected onto one’s ability to regulate one’s mind, a popular feature and focus of horror narratives. This is an especially popular 1940s horror narrative’s trope: there is a creeper dormant in each of us that can be awoken, with the potential loss of our self-control and moral compass.

Since the Creeper’s story, rooted in Hatton’s acromegaly, is a revenge story, how do we make sense of that revenge? What social conditions are

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close beneath the surface of the Creeper’s violence? On one level, The Brute Man and House of Horrors are comfortable rooting the Creeper’s violence as a natural progression of his disfigurement, where the body reads as a text for what monstrosity lies within. On a broader level, the trafficking of Hatton as The Brute Man between studios also reveals an ethical imperative at work.

There is, after Hatton’s death, an active repression of what it means to release a Rondo Hatton “real” monster film in light of a disfigurement that makes him look like that “real” monster. Fears of sensationalism of Hatton’s disfigurement for the purposes of audience pleasure suggest that Universal somehow saw their decision to sell off The Brute Man as morally sound. And this feeds into the kind of real monsterdom that the 1940s both wanted to draw upon, and skirt when it got too close to the real real. Hatton’s body is meant to mirror a monster within Hal Moffet without meaning to turn that mirror back onto viewers who thrill to the sight of it. Representations of Hatton’s body are loaded with this dynamic tension, a tension can be read subversively (perhaps against Universal’s intentions) in Hatton’s later recovery by fans as a horror B-film icon.

My attention to Hatton’s body as a site of exploration is consistent with a later twentieth and twenty-first-century Western cultural focus on the body as site of cultural reproduction. Feminist thinkers, post-colonial frameworks, and critical disability scholarship are committed to recovering bodies that have been actively used and marginalized through discourses that help, as Mitchell and Snyder describe it, to shape the normate while being erased from historical narratives. “Freaks” delineate the normal, as the margins delineate the center.

Within a genealogy of “freakery” Robert Bogdan’s important work reminds us of the shifting discourses surrounding “the freak body” throughout the nineteenth century (1993). Similarly, Hatton’s career as Hollywood’s “real-life monster,” and The Brute Man as a film better-suited for the Poverty Row, also speak to shifting discourses on the freak body in the 1930s and 1940s. Robin Larsen and Beth Haller’s (2002) work on the reception of the film Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932) highlights that the dominant way of perceiving “freaks” at the time of Browning’s film was in transition—from extraordinary bodies that need to be admired to pathologized bodies that need to be corrected. 3 Eugenics and the types of proliferating institutional discourses medicalizing the body, which Foucault accounts for in The Birth of the Clinic (1963), helped to shift the way dominant culture looks and is affected by “freak” bodies. Disfigured bodies like Hatton’s in a postwar context become sites for what Ato Quayson terms “aesthetic nervousness” (2007: 24). Quayson explores ways that disease also provided a whole set of metaphors to express many social anxieties (2007: 24). In her important study, Hideous Progeny (2012), Angela Smith traces a similar narrative of critical disabilities studies tracking eugenic thought and classic horror-films, especially throughout the 1930s. While Smith’s book

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focuses on the cultural production and reception-based aspects of several classic horror films (such as James Whale’s Frankenstein and Browning’s Freaks), this chapter recovers Hatton, specifically, from her footnotes to extend the reach of some of her arguments. I am interested in how these medical discourses have important metonymical power in the ways they extend beyond the screen and the audience—to the political economy of the studio system itself that was producing these films.

pAssing Down THE BRUTE mAn: [Dis]FiguRing HATTon
in HoLLywooD’s CuLTuRAL Division oF LAboR

New historicists in critical disabilities scholarship, as identified by Mitchell and Snyder, use historical analysis to identify “the shifting investments of cultures” when faced with human variation (2001: 26). It is important to understand who were the main investors in a studio system about to be dismantled, as we assess the possible values and meanings of using Hatton’s disfigured body to tell a horror story. Conceived to be a part of the Universal’s family of classic horror monsters, Hatton’s breakout feature film as the Creeper, The Brute Man, was sold after his death, and the posthumous release of House of Horrors, and passed down to Poverty Row’s PRC studio.

This Hollywood transaction is what characterizes The Brute Man as a “pick-up” film. These types of transactions existed within a Hollywood economy that needs to be historicized in both its political and cultural contexts. With big money, these studios managed production, distribution, and exhibition of their films. In other words, they owned and monopolized the means of production around their films from the equipment and locations used to film their features, down to the theater chains that assured their films success. The

“Big Five” at the time were MGM, Paramount, Samuel Goldwyn Mayer,

RKO, and Columbia. Universal was considered a “little major” or “major-minor” studio: “‘major’ because they produced first-run features and had their own distribution set-ups; ‘minor’ because they did not own their own
theatre chains” (Schatz, 1997: 57). 4 Forties studios distinguished themselves mostly through the production and distribution of “A” and “B” films. A-films were pictures with higher production values, their budgets typically averag-ing $350,000 or more, with stars who appealed to a wide audience, intended to play the top half of the double-bill, with a running time of seven reels or more, and shot with schedules that allowed for rehearsals and retakes. (These are characteristic guidelines and not set rules.) For Thomas Schatz, in Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s, B-films were the “other class” of Hollywood films that helped meet the huge demand that came with the 1930s trend of double-billing:

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B’s were often packaged with another feature—either another B or a top feature working its way through the subsequent-run market—along with various shorts, newsreels, and cartoons in a full afternoon or evening “program” of films. [ . . . ]

B-movie production enabled [studios] to keep operations running smoothly and contract personnel working regularly, to develop new talent, and to ensure a regular supply of product. (1997: 43)

And the practice of block-booking—where exhibitors had to buy the rights to a blockbuster A-film as part of a package with six to seven other films (usually B-films)—guaranteed studios an outlet for their B-grade films.

Key to the Hollywood economy, Poverty Row is the figurative geo-
graphical location where “B” and “indies” studios were concentrated in Hollywood, or what Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas, and John Brunas in

Poverty Row Horrors! celebrate as “the wrong side of the cinematic tracks”

(1993: ix). Emphasizing the importance of this lower stratus of production, Tino Balio cautions that, “to concentrate upon the A would emphasize the art of a few films and elide the basis of production, the underlying commercial and artistic means” (1993: 313) of Hollywood. In the 1930s and 40s, following the Depression, the production of B-films thrived on the tension between producers and exhibitors around double-billing. Exhibitors found double-billing more profitable, as it arguably attracted greater audiences to their theaters, while proving demeaning and less profitable for producers of the A-films on the double-bill. The solution for the vertically integrated Major studios dominating the industry was block-booking, but the practice came under fire in the 1930s with exhibitors mobilizing the State to their defense. The two biggest challenges that defined and shaped the studio
system in the 1940s were the war and the anti-trust campaign.5 Schatz
accounts for the challenges faced mostly by the Five Majors who needed to address the pre-war declining overseas income and respond to the trade restrictions imposed by the 1940 consent decree.6 The most important strategy for the major studios to face these challenges was to scale back on low-budget production. The primary argument against block-booking, according to the government, was that studios were forcing “substandard”

films onto exhibitors, which discursively helped produce the “problem of the B-film.”

With Universal trying to clean up its act in a Hollywood economy of
respectability, Hatton’s value as the Creeper shifted. The fact that Hatton died from complications related to his acromegaly seemed to make Universal uncomfortable with the film, because it was cheap and clearly banking on the spectacle of Hatton’s disfigured body as monstrous. The Creeper films thus could be seen as exploitative—and exploitation films were the business of Poverty Row.

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Schatz is clear that the upper management levels for most big studios in the early 1940s, including Universal, came from the business side
of the industry—“a clear indication of Wall Street’s influence and the general development of the cinema into a modernist business enterprise”

(1997: 44), and bringing its free market discourses with it. In a famous February 1946 Penguin Film Review article “Picture for Peanuts,” the same month of Hatton’s passing as well as the passing-down of his last Creeper film to the “wrong side of the tracks,” Nick Grinde celebrates the world of B-films as
standing for Bread and Butter, or Buttons, or Bottom Budget. And standing for nearly anything else anyone wants to throw at it. . . . A “B” picture isn’t a big picture that didn’t grow up; it’s exactly what it started out to be. It’s the twenty-two-dollar suit of the clothing business, it’s the hamburger of the butcher’s shops, it’s a seat in the bleachers. And there’s a big market for all of them. . . .

When you are all through, you have a suit or a picture which goes right through into the market with its big brothers and gives pretty good service at that. The trick is to judge them in their class and not by “A” standards. (41)

With this working class discourse undergirding it, the Hollywood studio system of A and B films reveals a cultural division of labor in film’s role in broader cultural production; the discourses that help produce these differences are not only mutually constitutive of one another, but also interlocked with broader discourses of class in a developing neoliberal market culture in America. In the fall of the carnival sideshow, and the wake of Browning’s censored Freaks, B-films in the 1940s are often constituted as the freaks of the film industry, occupying a low point along a spectrum of respectability,
and dichotomized against the category of “respectable” “prestige” films.7

The dynamic overlapping discourses of freakery, profit margins, and ideal normate bodies remind us that Hollywood is a critical playground for collective socialization in dominant culture. Until the Hollywood Antitrust Act dismantled the 1940s studio-system in 1949, opening the industry to free market competition, the discursive tensions between A-films and B-films that Hatton was subjected to were palpably at the surface of Hollywood business. The A and B-film discourses of the 1940s studio system—as a form of cultural narrative prosthesis—help anchor and shape the discursive structures that would support neoliberal subjectivities in future decades especially behind the scenes in Hollywood during a period when the rest of America was working with a more Keynesian interventionist economic model. In the following section, I explore Hatton’s troubled and troubling iconic status as a lens into Hollywood’s cultural division of labor. Rondo Hatton / The Creeper becomes a complex conceptual figure here, locatable on a borderline (or faultline)

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and illuminating how these neoliberal discourses around “freak” bodies, and class, are projected onto imagined geographies and work with other social markers of difference, such as race.

“sTALe-bReAD” AnD HeALTHy boDies:

ConsuMing neoLibeRAL DisCouRses

What class of film was The Brute Man? Universal introduced the Creeper in the A-list film The Pearl of Death, and produced all three films featuring the Creeper, but the series folded between post-production of House of Horrors and The Brute Man and their releases. Many references to Universal’s transaction with PRC to sell the latter film echo, directly or indirectly, Variety’s explanation that this transaction was “in line with U[niversal]’s policy of no more B’s” (“Pre-Production News,” October 23, 1946). But it was a little more than a week after Hatton’s death when Variety reported that the:

[R]ecent death of Rondo Hatton, screen actor, caused the death of Universal’s

“Creeper” series. Two films of the series, “House of Horrors” and “Brute Man,”

have been completed but neither has been released. (“Creeper Series Folds”

February 12th, 1946)

Hatton still appeared in The Spider Woman Strikes Back (an A-picture) on March 22, 1946, and then Universal released House of Horrors a week later on March 29. Was it a new policy around B-films or Hatton’s death that led Universal to pass the Creeper down to PRC? The Brute Man transaction is more heavily loaded with economic, political and cultural meaning than considered at the time by popular media.

PRC released The Brute Man on October 1, 1946, and Variety reviewed the film on October 23 as a “singularly unexciting meller [i.e., melodrama] [that]

is suitable only for lower dualers [i.e., double-bills].” The reviewer concedes that “Hatton’s facial features, which run a close second to those of Frankenstein’s monster, furnish the film’s few chills” (“Film review: The Brute Man”). Hatton here is described more as a prop than a character, his presence more important than his performance. Variety reports the passing down of the film in “U’s ‘Brute Man’ to PRC But Hangs on to 2 Others,” which indicates that the film was sold to PRC for a reported $125,000 “following U’s merger with International.”8 Variety also reports, according to an unnamed Universal executive in the same article, that Universal did keep the two B-films The Vigilantes Return (Ray Taylor, 1947) and The Michigan Kid (Ray Taylor, 1947) . In a strange coincidence, the Universal-International merger happened on the same date as PRC’s release of The Brute Man (Koszarski, 1977: 20).

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Leo Spiz, an attorney and former RKO president, and William Goetz, a
production executive at Fox, took charge of Universal International and cut back severely on the production of B-films. In light of the merger and the decision to focus increasingly on A pictures, the notion that Hatton’s death was linked only coincidentally with the decision to sell his film is suspect. It is clear that The Brute Man would have represented clear investment risks for Universal-International.

The class discourse around the “substandard” B-film, and the “lower
dualers,” is an important consideration in assessing these risks. Comparing the Film Daily Yearbook ad campaigns of Paramount and MGM to those of Monogram and PRC in “Monogram Means Business,” Kyle Dawson

Edwards emphasizes “the degree to which the rhetorical markers of prestige tended to differ between the A- and B-film markets during this period”

(2011: 392). Taves (1993) breaks Bs down into four categories in order of prestige: (1) major-studio “Programmers,” (2) major-studio Bs, (3) smaller-company Bs, and (4) the “quickies” of Poverty Row. Monogram president Steve Broidy analogizes the consumption of the B-film in strictly class-based terms: “Not everybody likes to eat cake. Some people like bread, and even a certain number of people like stale bread rather than fresh bread” (Edwards,

2011: 388). Hollywood historians describe the Poverty Row studios’ strat-
egy of distinguishing themselves as “umbrella brands,” associating their film releases under a united brand of similar values and meanings associ-
ated with the studio (Edwards, 2011: 388). 9 When (re)producing one’s own studio image, a culture around one’s studio production, and defining the values behind cultural products in a 1940s Hollywood economy, the major paradigm was, according to Monogram’s president, that A is for cake, and then we have diminishing degrees of taste in the “fresh” or “stale” B-film.

The two films Universal hung onto must have been fresh B-films, while The Brute Man was assessed as stale bread, suitable for Poverty Row distribution, with PRC being “the lowest of the low” (Dixon, 2012: 35). We can explore more explicitly here a Hollywood cultural division of labor where Schatz’s language around the “different kinds of communities” being served by the 1940s industry echoes the hierarchical implications of Hollywood’s mode of cultural production.

Schatz argues that troubled overseas markets produced a need “to promote Americanism as the nation faced the prospect of global war,” provoking an on screen emphasis on American settings, American issues, and the domestic marketplace (1997: 68). Considering that the role of The Creeper was inspired by Hatton’s ostensibly war-derived deformity, I tend to agree with Schatz’s argument that all of Hollywood’s major genres were affected by the war, and that, therefore, most those films—including The Brute Man—could be thought of as “war films” (1997: 222). Disability is central to cultural production,

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especially during wartime, and it is common in horror scholarship to suggest that 1930s monstrous bodies were the product of lingering unease regarding the returning maimed bodies of World War I (See, for example, Skal, 1993:

66). Additionally, as Carol Poore argues in “Who Belongs?” that while dis-
ability was central to discourses around nationalism in Germany, disability in Hollywood worked as an organizing trope in cultural production for American capitalism. In 1940s cultural economy, B-movies themselves become characterized in terms of disability, especially in what they are thought to lack (both qualitatively and morally). Schatz argues that the question “why program

‘B’s’ anyway?” is “revealing in terms of the industry’s governing theories about its audience, about moviegoing, and about the preferences of certain audiences segments” (1997: 72). With the advent of more “scientific” audience market research, A-film producers challenged double-billing as demean-
ing the industry (Schatz, 1997: 70). In late 1941, Variety’s Arthur Ungar refers to the Major’s scale-back of B’s as a “so-called abandonment—for publicity purposes” (Schatz, 1997: 72). It is difficult to tease apart criticisms of B-films and double-billing. B-films are defined as the product of double-billing, but also carry the values associated with Poverty Row production. While the budget of B-films allowed them to appeal to specific smaller audiences and take more risks, A-film studios enjoyed a high degree of hegemonic media power to define the discourse around the value (and threat) of the B-films.

The cultural economy of B-films comes to light when we consider that

B-films were double-billed with important high-budget A-films in first-run theaters, or relegated to second and third run theaters, called “subsequent-
run” theaters.10 What can we say about this theater geography and how it maps out onto a cultural America? First, there is an important urban-rural divide. Research markets, such as Audience Research Institute (ARI), played their role in the social construction of separate audience markets by defining categories in terms of “national region, urban versus rural locale, age,
income bracket, and gender” (Schatz, 1997: 73). The research confirms an
easy assumption that lower-income and younger audiences were more drawn to the double-billed feature, and were the bigger audience for B-films in general. 11 Gallup noted that working and middle class audiences went to the mov-
ies more often than higher income audiences (Schatz, 1997: 75). Research
also confirms that working class audiences were more likely to attend the
subsequent-run theaters (Schatz, 1997). It is also important to consider that
rural moviegoers had fewer options in terms of available movie product.

Tracking the distribution of Poverty Row films like The Brute Man would find it running with other Poverty Row fodder in subsequent-run theaters for
working-class, predominantly rural communities.12

As Schatz mentions, citing Richard deDecordova’s research in “Regulating Childhood: The Children’s Matinee Movement” (1990), studios produced

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films to include the highest demographic for profit: women and children.

B-films could offer a variety of genres for an assumed variety of subgroup audiences. Advertising consultants at the time argued that women led purchase decision-making in the home, as well as that the presence of women and children in the theater “gave the establishment an aura of propriety”

(deCordova, cited in Schatz, 1997: 76). Schatz also cites a study of the

Interstate Theatre Circuit, priding itself in the early 1940s for not participating in the double-feature standard that “assiduously avoided the B picture, calling the double feature a ‘virus’ in the film business” (Hoblitzelle cited
in Schatz, 1997: 77). Even Arthur L. Mayer picks up on this disease meta-
phor in “An Exhibitor Begs for ‘B’s’” as he explains in 1947 how “Warner, Metro, Paramount, Universal have for the past few years shunned ‘B’s’ like the plague and associated themselves exclusively with high-budget pictures”

(1947: 175). Mayer also characterizes Bs in the same article as “handicapped”

by small budgets (1947: 177). Larsen and Haller’s study of the public reception of Freaks uses similar disease terminology in its exploration of the first-run vs. subsequent-run theaters’ distribution of Browning’s film:

The MPPDA’s public strategy in response to Freaks’ reception was silence.

However, its private strategy was quarantine. After removing it with fanfare from first-run theaters, MGM quietly reintroduced it at third-run small-town locations throughout May and at a third-run Manhattan theater in early July [. . .] Most critics noted that Freaks offended audiences and exhibitors in a uniquely vivid way by introducing body shapes that were “real” rather than

“made up” and by having people with physical differences act out their frustrations by collectively maiming a glamorous star. (2002: 168)

Larsen and Haller use the word “quarantine,” picking up on the moral polic-ing of the decade led by institutions like the MPPDA, and groups such as the Open Door Coalition and the National Legion of Decency, all associated with the Hayes Code. First-run theaters underwent a “quarantine” from exploitation films, while they were distributed in third-run theaters. We can imagine these quarantined spaces where Poverty Row’s freak films were channeled as, in Bogdan’s description, “only the more traditional or ‘backward’ areas, where hospitals and asylums had not yet penetrated [and that]

still welcomed vaudeville, circus, and carnival ‘freak’ attractions” (Bogdan,
cited in Larsen and Haller, 2002: 169). The urban-sophisticated vs. rural-
primitive distinction is writ large here. Larsen and Haller’s research points out regarding American sideshows how the “contradiction over their representation reflect the contrasting urban and rural receptions to sideshows in American culture” (2002: 169). Hollywood’s cultural division of labor operated on a mode of production that reproduced different discourses for different imagined geographies. A new liberal individualism was becoming

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defined less through a discourse of hard productive labor, and more through the autonomy and freedom brought by consumer power associated with the privileged urban spaces where one could go to a first-run theater to experience a more “sophisticated” product befitting an imagined status.

Philosophers and scholars have already gestured towards the productive nature of discourses around disability within capitalist discourses. Nicholas Brown draws these links clearly as he points to the ways Marx drew a relationship between physical disability and capitalism, pointing for example to

“the victims of industry, whose number increases with the growth of danger-
ous machinery, of mines, chemical works, etc.” (Marx, quoted in Brown,

2013: 187). But disability is more generally present in Marx as a trope, a
metaphor for the effects of capitalism, particularly of the division of labor.

Marx criticized the manufacturer who “converts the worker into a crippled monstrosity by furthering his particular skill as in a forcing-house, through the suppression of a whole world of productive drives and inclinations”

(quoted in Brown, 2013: 187). This use of disability as metaphorical vehicle
for the effects of the capitalist division of labor characterizes an ethical thread in Marxist thought. The Marxist parallel here is that B-films, like people with disabilities, constitute “the reserve army of the [studio] labour system”

(Hahn, 1987: 562).

Hatton’s career in the 1940s is a window into the ways Hollywood culture, reproduced and supported by its studio-run A- and B-film mode of production, did the work of reproducing a legacy of freak discourses within the very culture of filmmaking. This is a wider arena for thinking about the so-called

“diminishing returns” of horror in the 1940s overall. As an example of narrative prosthesis, the Creeper films used Hatton’s disabled body to construct a horror narrative. But studio executives misunderstood that pushing the notion of “real” physical difference, instead of the more transparent performative version popularized by Lon Chaney’s elaborate makeup and masterful bodily contortions, would not enhance the horror genre but would instead, as Larsen and Haller point out, create tension in the films’ reception and distribution:

“the reality or the body difference would cause aesthetic anxiety among mov-
iegoers” (Larsen and Haller, 2002: 171). Narratives are woven on and off the
screen. Harlan Hahn describes the human body as “a powerful symbol conveying messages that have massive social economic, and political implication in order to perpetuate their hegemony, [where] ruling elites have attempted to impose what might be termed a moral order of the body, providing images
that subjects are encouraged to emulate” (quoted in Larsen and Haller, 2002:

169). Sarason and Doris argue that how humans see people who are different
is not about who they are physically but about how people organize themselves culturally (Cited in Larsen and Haller, 2002: 170). These intersections beg the question: How do Poverty Row horror films become stigmatized

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by the discourses of disability, as inferior, disfigured, abnormal, “less than”

major studio films? As certain monsters become normalized, and others are distinguished as “freaks” within the genre, these discourses are mapped onto social spaces, communities, social categories, class, and so on. These normative discourses can be seen as culturally productive in the development of a new liberal individualism that emphasizes bodies in general, and idealizes certain bodies that will resonate later with the ideal neoliberal consumer-subject that would be the pulse of an efficient, demand-driven economy.

The Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry talks about Fifth columnists and uses the language describing the war overseas as a war of nerves, and losing our minds, empty of morale; it warns as well that

“America is not immune” (United States, 1942: “Footprints of the Trojan

Horse”). Again with the evocative language of health that conflates physical
threats with moral threats, it’s hard not to see how a figure like Hatton can embody these fears on an unconscious level. The language around B-films is one of disease, impropriety, quarantine, ill-breeding, and, as Schatz describes,

“defined by its lacks” (original emphasis, 1997: 78). Implicit in PRC’s pick-up of The Brute Man, The Creeper carried all of this discursive baggage on his extra bones and cartilage down to Poverty Row.

ConCLusion

This chapter highlights how the 1940s Creeper films are an important and overlooked part of a cultural history and cultural purchase of horror. Hollywood’s relationship to Rondo Hatton—the person, the performer, the iconic fictional character—is an entry point into seeing how discourses of “freaks”

and “eugenics” were productive in reproducing capitalist discourses around different classes of studios, actors, and films, in a decade where “B” films posed the biggest challenge to the free market of film production and exhibition. A film like The Brute Man—produced as an A-picture, distributed as a B-picture—can help to reveal how different discourses are woven together into the fabric of dominant culture. Exploring the language of virus, quarantine and “ill-breeding” helps provide a logic to a cultural economy that distinguished Poverty Row production from Major studio “prestige” films.

The 1940s represent an exceptional time for an America sorting out American capitalism—where the “problem of the B-film” and the 1940–1949 historical challenge to the Hollywood studio system bring to the surface some of the driving forces behind broader ideological shifts and settlements. The trafficking of B-movies in the 1940s helped drive the discourses that would root and shape a new American liberal individualism that would later serve neoliberalism very well. While the studio system shifted to an even more open and

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competitive market with the Anti-Trust Act, its discursive roots were more deeply embedded into broader cultural production.

These rooted discourses would trouble the decades to follow, for example, with the development of a deeply racialized 1950s suburban project, where it is well documented that the American state subsidized the acquisition of homes to white families with the help of the new and more accessible mort-gage system that we know today. Ultimately, through a process known as redlining, the same discourses that were helping to organize industry geographies in Hollywood also helped to organize the new suburban spaces where the entertainment industry would eventually have to stake a greater claim (Horton et al., 2003). These discursive structures would become the house that haunts the Keynesian decades to follow, until the discourses gain more power in the 1970s.

The 1940s is an era of undeniable importance to media and culture, and the incredible shifts that occurred for cultures across the world. Horror cinema has always provided a rich space for less regulated exploration of cultural norms and taboos, and we must question the terms under which a film such as The Brute Man was produced, received, and consequently written out of a rich horror tradition in the 1940s. Reviled by film reviewers and subsequently ignored by scholars, B-films must be “picked-up,” as they confront us with profound truths, and allow us to let our histories reflect the role and work of horror icons like Rondo Hatton in the culture at large.

noTes

1. The Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards (also, “Rondos” and “Rondo Awards”) were created by David Colton and Kerry Gammill at the Clasic Horror Film Boards in 2002. According to their website (http://classichorrorfilmboard.com/
rondos/about.html), the Rondos “celebrate the best in classic horror research, creativity and film preservation.” They state as well that the awards are fan-based, and have no ties to commercial sponsors.

2. In his assessment of B-filmmaking, Brian Taves argues that once an actor was identified with the A or B category, the person tended to “pigeonholed,” where an actor under contract with a studio like Universal would have to take the studio’s assignments, regardless of preference (Taves, 1993: 329).

3. Larsen and Haller note that Freaks’ successful reissue did not occur until the Cannes Film Festival of 1962, which was, ironically, the year that Tod Browning died.

4. As Charles H. Grant explains in his article “Anticompetitive Practices in the Motion Picture and Judicial Support of Antiblind Bidding Statutes”: “Each theatre chain would handle the films of its parent corporation. For example, RKO theatres would handle RKO Radio Pictures features, Loew’s theaters would exhibit M-G-M
productions, and so forth. [ . . . ] In addition, the Big Five would accommodate films

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made by Universal and Columbia [. . .] Consequently, small producing and distribution organizations, such as Mascot, Republic, and Monogram, were essentially closed out of the major markets. They took whatever bookings they could obtain from the major circuits and otherwise concentrated distribution on smaller independent theaters, theater chains, and state rights exchanges” (1989: 39).

5. “Anti-trust” refers to the trusts that served as protective measures to restrict competition and ownership of theatre chains so that studios could maintain a better control over distribution, exhibition, and, ultimately, profits.

6. The Decree was signed in October 1940, but only took effect in September 1941, giving studios just under a year to adapt their production strategies.

7. It is worth noting here that many horror actors (Karloff, Lugosi, George Zucco, Lionel Atwill) acted in both major and Poverty Row productions throughout the 1940s. Hatton, however, seemed fated to Poverty Row status based upon the discourses at play. Significantly, Bela Lugosi’s career is framed as “tragic” at least in part because he was largely relegated to “slumming it” on Poverty Row in the 1940s.

8. The “Universal-International” merger would be short-lived, lasting from 1946
to 1951.

9. Broidy’s marketing strategies, mirrored by PRC, are interesting to explore as well. The perceived customer here was in fact the exhibitor and not the moviegoer.

See Edwards’s “‘Monogram Means Business: B-Film marketing and Series Filmmaking at Monogram Pictures” (2011).

10. Major-owned theaters often had the best locations with the best profits.

Thousands of smaller “lesser” theaters spread throughout the country, and it was these smaller theaters that would often change their double-bill programs several times a week. The “grind houses,” among the poorest theaters in the major cities, offered continuous screenings, with sometimes up to six quickies for a nickel.

(Taves, 1993: 326).

11. See Gary D. Rhodes’s chapter in this book for a discussion of late-1940s reception of horror films.

12. Also interesting is that all of the other films featuring Hatton as the Creeper are referred to as melodramas, but The Brute Man as a Poverty Row release is characterized by Variety as a “semi-horror.” Does the label of horror help differentiate the fresh-B from the stale-B? (“Film review: The Brute Man”).

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Schatz, Thomas. 1997. Boom and Bust: The American Cinema in the 1940s. New York: Scribner.

“Screen News: Fox to Base Musical on Life of Hammerstein.” 1944. The New York Times. December 6, 26.

Scott, Mona. 2012. Think Race and Ethnicity. Boston: Pearson.

Skal, David J. 1993. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. New York: Norton.Top of Form

Smith, Angela M. 2012. Hideous Progeny Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press. Bottom of Form

Stafford, Jeff. “House of Horrors.” Turner Classic Movies. Online source: http://
www.tcm.com/this-month/article/275556%7C0/House-of-Horrors.html.

Last accessed October 12, 2013.

———. 2009. “Happy Halloween from the Creeper.” MovieMorlocks.com. October 31. http://moviemorlocks.com/2009/10/31/happy-halloween-from-the-creeper/.

Last accessed October 12, 2013.

Taves, Brian. 1993. “The B Film: Hollywood’s Other Half.” In Tino Balio’s Grand design: Hollywood as a modern business enterprise, 1930–1939. New York: Scribner. 313–50.

Taylor, Erma. 1946. “Hollywood’s Strangest Love Story.” Pageant. 2 (6): 10.

TCMDb. “The Monster Maker (1944).” The TCM Movie Database. Online source:

http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/83892/The-Monster-Maker/. Last accessed

August 7, 2013.

Tudor, Andrew. 1989. Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie. Oxford [England]: B. Blackwell.

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United States. 1942. Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry. Washington, DC: Office of War Information.

Weaver, Tom, Michael Brunas and John Brunas. 1993. Poverty Row Horrors!: Monogram, PRC, and Republic Horror Films of the Forties. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland.

Worland, Rick. 1997. “OWI Meets the Monsters: Hollywood Horror Films and War Propaganda, 1942 to 1945.” Cinema Journal. 37 (1): 47–65.

Zinn, Howard. 1990. A People’s History of the United States. New York: Harper Perennial.

FiLMogRApHy

The Brute Man. Directed by Jean Yarbrough. Universal/PRC, 1946. Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 1999. DVD.

House of Horrors. Directed by Jean Yarbrough. Universal, 1945. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2009. DVD.

In Old Chicago. Directed by Henry King. Beverly Hills, Calif.: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2005. DVD.

The Pearl of Death. Directed by Roy William Neill. Universal, 1944. [ The Complete Sherlock Holmes Collection.] United States: MPI Home Video, 2003. BluRay.

Race: The Power of an Illusion. Episode Three: The House We Live In. Directed by Lllewellyn M. Smith. San Francisco, CA: California Newsreel, 2003. DVD.

Chapter 17

The Vampire’s Ghost

The Case for a Poverty Row Classic

Selma A. Purac

In his review of Lesley Selander’s 1945 film The Vampire’s Ghost, Tom Weaver dismissively wonders “whether the studio’s writers even bothered to acquaint themselves with the legends and traditions of the monsters involved”

(1993: 218). The film, he complains, “gets every aspect of the vampire mythos wrong” (1993: 218). However, it is these very departures from the conventions of the vampire sub-genre that differentiate the film from its long
line of cinematic predecessors.1 By the 1940s, audiences had come to expect
a certain kind of vampire, one influenced not only by Bela Lugosi’s iconic portrayal but also by the Gothic tradition. Framed in the context of gloomy castles and desolate tombs, of tempestuous weather and bloodsucking bats, vampires were commonly depicted as supernatural fiends. The Vampire’s Ghost, however, signaled a new approach to the cinematic monster. Stripped of many supernatural abilities, the vampire is a more humanized figure here, and his relocation to Africa allows him to be considered in a uniquely colonial context. Given these notable characteristics, it is somewhat surprising that the
film has been largely ignored by scholarship.2 Though its B-movie status may
have played a part in this oversight, The Vampire’s Ghost is nonetheless a striking work that took early measures to revitalize cinema’s undead.

In its unique approach, Selander’s film is symptomatic of wider trends in 1940s horror cinema. This movie speaks to the creative hybridity and experimentation so characteristic of horror film at the time. Informed by both literary and cinematic traditions, The Vampire’s Ghost calls upon a wide range of intertexts and genres to produce an intriguingly palimpsestic work. In this respect, the movie can be read as a representative example of a largely overlooked and underappreciated period of horror film history. As Mark Jancovich points out, this is a decade defined, not by a lack of fascinating cinematic works, but rather by the curious critical dismissal of their worth (2008: 16).3

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Like the period of horror film from which it emerges, The Vampire’s Ghost is in need of critical reappraisal and recognition.

poveRTy Row pRoDuCTions: THwARTing expeCTATion

Originally screened on the bottom of a double bill with The Phantom Speaks (John English, 1945), due to what Weaver calls its position as a “lesser film”

(1993: 210), The Vampire’s Ghost is all the more impressive for its B status.

With their reduced budgets which often demanded shorter shooting schedules, lesser-known casts, and lower production values, Bs were frequently regarded as subordinate works, created to meet consumer demand in a profit-driven industry rather than give expression to artistic aspirations. 4 Such works were produced by low-end independent studios that were collectively known as “Poverty Row” because of “the extreme cheapness” (Davis, 2012: 49) of their production practices and their concentration in the Gower Gulch region of Hollywood. Yannis Tzioumakis outlines the basic rules that governed Poverty Row productions: (1) inflexible shooting schedules that rarely extended beyond the six-day work week, (2) the necessity of only one take per shot, regardless of quality, to drive costs down, (3) the development of stories from inside the company so as to avoid the additional cost of purchasing rights, and (4) the tendency to shoot outdoor films, thereby reducing costs through minimal studio work (2006: 75). In short, Poverty Row was a slave to budget.

It is from this environment that The Vampire’s Ghost emerges. A “ten-day
wonder” (Swires, 1997: 16), the film was rapidly produced by the Poverty

Row studio Republic Pictures.

While such budgetary limitations would naturally restrict a production, the independent status of these studios meant that they were also free from some of the constraints faced by the majors. As Tzioumakis explains, “these independent companies operated in the shadow of the studios but outside their sphere of influence” (2006: 64). Poverty Row films, he claims, “represented an alternative practice that went against the mainstream classical cinema of the studio system [ . . . ]. In departing from the rules of classical filmmaking, lower-end, non-studio production presented a cinema that was less bound by established rules” (2006: 77). Thus, where many of the major studios focused their vampire films around the already lucrative figure of Dracula, or of vampires who resembled him, the independents had the freedom to explore more unique, alternative depictions, particularly within a genre that, by the 1940s,
had come to be known for its “tendency to recycle everything” (Kendrick,

1991: 218). 5

Variously characterized by its “aesthetic depletion” (Worland, 1997:

47), its derivative tediousness (Worland, 2007: 218), and its “ever-cheaper

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degradations” (Higham and Greenberg, 1968: 51), horror films of the 1940s
are often seen as stale iterations of motifs freshly established in the preceding decade. The Vampire’s Ghost, however, clearly challenges such claims. The film is a fine example of an independent 1940s horror movie that managed to transcend many of the limitations placed upon it. Despite the haste of the production itself, underlying the film is a literate script whose quality should perhaps not surprise us: the original story was conceived by the respected science-fiction author Leigh Brackett, who co-wrote the screenplay and would later go on to write such classics as The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946) , Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1958) , The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973), and The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980).6 Rather than
rehash cinematic tropes in The Vampire’s Ghost, Brackett pulls the myth of the vampire in unexpected directions.

John Abbott plays the long-suffering Webb Fallon. Cursed with vampir-
ism four hundred years ago, he now passes in society as a bar owner in the busy African outpost of Bakunda. When a series of workers from the Vance plantation are mysteriously murdered, the superstitious natives suspect a vampire in their midst and begin deserting into the jungle. To prevent further disruptions, the plantation owners Tom (Emmett Vogan) and Roy (Charles Gordon) enlist Fallon’s aid to track down the killer, but Fallon is attacked by an African who knows him for what he is. Fatally wounded, the vampire mesmerizes Roy, commanding him to place his body on a mountaintop where it will be revitalized by moonlight. Once he regains his strength, a lonely Fallon attempts to seduce Roy’s fiancé, Julie (Peggy Stewart), with the hope of gaining an eternal companion—the knowledge of which throws Roy into a delirium. By the time the local priest helps Roy break the vampire’s spell, Fallon has already disappeared into the jungle with Julie. However, with the help of Bakunda’s natives, his hunters track him to the ruins of a temple where they free the damsel and destroy the vampire.

Though the general structure of the narrative might seem conventional—
a monster disrupts the social order before he is identified and disposed of, allowing for the reinscription of “normalcy”—the film unfolds in a manner that challenges our understanding of this very pattern. Through its anti-colonial perspective which interrogates the categories of normalcy and monstrosity, The Vampire’s Ghost works to complicate our assumptions.

Take, for instance, the first few minutes of the movie which establish a set of expectations that are almost immediately thwarted. As the opening credit sequence fades to black, an illustrated map of Africa appears on screen. On the soundtrack, we hear the continued beating of a slit drum and the authoritatively colonial voice of an English-accented male narrator. “Africa!,” the voice intones, “The dark land where voodoo drums beat in the night. Where the jungles are deep and full of secrets, and the moon that lights them is still

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a mystical moon. Africa! Where men have not forgotten the evil they learned
of in the dawn of time.”7 As the narrator speaks, the camera zooms in on the map to highlight the location of Bakunda.

This expositional opening is very much in keeping with cinematic conventions of the 1940s. Indeed, this documentarian mode, whereby information is conveyed through maps and an authoritative male voice, echoes the opening of Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) and speaks to the rationalism of the film’s wartime audience. Dana Polan points out that the 1940s marked

“an historical moment in which it is assumed that citizens will need factual information as much as entertainment”; consequently, many films “began to be infiltrated by instances of didacticism and direct address to the audience.

In such instances, the films presented not a fictional world that the viewer can watch from a safe distance of escapism but a world of immediate pertinence presented directly and explicitly to the spectator” (2005: 364–65). In the case of The Vampire’s Ghost, it is significant that a horror film should evoke this

“realist” framework for it signals not only the work’s hybridity but also its experimental approach. Horror is presented to the audience within a frame of realism.

At this point in the film, our understanding of cinematic conventions leads us to believe that we are hearing an anonymous voice of authority that is divorced from the story world. However, as the illustrated map dissolves into an image of the actual town itself, the narrative voice suddenly shifts into the first person, thereby dismantling our assumptions. The initially detached voice reveals an unexpected degree of intimacy: “I always come back to Africa,” he says, as the camera tracks through the night-time town to rest on a darkened doorway. “But even here, there is no rest for me,” the voice continues. “The path of time is curved upon itself like a serpent, without beginning, without end. I must follow it forever.” This claim is visually accompanied by a hand—with a distinctive ring on one finger—that reaches for the door in close-up, revealing that the tracking shot of Bakunda was actually the first-person perspective of our mysterious narrator, who, it turns out, is the film’s dangerous predator.

As he opens the door, he cries, “I cannot die! I cannot rest! I cannot rest! I cannot rest!” The camera proceeds to track over the body of a sleeping African woman. As she awakens and gazes off-screen at the invisible intruder, she is enveloped in his shadow, and her piercing scream brings the scene to an end. The sequence demonstrates how expertly we are drawn into the story. Smooth transitions pull us into the fictional world as the film subtly hijacks our perspective, aligning the viewer with the vampire just as he is about to attack. As we share his perspective, the audience is forced into complicity here. The opening sequence both builds and undercuts the viewer’s sympathy for the vampire, thereby playing with our expectations.

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This contradictory stance signals the film’s complex take on the figure of the vampire, all of which is articulated with great economy.

syMpATHy in sHADows:

An unConvenTionAL vAMpiRe

Fallon is unlike so many of his cinematic forebears; at one point in the film, he even chastises Roy for assuming that he is like “other vampires.” The message is clear: here is a vampire who defies expectation; in this respect, we can locate in Fallon the 1940s tendency towards experimentation in the horror genre. Preceding this cinematic vampire are a series of creatures who pay homage to Universal’s Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931), as indicated by titles
such as Dracula’s Daughter (Lambert Hillyer, 1936), Son of Dracula (Robert Siodmak, 1943), House of Dracula (Erle C. Kenton, 1945), and films such
as The Return of the Vampire (Lew Landers, 1944), which features Lugosi reprising the role of a vampire. Nonetheless, these films mark an attempt to reframe the narrative of the bloodsucker in unexpected ways. For instance, in Son of Dracula, monstrosity is displaced onto the figure of a devious woman who seeks to exploit the vampire for his immortality. In House of Dracula, vampirism is presented as a medical ailment that can potentially be cured through a series of blood transfusions, and Return of the Vampire, as noted in the introduction of this book, repositions the monster in the context of World War II. All of these films signal, to differing degrees, a domestication of horror and a subsequent movement towards realism in 1940s film. While The Vampire’s Ghost falls into the same category, Fallon himself represents
a more extreme version of this normalization.8 Indeed, as the proprietor of a bar and gambling den, this sherry-drinking, day-walking smoker owes more to Casablanca’s Rick Blaine than to Lugosi’s Dracula.

The Vampire’s Ghost goes to great lengths to normalize its vision of monstrosity. The film’s “realist” frame, its largely demythologized vampire, and its anti-colonial discourse all speak to an attempt to familiarize the strange.

Polan notes that this is a common trend in 1940s horror due to the influence of the war; such films, he claims, are “composite forms, mixing horror with a rationalized image of the world” (1986: 185). We see this blending in Selander’s film. Not only does the movie embed the irrational horror of the vampire in the more realistic framework of colonialism, but it also emphasizes Fallon’s humanity. At one point, Julie reads a passage from a book on the undead which explains that “the real menace of the vampire comes from the fact that, in many ways, he appears normally human. He can become one of you.” Indeed, Fallon’s ability to pass is evident in Julie’s inability to see him for what he is. The real mystery of this character is that he is both man

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and monster at once: a respected member of the community who saves the conventional hero twice in the course of the film, and a murderer who slowly picks off Bakunda’s population. Despite his vampirism, Fallon encapsulates a more naturalized threat: he is depicted along the lines of an ambiguously dangerous man rather than a supernatural fiend. He represents what Polan calls “the strangeness of nonhuman beings who are all too human and who are working toward an ultimate integration with a human realm” (1986: 188).

To this end, Fallon’s visual entrance into the film is striking. He is not coded as a figure on the fringes of society; rather, he is at the very heart of it.

His bar is introduced as a space of seduction and spectacle through a sugges-
tive dance that earned the film a Legion of Decency “B” (Weaver, 1993: 216).

The sequence opens with a medium shot of a female dancer, Lisa (Adele Mara), who lifts her head to gaze directly into the camera as she writhes sinu-ously in time to the music. Her dance quickens as we cut to a long shot of the bar and the camera tracks from side to side to reveal her predominantly male audience, stressing her status as an object of desire. At the music’s climactic crescendo, Lisa provocatively throws herself to her knees so that she is positioned gazing directly into the camera; there is no smile on her face—rather, something more aggressive and alluring. This is seduction as sexual threat.

Fallon’s bar is quickly established as a space of sexual excitement that stands in contrast to rest of the pious town.

Lisa is the vehicle through which the vampire is introduced. As the breathless dancer moves off-screen, the camera cuts to a betting table, and Lisa walks into the frame to stand next to a rather posh looking player. That the object of desire is drawn to him signals his importance and allure; in all other respects, Fallon seems perfectly ordinary. As he reaches for the dice on the table, however, the camera isolates his hand in close up, and his ring identifies him as the mysterious villain of the film’s first murder. Thus, a mere eight minutes into the movie, the murderer is revealed, but in a way that underscores his normalcy as opposed to his supernatural status. Suspense is not created through the question of the killer’s identity, but rather how the plot will play out from this point. Indeed, this early revelation allows the film to prioritize the vampire’s psychology over the need to solve the crimes themselves.

In their comprehensive study of vampire cinema, Alain Silver and James Ursini point out that The Vampire’s Ghost is one of the earliest movies to
explore the figure of the “sympathetic male vampire” (1997: 89).9 Fallon’s
vampirism is coded as both a compulsion and a curse. A once-noble figure honored by Queen Elizabeth for his service during the Spanish Armada, Fallon is punished with vampirism when he mysteriously causes the death of a woman. Now, he struggles to reconcile his righteous past with his monstrous present, lamenting “sometimes things drive a man, regardless of his

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will—things that may even tear his soul.” His rhetoric suggests a certain degree of reluctance, for Fallon is acutely aware of the suffering he engenders. As he explains to Roy, “Young people like you and Julie: I destroy them. I cannot die. I live on to destroy peace and happiness.” His attacks are also constructed in a unique way. Fallon explains that he doesn’t necessarily take life; “On the contrary, I bring life to my victims. [They] will rise from

[their] grave and walk again just as I did.” Thus, when he offers to turn Julie, he says, “We can visit worlds that no human eye has ever seen. Will you come with me, Julie?”

The film’s dialogue inflects Fallon’s vampirism somewhat ambiguously, and this idea is stylistically reinforced through the film’s shadow work which pulls viewers between the poles of sympathy and disdain. Fallon’s threatening presence is consistently signaled through shadows. Halfway through the film, he attacks both the sailor Barrett (Roy Barcroft) and Lisa after they cheat him in a game of cards; much like the first attack of the film, the vampire’s stalking of Barrett plays with the limits of the viewer’s vision. Barrett’s stalker is framed from the knees down; though his face remains hidden, we immediately recognize the calm, measured step and the pristine white dress-pants of Fallon, which stand in stark contrast to the nighttime cinematography.

When Barrett finds himself trapped in a dead end and turns to face his pursuer, we experience the vampire through the victim’s horrified face. The shadowing of the villain allows the camera to focus on the performative dimension of terror, emphasizing the vampire’s threat. Mirroring an earlier scene when Fallon forces a dagger from the sailor’s hand simply by gazing at him, Barrett drops his knife when the vampire’s shadow encroaches on his hand. The shadow of the vampire’s hand continues to climb over Barrett’s shoulders and towards his neck before enveloping his form. To signal his demise, the drums begin to beat portentously, and this sound acts as an aural bridge into the next scene where a knowing Lisa awaits her fate.

Where the attack on Barrett resists visually foregrounding the vampire, opting instead to suggest his threatening presence through stagey framing and shadows, the attack on Lisa does the opposite: the shadows of a window frame cut across her nervous form as she listens to the drums, gesturing towards Lisa’s entrapment. As she waits, her door opens as of its own accord, and a shadow is cast upon it. Rather than remain hidden, however, Fallon steps into the light. Despite any sympathy we might have for him, the film more openly acknowledges his villainous status here, and as he attacks Lisa, the camera shifts to the victim’s terrified face, thereby once more aligning the viewer with the gaze of the vampire. 10

If the attack on Lisa is meant to underscore Fallon’s treachery, the final moments of the film compensate by building sympathy for the vampire
through the use of shadows. Here, shadows code the villain as a victim. As

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Fallon bends his head to bite Julie’s invitingly outstretched neck, the shadow of a crucifix suddenly cuts across his face. Used earlier to suggest the vampire’s dominance, the shadows of this scene gesture towards his subjugation by an alternative authority. His horrified expression mirrors those of his prey, inflecting him as both vampire and victim. In part, it is this psychological and moral complexity that differentiates Fallon from so many of the cinematic vampires who precede him. Despite his monstrosity, he is nonetheless one of
the first sympathetic male vampires of cinema.11 Though Universal’s House of Dracula, released in the same year, features a sympathetic version of its titular character, the film’s very dependence on this classic cinematic monster belies a reliance on iconography already established in the studio’s earlier representations of the king-vampire. 12 In being free of the Count’s legacy,
however, Fallon marks a more striking departure from convention.

siDesTepping sTokeR: THe quesTion oF inFLuenCe

Silver and Ursini identify The Vampire’s Ghost as a film that in some ways bypasses the influence of Dracula, who haunted so many cinematic depictions of the vampire. By way of contrast, Selander’s movie looks to a “pre-Stoker conception for its inspiration” (1997: 91)—most notably, works such as James Malcolm Rymer’s serialized Victorian tale Varney the Vampire (1845–1847) and John Polidori’s novella The Vampyre (1819). These works went on to influence Stoker’s later articulation of the vampire; however, in returning to these earlier literary models, The Vampire’s Ghost effectively sidesteps the almost inescapable authority of Dracula, presenting viewers with a distinctly different model of vampirism.

In Varney, we find a sympathetic vampire—one who suffers from the curse of vampirism but is nonetheless a villain, much like Fallon. Some of the more curious plot points of The Vampire’s Ghost, however, seem to be directly influenced by Polidori’s novella.13 In this work, we find a parasitical relationship between the monster and his male victim. Lord Ruthvan, the vampire, mesmerizes Aubrey, who becomes physically sick with the knowledge of

Ruthvan’s true nature but can say nothing. In Polidori, we also find a scene of moonlight resurrection that is reminiscent of werewolf legends: when Ruthvan is fatally shot by robbers, his lifeless body is taken to the peak of a nearby mount where the moonlight revivifies him. These elements are central to Selander’s film and demonstrate a movement away from the cinematic conventions of vampire films of the time in favor of early literary intertexts.

In this respect, the sequence depicting Fallon’s moonlight resurrection is especially distinct; Silver and Ursini call it a “striking anomaly” in the pantheon of vampire films (1997: 91). In part, the scene demonstrates that

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even when the film addresses a horror convention as common as “the monster’s return,” it does so in an unexpected manner. Roy carries Fallon’s limp body up a mountain at sunset and gently lays him down, placing his small box of earth beneath the vampire’s head. Like the jungle excursion scene that precedes it, the mountaintop location of this sequence allows the film to transcend its back-lot limitations, providing the viewer with the sense of an expansive surrounding landscape. Fallon’s limp supine body almost feminizes him here, emphasizing the vampire’s vulnerability. 14 However, once the moonlight illuminates his still form in medium shot, we can see his chest dramatically begin to rise and fall as the music swells to emphasize the mysteriousness of his awakening. Like some paranormal Sleeping Beauty, he slowly opens his eyes, a smile lightly playing upon his lips. The sequence highlights the unnaturalness of this most human of vampires. In a film that stresses the monster’s ability to pass in normal society, this scene is pivotal
in affirming his abnormality.15

The film, then, owes something of its unique plotting to its choice of literary precursors, but cinema also plays a key role in terms of influence. Though it resists borrowing from Universal’s procession of monsters, The Vampire’s Ghost nonetheless pulls from other, perhaps less conventional, cinematic sources. Frank Strayer’s 1935 Poverty Row picture Condemned to Live is notable in that it features two elements central to Selander’s film: a sympathetic vampire figure and an African location. In keeping with Tzioumakis’s claim that independent films were not restricted by the rules of mainstream cinema, the movie is evidence that, fairly early on, Poverty Row pictures were experimenting within a genre that came to be defined by fairly static conventions. But Condemned also seems to provide the seed from which The Vampire’s Ghost germinates. Though the villain isn’t a vampire in the traditional sense of the word, and the film’s location shifts out of Africa and into a more conventional European setting not quite four minutes into the film, Condemned nonetheless provides a foundation for Selander’s later production. The Vampire’s Ghost borrows and expands upon those elements that make Strayer’s movie unique within the vampire sub-genre.

The African location of Selander’s picture is one of its defining characteristics. While The Vampire’s Ghost might not be the first film to associate vampirism with Africa, it is the first to provide a more sustained and meaningful exploration of the connection. In Condemned, Africa is briefly used as a backdrop that highlights the foreign origins of vampirism; in The Vampire’s Ghost, however, the African setting provides the film with the unique visual and atmospheric texture that is its hallmark. Polan outlines the standardized images commonly linked to the cinematic vampire of the 1940s: “the bat that turns into a count, the Gothic house at the edge of a cliff, the laboratory with its gleaming test tubes and crackling electric waves, etc.” (1986: 174). The

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unique setting of Selander’s film frees it from many of these iconographic expectations. 16

In The Vampire’s Ghost, then, we find a rethinking of the Gothic tradition. Fallon’s monstrosity resonates differently in this time of war. As Polan puts it, in the 1940s, there is “no longer the classic iconography, no longer the classic signification, but a domestication, a materialization of [horror’s]

effects in an everyday realm where it can seem to menace all the more intensely” (1986: 191). Like other films of the period, The Vampire’s Ghost approaches horror from this more rational perspective. The “domestication”

of the genre is evident in the film’s more realistic setting which, though unique in the context of the vampire sub-genre, is nonetheless representative
of the period’s “incessant desire to familiarize horror” (Polan, 1986: 174). 17

The opening image of the film is an apt symbol of the setting’s importance.

The Liberty Bell logo of Republic Pictures, which features the Georgian architecture of the bell-tower and steeple of Independence Hall, fades to black, and in its place appears an African man steadily beating a slit drum in the midst of the jungle. The image is all the more remarkable for its contrast to the studio’s insignia. After a moment, the film’s title is superimposed on the image, and foreboding orchestral music swells overtop the drum beat.

This blending of sound gestures towards the hybrid stance of the film, which is reinforced by the striking juxtaposition of the word “vampire” on the jungle setting. Thus, the expected Gothic imagery and vaguely European setting of more conventional vampire films is replaced with jungle mise-en-scene. At the time of the film’s release, jungle iconography would suggest an entirely different cinematic genre: the zombie film (most famously expressed in Jacques Tourneur’s 1943 I Walked with a Zombie) or the jungle-adventure picture (as seen in Republic’s 1941 Jungle Girl serial).18 The relocation of the vampire to the jungle signals the film’s unique reworking of the vampire myth. This novel combination of vampirism and voodoo allows the movie to challenge the “generic familiarity” that had largely come to define vampire
cinema (Polan, 1986: 174).

An AgiTAToR in AFRiCA: CoLoniALisTs AnD vAMpiRes

Neither dead nor alive, vampires are by their very nature boundary-breakers; thus, their narrative function is often disruptive. Like Ruthvan and Varney before him, Stoker’s Dracula is rendered monstrous through his ability to disturb social and sexual mores. Fallon is similarly anarchic—a role that is central to the film’s African location. His entrance into the plantation town of Bakunda marks the subversion of its rigid social structure, as evidenced by Fallon’s victimization of Roy, the conventional white hero. In part, this

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dynamic stems from the film’s source material: like Aubrey from Polidori’s The Vampyre, Roy is spellbound into silence, and his passivity is manifest in his bedridden paralysis. Infantilized and emasculated, Roy is depicted lying helplessly in bed as Fallon brings him baskets of food, ingratiating himself to Julie, while exulting in Roy’s weakness from his bedside.

From the moment he first appears on screen, driving into town in a vehicle branded with the plantation name, Roy is established as a representative of colonial control. In preying on Roy and enabling the defection of frightened plantation workers, Fallon undercuts the authority of colonial rule in the town. In fact, his presence consistently foregrounds the active role of Bakunda’s African population over its rather ineffective white occupants.

Where the white characters fail to see what is before them, the black characters both see and comprehend. This idea is literalized when Fallon is welcomed into the Vance household as a guest. At this point in the narrative, no one knows that a monster has been invited into their midst. At a crucial moment in the sequence, however, Fallon is served a cup of coffee by Simon (Martin Wilkins), a black servant. Looking at a mirror on the adjacent wall, Simon notices that Fallon casts no reflection. The shot is a wonderful detail: a close up of the mirror reveals coffee being poured into a cup held by an invisible hand. Fallon’s white suit can be seen in the chair, but the body that fills it is not. The vampire’s true nature is not seen by anyone but Simon, which positions the servant as the prospective hero of the film. Thus, Fallon’s very presence threatens to overturn racial distinctions held in place by the colonial system.

Accordingly, Simon hatches and then bravely executes a plan to dispose of the vampire; indeed, it is his successful attack that forces Fallon to carry out his moonlight resurrection. Where Roy is relegated to the position of passive victim, Simon is constructed as a brave man of action. This reversal is a central feature of the film: white characters are unwilling to even entertain the possibility of vampirism, which Julie calls “old medieval tommyrot,” allowing the blacks to play a central role in the vampire’s capture and disposal.

Though this dynamic would seem to negatively align the African characters with old world superstitions, as opposed to the so-called civilized reason of the colonists, it nonetheless allows them to take on a more active and heroic role in the movie.

The drums that dominate the film’s soundtrack are symptomatic of this active role. This diegetic sound penetrates the town of Bakunda and the jungle beyond it, but the aural motif is also a central narrative ploy. We learn that the drumming is an exotic mode of telegraphy, whereby the tribes communicate with one another across vast distances. Because this aural language is beyond the viewer’s understanding, the drumming adds to the film’s suspense by limiting the range of story information accessible to the audience.

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It is also, however, a language that evades control by the colonialists. The flow of valuable information through the jungle frontier cannot be disrupted or “hacked” by whites; this is a distinctly black mode of communication, and it is the vehicle through which the hunters—which include Simon—locate Fallon after he has escaped into the jungle with Julie.

In one shot, we see the pair trekking through the jungle. As they move off-screen, the camera tilts downwards to focus on a patch of reeds which part, revealing the faces of two tribesmen, who then slowly retreat back into the thicket. The traditional iconography of the “African threat,” stalking the white colonialists in the jungle, is subverted by allowing these men to communicate the monster’s location just in time to save the girl. The threatening jungle and its ominous drums are transformed into tools that facilitate the capture of the vampire and the subsequent liberation of his victim. As Rhona J. Berenstein notes, jungle-horror films of the thirties and 1940s “rely upon the immutability of racial difference—blacks and the jungle are threatening to and different from whites” (1996: 169). Such films reinforce racial difference by depicting black men and women as savage threats to white primacy
and power—“monstrous, backward, uncivilized, and untamed” (Berenstein,

1996: 163). To a certain degree, however, The Vampire’s Ghost resists this kind of racial stereotyping, but the film significantly suggests that it is the vampire’s subversive presence that contributes to this resistance. Under Fallon’s influence, the white hero is suppressed, the black servant is empowered, and the language of the African jungle proliferates.

If Fallon disrupts Bakunda’s system of colonial control, he is nonetheless a larger symbol of it. The vampire magnifies the colonial threat represented by the white plantation owners of the town, as evidenced through his back-story.

A faithful servant of Elizabeth I of England, Fallon is a son of the Empire.

His vampirism can therefore be read as an extension of his status as a con-queror and invader; as a monster, Fallon continues his project of conquest and domination. By locating the vampire tale in Africa, the film foregrounds these political undertones. Here, it is the white vampire—a creature of Europe—that poses the greatest threat in the jungle, and in subjugating Roy, he enslaves the enslaver.

In part, The Vampire’s Ghost is about possessed bodies: Fallon’s possession by his thirst, his possession of his victims, and the possession of Bakunda’s blacks by colonial forces—a fact that is emphasized by the ironic title of the plantation itself: Liberty Rubber Company. Fallon tells Roy that “the natives knew, as soon as they saw the first body of the first victim. They knew what creature it is that must have human blood to live.” In a plantation town subject to colonial rule, the African characters are already well acquainted with the dark side of human hunger. Fallon’s vampirism is a literalization of this colonial threat; however, because he feeds upon both blacks and colonialists,

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we can read him as an arch-colonialist, whose actions are meant to reflect upon the Vances. Thus, the film explores the occult economies that monsters inhabit—both vampires and colonialists.

In his well-known exploration of Stoker’s Dracula, Stephen D. Arata draws our attention to the intimate connection between imperialism and vampirism. Vampires, he claims, colonize the body; they appropriate and transform their victims, providing them with a new “racial” identity that marks them as Other. By extension, colonialism can be read as a form of symbolic vampirism: strong forces invade, possess, and exploit weaker nations, feeding upon their resources and consuming bodies through a system of forced labor. Both vampirism and colonialism, then, are predicated upon a system of slavery and servitude. This idea is reinforced via costume in The Vampire’s Ghost. Though Fallon wears white like the other colonialists of Bakunda, the outfit he wears the most often in the film is identical to that of the plantation owner, Tom Vance. He is visually aligned to the colonial project. Indeed, though Fallon’s image is not reflected in the mirror, it is symbolically reflected in Bakunda’s colonialists. Just as the plantation owners exploit and commodify the human body, so too does the vampire—a fact that is emphasized by his status as a bar-owner who feeds upon both workers and patrons alike. 19 Fallon and the Vance family are all monsters in a market where the
currency is human life.

As it moves towards the destruction of the vampire, however, the film also works towards the restoration of the so-called “normal” order which was so disrupted by the presence of the literal monster. Fallon demonstrates a wild disregard of Bakunda’s social codes. In a distinctly hierarchized environment, he feeds without discrimination: white, black, outsider, local, male, female, rich, poor—all are potential victims for our equal-opportunity predator.

Those distinctions that are so important in Bakunda collapse before the vampire. Thus, Fallon’s expulsion allows for the reinscription of social norms.

Roy can be reinstated as the heroic white patriarch, and the natives can return to work at the plantation. However, the film resists such an ending. Simon is not relegated to the periphery of the scene involving the vampire’s expulsion; rather, he occupies a prominent place, ensuring that another resurrection will be impossible.

It is through the united efforts of Roy and Simon that Fallon is finally disposed of. He is subdued by a cross, a native spear, and fire—tools that jointly represent colonial power and the Bakundan population. Simon’s continued prominence signals the enduring disruptive impact of the vampire; though Fallon might be gone, it would seem that the ghost of his influence lingers.

Indeed, the final image of the film returns viewers to the drum-playing native of the opening credit sequence, as though to reaffirm not only his importance and but also the authority of a mysterious language beyond the viewer’s

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comprehension. This exceptional B-movie doesn’t worry about breaking
from the conventions that might organize our understanding of vampire cinema; rather, The Vampire’s Ghost delights in thwarting our expectations with each beat of the drum. That it manages to do these things under the severe limitations of time, budget, and production constraints makes the film all the more remarkable. Nonetheless, in its retooling of the vampire sub-genre, we should read this film as an exemplar of horror production in a period characterized by cinematic experimentation. The refreshing approach of The Vampire’s Ghost is representative of a more general pattern in 1940s hor-
ror—one that is not defined by “imitation and corruption” (Jancovich, 2008:

17), but rather by negotiation and reconfiguration. In this respect, Fallon’s
ghost haunts not only Selander’s film, but 1940s horror itself.

noTes

1. At the time of its release, opinion on the film was split. A reviewer for Variety claimed that the players go “through their paces in stilted fashion.” He disparagingly summarized the production with the claim, “Script, settings and camerawork just so-so.” Conversely, the reviewer for the Daily Boston Globe claimed that, despite the outpouring of vampires from Hollywood in recent years, “John Abbott can hold his own with the most blood-curdling of the creatures,” and he goes on to praise the shadow-work at the end of the film.

2. The film is routinely overlooked in scholarship, often relegated to the periphery of discussions due to its B status. Even in book-length studies devoted to vampire cinema, The Vampire’s Ghost is rarely mentioned. For instance, such works as Jeffrey Weinstock’s The Vampire Film (2012), Stacey Abbott’s Celluloid Vampires (2007), Tim Kane’s The Changing Vampire of Film and Television (2006), and Michael J.

Murphy’s The Celluloid Vampires (1979) make no mention of the film. Tom Weaver discusses the movie in Poverty Row HORRORS! (1993); however, his approach is largely descriptive and dismissive. Though Alain Silver and James Ursini provide a more critical exploration of the movie in The Vampire Film (1997), only three pages are devoted to it. Other works mention The Vampire’s Ghost in passing: for example, Martin Riccardo’s multimedia vampire bibliography, Vampires Unearthed (1983); J. Gordon Melton’s encyclopedia of the undead, The Vampire Book (1998); and Gregory A. Waller’s study The Living and the Undead (1986). Sustained explorations of the film tend to be few and far between.

3. In his essay “Pale Shadows: Narrative Hierarchies in the Historiography of 1940s Horror,” Jancovich points out that even those monsters popularized by Universal in the 1940s—most notably the Mummy and the Wolf Man—are rarely recognized for their complexity. Rather than being read as reflective of a different set of cultural concerns, these creatures are more often denounced as pale imitations of those that dominated the thirties. For Jancovich, many of these widely derided horror films, such as The Mummy’s Hand (1940), The Mummy’s Curse (1944), and The Wolf Man (1941), belie the fundamental creative intertextuality of the period. Though The

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Vampire’s Ghost emerges from an entirely different kind of studio, the film is reflective of a similar experimentation, demonstrating that from Universal Studios to Poverty Row, we find in 1940s horror a sustained interest in the defiance of convention.

4. Yannis Tzioumakis notes that Republic was both “financially” and “artistically” the most successful “Poverty Row studio in the 1930s and 1940s” (2006: 63).

In part, this success stems from the structure of the company; Republic was the product of a 1935 merger between Consolidated Film Industries, which had been around since the late 1910s, and a series of small Poverty Row studios, which included Majestic, Mascot, and Monogram. This newly formed company “combined the individual strengths of the companies from which it was created and immediately found itself in pole position for dominating the low-end independent market” (Tzioumakis.

2006: 69).

5. Walter Kendrick’s evaluation of 1940s horror applies not only to those films rooted in Poverty Row studios, but also to bigger budget productions. Rick Worland makes this clear in his summary of the repetitive nature of 1940s horror: “Apart from the stylish films produced by Val Lewton at RKO from 1942 until 1946, films not so highly regarded in their day despite their current stature, 1940s horror cinema is commonly remembered for tired sequels to respected originals . . . numbing poverty row quickies . . . or mocking genre send-ups” (1997: 47).

6. In a 1976 interview, Brackett, noted the speed with which the film was made:

“I was three weeks on the script with another writer,” she says, “and they shot the film in ten days and that was two days over schedule. They fired the cameraman after the second day because he was taking too much time” (Swires, 1997: 16).

7. All quotations from Selander’s film unless otherwise indicated.

8. Polan points out that 1940s horror films often displace the source of the menace, “from physically traditional monsters to the id as initially uncontrollable force”

(1986: 186). Thus, he reads the 1945 film House of Horrors as “more a murder story with the motives of the deformed killer (Rondo Hatton) given coherent explanation”

(185). Similarly, in The Bowery at Midnight (1942), the real mystery of Lugosi’s central character is not that he can raise the dead, “but rather that he is a college professor by day and a master criminal at night” (Polan, 1986: 186–87). In The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), the monstrous force is revealed to be the result of a human plot, and in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), it is an all-too-human temptress who poses the greatest threat. These films are examples of the 1940s tendency to familiarize horror, of which The Vampire’s Ghost is part.

9. The gender distinction differentiates the film from Universal’s Dracula’s Daughter (1936), the studio’s sequel to Browning’s Dracula (1931). Here, Gloria Holden plays Countess Maria Zaleska, a sympathetic female vampire struggling to free herself from her father’s bloodthirsty legacy, which is framed as a hereditary disease.

10. Many of these elements—shadows that seem capable of harm, doors that open on their own to reveal shadowy figures, barriers that emphasize the theme of impris-onment—in fact recall another influential vampire film: F. W. Murnau’s silent horror classic, Nosferatu (1922). Based on Stoker’s Dracula, the film violated copyright laws and was subsequently destroyed; however, some prints survived. According to Tim Kane, “It managed to resurface in 1929, playing to audiences in New York and Detroit” and was eventually purchased by Universal, whose production team took it

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into account in the creation of their own 1931 film (2006: 10). It is quite possible, then, that the film went on to influence The Vampire’s Ghost, as many shots are reminiscent of the German classic. In fact, the scene in which the shadow of Fallon’s hand climbs over Barrett’s shoulder seems to be a direct visual quotation of Murnau. Other elements of The Vampire’s Ghost’s shadow work recall those films produced by Val Lewton for RKO in the 1940s, most notably Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943) .

11. Paul Landres’s 1957 film The Vampire presents an intriguing take on this theme; here, a kindly doctor accidentally takes a series of vampire blood pills created by a colleague. The pills force a nightly Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation on the doctor, turning him into a deeply reluctant killer. Thus, though sympathetic, the doctor is not technically a traditional vampire. The sympathetic male vampire is resurrected by television in the mid-sixties with Barnabas Collins in Dark Shadows, followed by the Blacula films in the early seventies.

12. The film itself represents “one of the last gasps of the Universal monster factory” (Silver and Ursini, 1997: 89), rallying together some of the studio’s most popular monsters. A sequel to Universal’s other “monster ensemble” films, House was preceded by Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) and House of Frankenstein (1944), and followed by Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), all of which depend in part on earlier iterations of the same monsters.

13. A wildly popular work at the time of its release, The Vampyre’s notoriety derives from its association with the rakish poet Byron, to whom the work was mistakenly attributed and upon whom Polidori modeled his brooding anti-hero. As Silver and Ursini note, “excepting his need for blood, a certain magnetism, and his revivi-fication powers Ruthven is a most ‘human’ vampire without many of the demonic qualities and potency of later figures” (1997: 38). Fallon is very much in keeping with this humanized characterization of the vampire.

14. Various elements in the film work to feminize Fallon, thereby separating him further from earlier iterations of the vampire, such as those by Lugosi and Carradine, which stress his powerful masculinity and overbearing sexuality. From his slight physical stature and his lavishly appointed apartments, to his association with jewelry and his role as a bedside nurse for the sick Roy, Fallon’s vampire represents a greater degree of gender fluidity—a characteristic that is suited to the vampire’s role as a boundary breaker. The name “Fallon” is Old Gaelic for “The Stranger,” but it is also largely considered a female name. Fallon also meets his end in a feminized temple of death which is presided over by the icon of a busty goddess.

15. This resurrection possibly gestures towards the film’s title, for indeed, the notion of ‘haunting’ is central to the movie’s focus on patterns of repetition. Fallon echoes his opening narration towards the end of the film when he tells Julie that

“The path of time is curved upon itself like a circle: without beginning, without end.

A man may follow that path forever if he chooses.” The Vampire’s Ghost is filled with references to the cyclical nature of Fallon’s long life, from his return to Africa to the repetitive nature of his destructive path. Indeed, even the film’s title hints at this doubling; the ghost of a vampire suggests a state of what we might call double death: just as Fallon dies only to rise when he first becomes a vampire, in the course of the

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film, he experiences yet another resurrection. Such repetitions add to the film’s sense of fatalism and thus to the vampire’s tragic stance.

16. Other horror films from the 1940s similarly attempted to revitalize the genre by relocating some of their monsters. Son of Dracula (1943), for instance, is located in the bayous of the Deep South, and Isle of the Dead (1945) takes place on a Grecian island. The Mummy also moved from Egypt to Massachusetts in The Mummy’s Tomb (1942) and The Mummy’s Ghost (1944), and to Louisiana in The Mummy’s Curse (1944).

17. Polan’s discussion of horror’s naturalization is very much in keeping with the tradition of the social fantastique—a phrase coined by the French writer Pierre Mac Orlan and used to describe the horrors rooted in modern life. In the 1940s, horror film begins to explore themes and spaces that are divorced from the traditional Gothic construction of the genre. Thus, under the influence of World War II, crumbling castles and cliff-side laboratories give way to the horror of more realistic hospitals and operating rooms, and supernatural beings are often supplanted by morally ambiguous humans. This “secularization of horror” (Polan, 1986: 159) can also be found in the traditions of the Grand-Guignol and Gothic realism, as outlined by Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare and Kristopher Woofter in this collection. These traditions signal a different approach to the Gothic, which is so often used to define horror.

18. Jungle-adventure movies rose to prominence in the thirties. As Berenstein notes, however, reviewers of the time practiced a “generic looseness,” whereby jungle-adventure and jungle-horror were considered in “cross-generic terms” (1996: 11). Thus, such varied films as Doctor X (Warner Bros., 1931), The Island of Lost Souls (Paramount, 1932), Tarzan the Ape Man (MGM, 1932), King Kong (RKO, 1933), and Nagana (Universal, 1933) were categorized as jungle pictures. The sheer number of such pictures from the thirties means that genre conventions would have been quite easily recognized by viewers in the 1940s.

19. The metaphor of vampiric capitalism predates Stoker’s Dracula as well. Marx claims that “capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour” (quoted in Moretti, 2005: 432). Working from this idea, Franco Moretti’s Marxist reading of the novel allies the vampire to the capitalist, noting that the vampire is driven by the demonic energies of accumulation; he consumes the lives of others so as to prolong his own. Thus, underlying the monster’s behaviour is the capitalist motive of personal acquisition at the cost of others. For Moretti, Dracula is a monopolist with aspires to subjugate the competition and “destroy all forms of economic independence” (2005: 433). Such a reading could be applied to Fallon, who seeks to destroy the hierarchy implicit to the plantation.

ReFeRenCes

Arata, Stephen D. 1990. “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization.” Victorian Studies. Summer: 627–34.

Berenstein, Rhona J. 1996. Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema. NY: Columbia University Press.

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Davis, Blair. 2012. The Battle for the Bs: 1950s Hollywood and the Rebirth of Low-Budget Cinema. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Higham, Charles and Joel Greenberg. 1968. Hollywood in the Forties. London: Zwemmer.

Jancovich, Mark. 2008. “Pale Shadows: Narrative Hierarchies in the Historiography of 1940s Horror.” Shifting Definitions of Genre. Eds. Lincoln Geraghty and Mark Jancovich. London: McFarland. 15–32.

Kane, Tim. 2006. The Changing Vampire of Film and Television: A Critical Study of the Growth of a Genre. London: McFarland.

Kendrick, Walter. 1991. The Thrill of Fear: 250 Years of Scary Entertainment. New York: Grove.

Marx, Karl. [1894] 1976. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume 1.

Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin.

Moretti, Franco. 2005. “Dialectic of Fear.” Signs Taken For Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms. Translated by Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller. New York: Verso. 83–108.

Polan, Dana. 2005. “Casablanca: The Limitless Potentials and the Potential Limits of Classical Hollywood Cinema.” Film Analysis: A Norton Reader. Eds. Jeffrey Geiger and R. L. Rutsky. New York: Norton. 362–79.

———. 1986. Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940–1950. New York: Columbia University Press.

Polidori, John. [1820] 2008. The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre. Eds.

Chris Baldick and Robert Morrison. New York: Oxford.

Rymer, James Malcolm. [1847] 1970. Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood.

Ed. Devendra P. Varma. New York: Arno.

Stoker, Bram. [1897] 1997. Dracula. Eds. Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal. New York: Norton.

Swires, Steve. 1997. “Leigh Brackett: Journeyman Plumber.” Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s. Ed. Patrick McGilligan. Berkeley: University of California Press. 15–26.

Silver, Alain and James Ursini. 1997. The Vampire Film from Nosferatu to Interview with the Vampire. 3rd ed. New York: Limelight.

Tzioumakis, Yannis. 2006. American Independent Cinema: An Introduction.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Weaver, Tom. 1993. Poverty Row HORRORS!: Monogram, PRC and Republic Horror Films of the Forties. London: McFarland.

Worland, Rick. 2007. The Horror Film: An Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

———. 1997. “OWI Meets the Monsters: Hollywood Horror Film and War Propaganda, 1942–1945.” Cinema Journal. 7.1 (Autumn): 47–65.

FiLMogRApHy

Condemned to Live. Directed by Frank R. Strayer. Invincible Pictures, 1935.

Narberth, PA: Alpha Video, 2004. DVD.

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Dracula. Directed by Tod Browning. Universal, 1931. Universal City, CA: Universal Home Video, 2006. DVD.

Dracula’s Daughter. Directed by Lambert Hillyer. Universal, 1936. [ Dracula: The Legacy Collection] Universal City, CA: Universal Home Video, 2004. DVD.

House of Dracula. Directed by Erle C. Kenton. Universal, 1945. [ Dracula: The Legacy Collection] Universal City, CA: Universal Home Video, 2004. DVD.

The Vampire’s Ghost. Directed by Lesley Selander. Republic, 1945. Netflix.

index
abandoned city, 14

The Ape Man (1943), 246–47, 276,

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein

280–82, 290n9

(1948), 22n12, 115, 149, 245,

Arletty, 190

133–34, 333n8, 334n12

Audience Research Institute (ARI), 310

Absalom, Absalom! (novel), 15–16, 97
avant-garde, xiv–xv, 43n8, 63n4,
acromegaly, 269–70, 295, 298–99,

89–104

303, 306

The Actor’s Studio (1949), 156

B-films, 290n8, 305–14
adaptation, 21n7, 22n11, 30, 32, 43n5,

Baron fantôme, Le (1943), 191

71, 82n10, 113, 114, 119, 121,

Bedlam (1946), xviii, 6, 21n4, 61, 68,

131–35, 142, 143n5, 143n8, 147–57,

219, 222n2, 248

158n4, 183, 193, 203, 211, 271

Bedlam ( Life Magazine photo
aesthetics of absence, 6
essay), 206
affect, 7, 9–13, 20, 73, 75, 77, 95

Benjamin, Walter, 12, 22n17, 68,
affect aesthetic, 17

73–74, 80, 82n12

Africa, 140, 229, 319–22, 327–32

Bhabha, Homi, 228
agency, 47, 53, 60–61, 89, 99, 102, 109,

The Black Cat (1934 film), xix, 147, 281

120, 122, 124, 203, 220, 235, 303

The Black Cat (1941 film), 148, 246
alterity, 91, 96–99

Bloch, Robert, 151

The Amazing Mr. X (1948), 49–50, 60
block-booking, 306

American Gothic, 4, 6, 12–13, 15–17,

Bluebeard (1944), xviii, xix, 9–10,

89, 125n16, 154

12, 28, 32, 35–36, 39, 41, 43n9,

American Occupation of Haiti,

63n3, 264

232, 235
body, 68, 75, 76, 77, 79, 92, 98–100,
anti-Semitism, 207, 262, 266

102–3, 130, 136–37, 139, 151–52,

Anti-Trust Campaign (1940–1949),

268–69, 295–306, 311–12, 326–27,

295–96, 303, 306, 314, 315n5

329–31. See also freak body

Antoine, LeRoy, 232

The Body Snatcher (1945), 6, 21n4,
ape film, 275–89

67–68, 70, 75, 77, 79–81, 246

339

340 Index

Bogdan, Robert, 300, 304, 311

Citizen Kane (1941), 15–16, 18–19, 58,

Bokor, 228, 232, 236n1

69, 81n5, 155, 269

Bonsal, Stephen, 226
city mysteries, 14

Bowery at Midnight (1942), 234, 247,
class, 32, 34, 77–79, 102, 165, 183, 187,

333n8

195, 296, 300, 305, 307–10, 313

The Bowery Boys, 109–10, 113, 115,
classical liberalism, 297, 302

117–18, 120, 124, 241

Classics Illustrated, 150
box office (box-office), 57, 111, 196,

Clouzot, Henri-Georges, 181, 186–88,

229, 235, 240, 243, 245, 286

193–200

Boys of the City (1940), 114–15, 124,

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, xvi, 17, 295,

125n8

299, 302

Brackett, Leigh, 321, 333n6
colonialism, 68, 137, 150, 225, 228–29,

Browning, Tod, 11, 29, 116, 131, 227,

232, 300, 304, 319, 321, 323,

246, 265, 272, 281, 304–5, 307,

328–31

311, 314n3, 323, 333n9
comédie rosse, 71–75

The Brute Man (1946), 149, 241, 269,
comedy-horror. See horror-comedy

273n1, 295, 297, 300–14, 315n12

Condemned to Live (1935), 327

Burking, 76

Conjure Wife (novel), 136

Continental Studios, 184–87

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Corbeau, Le (1943), 181, 193–97

(1919), 248

Corman, Roger, 147, 154, 157

Cable, George W., 225

The Creeper, xvii, 50, 149, 157n3, 242,

Calling Dr. Death (1943), 135–38,

269, 295–313, 315n12

143n7, 143n10
cultural economy, 295–313

Caribbean, 229, 232–35

Carné, Marcel, 183, 185, 187, 189

Daves, Delmer, 50, 249

Carroll, Noël, 13, 151, 216
de Havilland, Olivia, 204–5, 210, 218,

Casablanca (1942), 169, 171, 322–23

222n3

“A Cask of Amontillado” (1949
de Lorde, André, 67–68, 73–77, 81,
television), 156

193, 205

The Cat and the Canary (1927), 110,
de Maupassant, Guy, 71

125n7, 141, 148
de Poligny, Serge, 191

The Cat and the Canary (1939), 148, 286

Dead End (1937), 170

Cat People (1942), xiii, 5, 68–69, 81n5,

Dead End Kids, 113, 116–18, 121

90, 104, 143n7, 194, 222n2, 231,

Dead Man’s Eyes (1944), 138–39,

282, 288, 334

143n9

Chaney, Lon, Jr., xiii, 129, 135–42,

Dead Men Walk (1943), 261,

148, 161–62, 239, 241, 247, 302

267–68, 272

Chaney, Lon, 173, 312

Delannoy, Jean, 186, 191
child empowerment, 109

Dementia (1955), 50–51
children, 33, 74, 109–12, 118, 120–27,

Deren, Maya, 90, 93–95

151, 194–95, 242, 244, 278, 286,

Deutsch, Albert, 206

310–11

The Devil Bat (1940), 23, 246, 264,

Chute de la maison Usher, La

270–71

(1928), 155

The Devil’s Daughter (1939), 230

Index

341
disability, 28, 33, 38, 41, 54–55, 79,
fantastique-uncanny, 182, 188–89

89, 98–99, 105n7, 138, 297, 300–5,

Faulkner, William, 15–16, 97

309–13
female gaze, 50–51, 53, 56–59, 61
disfigurement, xvii, 269, 299–306, 313
feminism, 47, 50, 54–55, 57, 59–61,
documentary, 5, 8, 13, 15–20, 21n8,

124n2, 211–14, 299, 304

71, 81n2, 110, 119, 208, 322
film noir, xi, xv–xx, 3, 5–6, 10–20,
domestic(ity), 6, 13, 14, 17, 37–38, 41,

22n15, 30–31, 37–41, 62nn1–2,

51–52, 89, 99, 102–3, 113, 123–24,

89, 104, 109–10, 118–24, 125n15,

129–39, 167, 204, 215, 217, 220,

126n19, 132, 153, 183, 186, 195,

323, 328

198n2, 252n41, 261, 282–83, 286–88
double-billing, 246, 305–6, 310
first-person camera, 27, 30, 34–42,

Dracula (1931 film), xii, 11, 29, 131,

43nn4–5, 97, 198n3. See also

142, 227, 246, 248, 250, 251n25,

POV camera

265, 267–68, 277–79, 323, 333n9

The Flying Serpent (1946), 241, 248,

Dracula (novel), 8, 243, 331, 333n10,

261, 266, 270–72

335n19

The Following (2013 television series),

Dracula (character), xi, 19, 151, 162,

147, 157

244, 246, 267, 288, 320, 326, 328

France, 181–196

Dracula’s Daughter (1936), 50, 323,

Frankenstein (1931 film), 29, 142, 163,

333n9

188, 227, 246, 250, 265, 277, 286,

Dragonwyck (1946), 222n5, 248

299, 305

Driscoll, Bobby, 121, 123

Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman

Dupin, C. Auguste, 149, 152–53

(1943), 149, 247, 334n12

Duvivier, Julien, 183, 186

Frankenstein monster, 148, 162,

298, 302

Eagle-Lion Films, 50, 245, 249
freak body, 295, 297, 301, 304. See

East End Kids, 109–10, 117
also body

East Side Kids, 109–24, 125n6
freakery, 296–97, 304, 307
electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), 210

Freaks (1932), 116, 304–11, 314n3

Elliott, Kamilla, 150
freakshows, 301
eugenics, 262, 270–71, 304, 313

Fresnay, Pierre, 184–96
excess, xiii, xvi, 7, 9–20, 22n15, 51,

Freud, Sigmund, 15, 204–5, 211–12,

67, 69, 80, 95, 98, 136, 139, 205

218, 220

Frozen Ghost (1945), 139

The Face of Marble (1946), 49, 225,

Frye, Dwight, 267

234, 241

The Fall of the House of Usher (1949

Garland Thomson, Rosemarie, 300–2
film), 153, 157

Gaslight (1944), 6, 14, 52, 89, 213–14,
fantastic-marvelous, 7. See also

222n5
fantastique-marvelous

Gemora, Charles, 283–85, 290n14
fantastique, 71, 181, 182, 190–91,

Germany, 119, 184, 197, 241, 262,

195, 198

270–71, 310
fantastique-marvelous, 185–86, 192

The Ghost Breakers (1940), 148, 230
fantastique-social, 182–83, 187–88,

Ghost of Frankenstein (Kenton

335n17

1942), 246

342 Index

Ghosts on the Loose (1943), 114,

Hollywood Anti-Trust Act, 295–96,

116–17, 246–47

303, 306, 314–15

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 89, 215,

Holocaust, 68, 119, 235, 262–63, 270

217, 220
hooks, bell, 233

Gorcey, Leo, 113, 115, 117
horror radio, xix, 114, 131–34, 142

Gothic, xiii, xv–xvii, 3–20, 21nn7–8,
horror-comedy (comedy-horror), 109,

22nn20–21, 27, 30, 47–48, 53, 69,

115, 118, 124, 148, 152, 157, 226,

72, 82n7, 89, 96–97, 114, 125n16,

231, 234, 243, 245, 288, 289n7

131–141, 147–51, 154, 162–63,
horror-noir, xix, 110, 118–124

169, 172, 182, 188, 198n2, 213–15,

House of Dracula (1945), xii, 9, 11–12,

218, 227, 288, 319, 327–28,

22n13, 104, 109, 148, 241–42,

335n17

323, 326

Gothic literature, 15, 82n7, 131, 188

House of Frankenstein (1944), 22n12,

Gothic realism, 3–20, 82n12, 198n2,

104, 148–49, 251n25, 264, 334n12

335n17. See also realism

House of Horrors (1946), 149, 241,

Gothic romance, 213

295, 296, 297, 300, 304–5, 333n8
gothumentary, 21n8
hybridity, xii, xvi–xvii, xix, 14, 20,

Grand-Guignol, 22n17, 67–81, 82n11,

89–90, 104, 105n2, 109–10, 120,

182–83, 192–98, 205, 335n17

147–57, 235, 264, 277, 298, 319,

Grand-Guignol Theatre, 67, 69, 82n9

322, 328
grand-guignolesque, 67, 69, 80–81
hydrotherapy, 219

Great Depression, 51, 227
hypermediation, 8, 9, 11

Gross, Jack, 67–81, 82n6

I Walked with a Zombie (1943), 21n4,

Haiti, 225–35

70, 80, 104, 150, 193, 228, 231–33,

Halloween (1978), 27–30, 34–35

236, 328, 334n10

Halperin, Victor, xii, 226–31
identity, 32–38, 53–54, 120, 124,

Hangover Square (1945), xviii, 9–12,

284–85, 331

28, 32–36, 40–41, 63n3, 150, 198n3

Inner Sanctum Mysteries (film),

Harlem on the Prairie (1937), 262

129, 132

Hatton, Rondo, xvii, 149, 157n3, 269,

Inner Sanctum Mysteries (novels),

295–314, 333n8

129, 132

Haunted Spooks (1920), 115, 125n7

Inner Sanctum Mysteries (radio), 129,

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 15

132–33

Hays Code, 110–11, 118, 262, 279
interior monologue, 15, 134, 204

Hearn, Lafcadio, 226

Island of Lost Souls (1932), 265,

Herbert, Hugh, 152

276–77, 335n18

The Hermit’s Cave (radio), 132

Isle of the Dead (1945), 6, 21n4, 234,

Hitchcock, Alfred, xiv, 4, 10, 19, 27,

335n16

30, 43n5, 89, 104, 114, 120–21,

125n8, 125n13, 134, 143n4, 150,

Jack the Ripper, 28, 32–33

153, 158n6, 222n5, 248–49

Jane Eyre (novel), 97, 231–32

Hitler – Beast of Berlin (1939),

Jetztzeit (baroque allegory), 74

262–63, 266

Jews, 184, 191, 262–65, 270

Hitler, Adolf, 119, 190, 263, 265–66

Johnson, Raymond, 133–34, 143n4

Index

343

Jour se lève, Le (1939), 186, 189

The Little Tough Guys, 113, 117
jungle horror film, 261, 277–80, 300,

Litvak, Anatole, 17, 23n23, 203–21, 249

321, 327–30, 335n18

The Locket (1946), 10, 15, 222n2

The Lodger (1944), 28, 31–36, 40–41,

Karloff, Boris, xvi, 6, 68–70, 75,

43n5, 63n3, 198n3

115, 155, 161–63, 172, 219, 239,

Lot in Sodom (1933), 97

243–44, 247–48, 276, 281, 287,

Loup des Malveneur, Le (1943), 181,

289n7, 300–2, 315n7

188, 192, 195, 197

Kenton, Erle C., xii, 9, 11, 22n12, 109,

Luce, Henry, 18

148–49, 241, 247, 264–65, 276, 323

Lugosi, Bela, xii–xiii, xvi, 11, 76, 114,

Keynesian model, 296, 302–3, 307, 314

116, 148, 156, 161, 172, 233–34,

King Kong (1933), 50, 231, 276–80,

239–40, 243–47, 268–71, 276–82,

284, 287–88, 289n5, 335n18

288, 289n7, 290n9, 315n7, 319,

King of the Zombies (1941), 125n9,

323, 333n8, 334n14

225, 231, 236

King, Henry, 298–99, 301

Mad Love (1935), 50, 139, 140, 268

Kracauer, Siegfried, 14, 17–18, 22n19,

The Mad Monster (1942), 261, 264–72

119, 125n16, 161–63
madness, xvii, 5, 14, 19, 29, 52, 75,

117–18, 125n12, 132–36, 140, 154,

L’Assassin habite au 21 (1942), 181,

156, 162, 181–98, 203–5, 209, 212,

186–87, 197

214–20, 233–34, 239, 262, 264,

L’Éternel retour (1943), 191

268–72, 277–78, 299

L’Herbier, Marcel, 191

The Magic Island (book), 225–27

Landers, Lew, xii–xiii, 120, 144n11,

Main du diable, La (1942), 181,

147, 241, 247, 249, 281, 323

191–93, 197

Lang, Fritz, 50–51, 120, 222n5
male killers, 30–31, 39, 41

Larsen, Robin and Beth Haller, 304,

The Maltese Falcon (1941), 119, 171

311–12, 314n3

March of Time (1935–1951
latch-key kids, 110, 118, 124n2
newsreels), 18

Le Borg, Reginald, xii, 135–38, 280

Mark of the Vampire (1935), 272, 281

Leitch, Thomas, 150

Marx, Karl, 312, 335n19

The Leopard Man (1943), 21n3, 28–33,

Marxism, 312, 335n19

36–41, 42n1, 61, 121, 150, 152,
masculinity, 27, 29, 31, 37–39, 41–42,

193, 282

43n10, 47, 50, 54–55, 59, 89, 169,

Lewton, Val, xiii, xv, 5–6, 21n4, 42n2,

214, 334n14

47–49, 61, 67–81, 82n6, 104, 118,
matinee, 110–12, 124, 125n5,

150, 186, 193, 219, 231–35, 248,

290n9, 310

267, 276, 288, 289n1, 333n5, 334n10

Maury, Max, 72–75

Lewtonesque, 67–81

The Maze (1953), 50, 54, 57–61
liberal individualism, 296–97, 302,

McGinnis, Muggs, 114–16

311, 313

McGuire, Dorothy, 29, 54, 63n4,

Life Magazine, 18–19, 205, 207,

89–90, 93, 98–101

209, 216

Méliès, Georges, 182–83

Lights Out! (radio), 131–33, 156
melodrama, xviii, 5, 8, 14, 17–18,
liminality, 21, 74, 93–96, 130

56, 68, 71–75, 79–81, 90–92, 104,

344 Index

105n8, 129, 183, 186, 208, 210,

Naish, J. Carrol, 269

248, 287, 308, 315n12

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

Melville, Herman, 14–16
of Nantucket (1837 novel), 15–16,

Menzies, William Cameron, 50, 54, 57,

22n21, 150

59, 281
narrative prosthesis, 301–2, 307, 312

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), 90,
naturalism, 71–76, 205

93–95

Nazi, xiii, 116–19, 125n12, 161, 168,

Méténier, Oscar, 71–75, 82n10

181–97, 209, 225, 231, 235, 240,

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM),

247–48, 262–65, 268, 270–71

22n11, 30, 113, 155, 246, 268, 305,

Nazi scientists, 114, 261, 264–65, 268,

309, 311, 335n18

270–72

Mitchell, David and Sharon L. Snyder,
neoliberalism, 296–97, 302–3,

301–4

307–8, 313

Moby-Dick (novel), 15
neorealism, 5, 8, 14, 17, 119. See
mockumentary, 18, 21n7
also Gothic realism; poetic
modernism, 8, 15, 47–51, 59–62, 68,
realism; realism

71–74, 78–81, 95–97, 102, 149–50,

Neufeld, Sigmund, 262–63

208, 210, 214, 227, 278–282, 288,

Newfield, Sam, xvi–xvii, 109, 241,

289n5, 307, 335n17

261–73, 299

Monogram Pictures, xvi–xvii, 57,

Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948), 4,

113–117, 125n6, 227, 231, 234,

161, 165, 167

239, 241, 245, 248, 251n3, 276,

Night of the Living Dead (1968), 236

280–81, 299, 309, 315n4, 333n4

Nuit fantastique, La (1942), 190–91

The Monster and the Girl (1941), 264,

Nuremberg trials, 118–19, 247–48,

276–77, 280, 282–89, 290n11

270, 272

Monster Kids, 110

The Monster Maker (1944), 261,

O’Callaghan, Evelyn, 228

268–72, 299

Occupation (France), 181–91, 197–98
monstrous-masculine, 47, 52, 55, 59,

Old Dark House films, 19, 114–15,

62n2

118, 125n7, 140–41, 148, 153–54,

Montmartre, 71–72, 75

157, 277

Motion Picture Producers and

The Old Dark House (1932), 125n7, 148

Distributors Association (MPPDA),

Orlan, Pierre Mac, 182, 335n17

110, 311

Orr, John, 150

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932),

Ossessione (1943), 14, 119

147, 247, 276–80, 284, 286–87

Ouanga (1936), 230

Muse, Clarence, 228

Ouspenskaya, Marie, 152–53

Musuruca, Nicholas, 104

My Son the Hero (1943), 264

Paramount Pictures, 235, 245, 249,
mystery, xi, xv, xx, 3, 13, 15–16, 19–20,

276, 280, 282–86, 305, 309,

31, 50, 113–14, 132, 135, 138–39,

311, 335

147–57, 158n6, 186, 228, 249,
paranoid woman’s (women’s) film,

252n41, 271, 281, 284–86, 323, 333n8
xi, xv–xvii, 3–6, 11–14, 17, 20,

The Mystery of Marie Roget (1942),

52–56, 89, 94, 136, 141, 162–63,

148, 152–53

169, 172, 213–16. See also woman’s

Myton, Fred, 267

(women’s) film

Index

345

Parker, John J., 51
postwar horror, 47–62

The Pearl of Death (1944), 269,

POV camera, 30, 35–37, 41–43,

299–300, 308

62n3, 97, 136. See also first-

Peeping Tom (1960), 27, 29, 31, 41–42,
person camera; point of view

43n6, 97, 187

(point-of-view)

Pépé le Moko (1937), 183

Poverty Row studios, xvi–xi, 3, 57,
performance, xiii, xvii, 11–12, 22n16,

67, 109–14, 125n9, 227, 237–40,

35, 41, 63n4, 90, 93, 99–101, 140,

261–71, 273n1, 276–77, 280–81,

166, 169, 172–74, 269, 280–84, 308

290n8, 299, 304–13, 315n7, 320,

Phantom Lady (1944), xv, 4–5, 22n15,

327, 332n2, 333n4

30, 91, 121

Producers Releasing Corporation
pick-up film, 295, 301, 305, 313–14

(PRC), xvi–xvii, xix, 239, 241,

Pierce, Jack, 299

245–46, 261–70, 281, 295, 303,

Pillow of Death (1945), 141

305, 308–9, 313, 315n9

Poe, Edgar Allan, as matrix figure,
proto-slasher, 27, 31, 63n3. See also

149–50
slasher

Poe, Edgar Allan, tales: “The

Psycho (1960), 27–31, 34, 41–42,

Assignation” (1834), 151; “Berenice”

43n7, 97

(1835), 151; “The Fall of the House
psychoanalysis, 13, 20, 210–12,
of Usher” (1839), 4, 19, 148–51,

218, 303

154, 157n1; “Ligeia” (1838), 151;
psychotherapy, 214, 221

“The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842),

150; “The Predicament” (aka, “The

Quai des brumes, Le (1938), 183,

Scythe of Time”) (1838), 152; “The

186, 189

Purloined Letter” (1844), 149, 153;

“The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), 147;
race, 114, 207, 228–30, 263, 289n5,

“The Unparalleled Adventure of One

301, 308, 314, 329–31

Hans Pfall” (1835), 150; Tales of the
radio, 18, 114, 116, 120, 125n11,

Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), 151

129–42, 143n2, 147, 155–56,
poetic realism, xv, 5, 9, 15, 17, 183,

271, 285

186–87, 189, 195, 198n2. See

Rathbone, Basil, 152
also realism

The Raven (1935), xii, 147–48, 247,
point of view (point-of-view), 33, 36,

268, 281

47, 51, 52, 56, 59, 60, 90, 97–98,

The Raven (2012), 147

101, 105n7, 187, 204, 207– 209,

Realart Pictures, Inc., 246

214, 217, 218, 220, 221. See also
realism, xv, 3–9, 13–20, 21n7, 52,
first-person camera; POV camera

73, 110, 113, 119, 125n16, 198,

Polan, Dana, xviii, 13–14, 17, 37,

322–23. See also Gothic realism;

322–24, 327–28, 333n8, 335n17
neorealism; poetic realism
post–World War II era, xv, 22n19, 31,

Rebecca (1940), 10, 13, 19, 89, 104,

38, 47–62, 75, 102, 120, 124, 156,

114, 125n8, 213, 222n5

203, 207, 239–50

The Red House (1947), 5, 49–50, 60,

The Postman Always Rings Twice

161, 167, 249

(1946), 119
reform, 17, 18, 111–14, 210

The Postman Always Rings Twice

Reid, Captain Mayne, 226

(novel), 14
reissues, 240, 245–47, 250, 279, 314n3

346 Index

Republic Pictures, xvi–xvii, 227, 241,

Social Darwinism, 277–78, 289n4

299, 315n4, 320, 328, 333n4

Social Problem Picture, 207–10

The Return of the Vampire (1944),

Son of Dracula (1943), xii, 81n4, 323,
xi–xvi, 143n11, 323

335n16

Revolt of the Zombies (1936), 229,

Son of Frankenstein (1939), xii, 22n13,

231, 236

149, 246

RKO Radio Pictures, xvi, 5, 47–50,

The Spider Woman Strikes Back

54, 61, 67–70, 81, 82n14, 124n1,

(1946), 300, 308

143n7, 150, 231–34, 245, 248, 250,

The Spiral Staircase (1945), xv, xvii,

267, 269, 288, 305, 309, 314n4,

14, 22n15, 28, 30–35, 39, 41,

333n5, 334n10

43nn8–9, 49, 53, 54–61, 63n2,

Rochemont, Louis de, 5, 18, 20, 23n24

89–105, 222n5, 248

Spook Busters (1946), 117–18, 120, 241
safety, 20, 36, 52–53, 110–11, 122–24,

Strange Confession (1945), 140–41

262, 322

Strange, Glenn, 148, 264

Sarris, Andrew, 264, 276

Stranger on the Third Floor

Schatz, Thomas, 239–40, 245, 305–13

(1940), 119

Schüfftan, Eugen, 263
studio system, 281, 295, 300, 302,
science fiction, 49, 62n1, 132, 150,

305–7, 313, 320

182, 235, 250, 288, 303, 321
subjectivity, 3, 6–7, 12, 16–17, 19,

The Sea Bat (1930), 227, 229

22n15, 47, 56, 60, 71, 90, 97, 99,

Seabrook, William, 225–27

120, 133–36, 140, 162, 195, 214,

Secret Beyond the Door (1947), 49,

296–97, 300, 303, 307

51–52, 63n2, 222n5
surrealism, xv, 9, 36, 51, 69, 90–96,

Seiderman, Maurice, 269–70

182, 195, 301

Selznick, David O., 231

Suspense (radio), 132–33, 143n5

The Seventh Victim (1943), 4, 21n4,

Suspense! (television), 156

70, 267

Système du docteur Goudron et du
sexual violence, 27, 29, 31, 37–42
professeur Plume, Le (1913), 183,

Shadow of a Doubt (1943), 4, 14,

193–94

120, 222n5

The Shame of the States, 206
tableau, tableau vivant, 99

Sherlock Holmes, 132, 148–49, 152,

The Tell-Tale Heart (1941 film),

157, 252n41, 299–300

155–57
sideshow (attractions), xv, 67, 69,

“The Tell–Tale Heart” (1949, The

82n13, 91, 278, 300, 307, 311

Actor’s Studio), 156
silent film, xiv, 22n15, 56, 63n4,

The Terror of Tiny Town (1938),

90–93, 98–100, 103, 125n3, 141,

262, 267

183, 193, 226–27, 277

Terwilliger, George, 230

Siodmak, Robert, xii, xv, xvii, 4, 21n3,

Tetzlaff, Ted, 109–10, 121

22n15, 28, 30, 50, 53–59, 81n4,

The Thing from Another World (1951),

89–105, 121, 169, 222n2, 248, 323

49, 250

Sitney, P. Adams, 90, 93, 95–96

Thompson, G. R., 151–52
slasher, xv, xvii, 28–31, 37, 41–42, 49,

Todorov, Tzvetan, 7, 21n6, 71,

61, 275. See also proto-slasher

182, 198

Index

347

Tomorrow We Live (1942), 264

Voodoo Man (1944), 234, 246, 290n7

Tourneur, Jacques, xiii, 5, 21n4, 28, 69,

Vorhaus, Bernard, 50, 249

80, 121, 143n7, 150, 222n2, 222n5,
voyeurism, 29, 31, 34, 37–42, 56–57,

231, 282, 288, 328

67–71, 90–91, 97–98

Tourneur, Maurice, 181, 183, 191–94
trance film, 95–96

The War of the Worlds (radio), 18
transfusions, 265, 267, 323

Ward, Mary Jane, 203–16, 220
trauma, xiv, xvi–xvii, 4–18, 33, 38, 49,

Warner Bros., 113, 169, 173, 241, 245,

73–80, 89, 101, 119–24, 133, 138,

249, 281, 311, 335n18

142, 185, 303
wartime youth culture, xvii, 109

20th Century Fox, 148, 150, 157n2,

Weird Woman (1944), 136–38, 143n10

205, 209, 245, 248, 280, 309

Welles, Orson, 15–19, 23n26, 58, 82n5,

144, 155, 168, 269

Ulmer, Edgar G., xvi, xviii–xix, 9–10,

Weston, Garnett, 227

28, 62n3, 147, 151, 261–66, 281, 342

White Zombie (1932), xii, 226–33,

Un chien Andalou (1929), 90, 98–99

236, 342
uncanny, xvi, 4, 6, 9–10, 12, 17,

The Window (1949), 109–10, 121–24

20n2, 21n6, 79, 130–31, 136–37,

Wisbar, Frank, 4, 241, 263

143nn3–4, 147, 151, 155, 182–83,

The Witch’s Tale (radio), 131–34

188–89, 192, 195, 266, 269, 284
witness, 4, 7–8, 15–16, 54, 59–60, 77,

The Undying Monster (1942), 150

97–98, 109, 120, 122–23, 142n1,

Universal Studios, xi–xiii, xix, 3–6,

156, 205

22n13, 47–50, 67–68, 81nn2–3,

The Wolf Man (1941), xii–xiii, 68–69,

82n6, 109–10, 120, 124, 129, 131,

149, 242, 246, 264, 267, 282,

135, 140–42, 144n11, 147–156,

287, 302

157n2, 162, 188–89, 227, 239–49,
woman’s (women’s) film, xx, 52, 60,

250n1, 264–72, 273n1, 275, 280–81,

62, 104, 207, 216, 218. See also

289nn1–2, 290n11, 295–311, 314n2,
paranoid woman’s (women’s) film

315n4, 323, 326–27, 332–35

Woolrich, Cornell, 121–23

Universal-International Pictures,

World War II, xii–xiii, xv, xvii, 7, 9,

243–44, 297, 308–9, 315n8

14, 30–31, 42, 47–51, 60–61, 62n1,

68, 75, 77, 81, 89, 91, 102, 116,
vampire, xiii–xiv, 161, 169, 171, 267,

118, 120, 125n14, 131–33, 137–39,

278, 319–335

148, 156, 203, 234, 239–58, 261–64,

“The Vampyre” (1819, story), 326,

270–73, 300, 323, 335n17

329, 334n13
vertical alterity, 89, 91, 97, 99

Yarborough, Jean, 231
veterans, 30, 37–38, 120, 125n14, 303

“The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892 story),

Vichy, 183–87, 191–97

89, 215, 220

Visiteurs du soir, Les (1942), 185,

189–92, 197

Zinn, Howard, 297

Vodou (Voodoo), 80, 136–37, 225–34,
zombie, xvii, 225–36, 328

236n1, 247, 287, 290n7, 321, 328

Zombies on Broadway (1945), 233
voice-over, 18, 47, 51–52, 117, 130,

Zucco, George, xvi, 264–71,

135–41, 217, 221

285–86, 315n7

About the editors and Contributors

AbouT THe eDiToRs

Mario DeGiglio-bellemare teaches courses on genre cinema and monster ethics in the Humanities Department of John Abbott College, in Montréal.

He completed his PhD at the University of Toronto, working in the area of postcolonial studies and religion. He is presently undertaking research on the history of the Parisian Grand-Guignol Theatre and its impact on cinematic horror in a projected book, entitled Sinister Tableaux: Grand-Guignol Cinema. He recently published an article on the Grand-Guignol and cinema in the journal, Horror Studies (2014, 5 [1]). He is an occasional writer for the Canadian horror genre magazine Rue-Morgue.

Charlie ellbé completed her Master’s degree in Film Studies at Concordia University in the fall of 2011, working on art direction in 1930s Universal Horror. She is now coordinator of the Moving Image at Concordia University, while also pursuing a Masters in Library and Information Studies at McGill University. Charlie has also taught courses on horror cinema at Miskatonic Institute in Montreal. In 2012, she served on the jury of the Montreal Underground Film Festival. Charlie presents at conferences annually, and has a forthcoming piece in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts (2015).

Kristopher woofter teaches courses on horror cinema and the Gothic in the English Department of Dawson College in Montréal and is a PhD can-didate in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University. He has published on the Gothic documentary (2012, Textus: English Studies in Italy.

25 [3]) and on The Cabin in the Woods in Reading Joss Whedon (Syracuse University Press, May 2014). He is coeditor (with Jasie Stokes) of, and a 349

350

About the Editors and Contributors
contributor to, “We Are Not Who We Are”: Critical Reflections on The Cabin in the Woods, a special double-issue of the peer-reviewed online journal, Slayage (2013–2014, 10.2/11.1 [36–37]). He is cochair of the Horror Area of the PCA/ACA and a codirector of the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies in Montréal.

AbouT THe ConTRibuToRs

Paul Corupe programs Toronto’s ongoing horror lecture series, The Black Museum, and is the managing editor for cult film book publisher Spectacular Optical. The founder of genre film website Canuxploitation.com, he is also a regular columnist and contributor to Rue Morgue magazine, and has written for The Toronto Star, Take One Film and Television in Canada, This Magazine, and Cinema Sewer, among others. He has appeared in numerous DVD extras as well as the documentary Nightmare in Canada: Canadian Horror on Film.

blair Davis is assistant professor of media and cinema studies in the College of Communication at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of The Battle for the Bs: 1950s Hollywood and the Rebirth of Low-Budget Cinema (2012), and has written numerous articles on B-movies and horror cinema for the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television and such anthologies as Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear (2004) and American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium (2010).

Louise Fenton is a senior lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton, U.K., where she teaches contextual studies and illustration within the Faculty of Arts. Louise’s research interests lie in the representations of marginalized cultures, especially Voodoo and Witchcraft. She completed her PhD at the University of Warwick, U.K., where her thesis focussed on the representations of Haitian Vodou throughout cultural production in Britain and America since 1850. Louise is currently working on a number of publications relating to Voodoo and Witchcraft as well as continuing with her visual practice.

anne Golden is on the Creative Arts faculty of John Abbott College in Montréal, Québec, and is Artistic Director of Groupe Intervention Video, an artist-run distribution, exhibition, and production center for videos directed by women. She is an independent curator and writer whose programs include Horizontal Holds/Vertical Views: Recent Canadian Art Video (Musée National du Québec, 2001) and Seuils/Thresholds (Edges Festival, Victoria, BC, 2006). She has also curated programs for Vtape (Toronto) and

About the Editors and Contributors

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Centre for Art Tapes (Halifax). Golden has made twelve videos since 1991.

Among these are Fat Chance (1994), Big Girl Town (1998), Somme (2005), and From the Archives of Vidéo Populaire (2007).

David Hanley has a BFA and MA in Film Studies from Concordia University and is currently pursuing a PhD in Canadian Studies at Carleton University.

He has published pieces in Offscreen, Isis, The Projector, and Nuacht, and contributed entries to The Historical Dictionary of South American Cinema by Dr. Peter H. Rist (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). Since 2011, he has been a programmer for Cine Gael of Montreal’s annual series of contemporary Irish films.

Karen Herland is an author, independent researcher, and educator, currently in sexuality studies at Concordia University’s Simone de Beauvoir Institute.

Her research interests include cultural studies, urban space, sexuality studies, media, and community mobilization. She is fascinated by how institutional regulations work across disciplines to construct social and cultural outsiders.

Her lectures at Montréal’s Miskatonic Institute in Horror Studies demonstrate how these outsiders are represented and reflected in horror films and other forms of popular culture.

Mark Jancovich came to the University of East Anglia in September 2004.

He studied at Keele University, the University of Kent at Canterbury, and Indiana University. He has taught at the Universities of Keele, Manchester, and Nottingham, where he founded the Institute of Film Studies. He is the coeditor of two book series; a founding member of Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies; a member of several editorial and editorial advisory boards; and has been a member of research panel 2 of the AHRB, an subpanel of RAE 2008, and a member of the Executive of the Media, Communication
and Cultural Studies Association. He has written extensively on horror and related topics.

Kier-La Janisse is a film programmer and the author of House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012) and A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007). She also has written for Incite: Journal of Experimental Media, Filmmaker, Shindig! , Rue Morgue, and Fangoria magazines, and has contributed to The Scarecrow Movie Guide (2004) and Destroy All Movies!! The Complete Guide to Punks on Film (2011). She coedited Spectacular Optical Book One: KID POWER! with Paul Corupe (2014). She is the founder of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies and editor-in-chief of Spectacular Optical (http://www.spectacularoptical.ca/).

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About the Editors and Contributors

Cory Legassic is a faculty member of the Humanities and Sociology Departments at Dawson College, Montréal, Québec, where he teaches
courses on social movements, social justice education, anti-racism, media, and feminism. He is a coordinator for Dawson’s alternative New School as well as a collaborator with the North/South Studies profile and Women’s/

Gender Studies Certificate. His article “Reasonable Accommodation as a Settling Concept” was published in The Canadian Women’s Studies Journal in their special issue on “Women and Canadian Multiculturalism” (2010).

Peter Marra is a PhD student at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Research emphases include classical Hollywood and the American horror film. His current research project proposes a cultural history of the American slasher film which traces the figure of the voyeuristic male killer from World War II through Vietnam.

Ian olney is associate professor of English at York College of Pennsylvania, where he teaches film studies. He is the author of Euro Horror: Classic European Horror Cinema in Contemporary American Culture (2013), as well as numerous essays on the horror film which have appeared in edited volumes such as A Companion to the Horror Film (2014) and in journals such as the Quarterly Review of Film and Video.

Dennis r. Perry is associate professor of English at Brigham Young University. He writes on film adaptation and nineteenth-century American literature, with special emphasis on Poe, Hitchcock, and Frankenstein adaptations. He is the author of Hitchcock and Poe: The Legacy of Delight and Terror (Scarecrow 1993), and coauthor with Carl Sederholm on Poe,

“The House of Usher,” and the American Gothic (Palgrave-Macmillan 2009), and on Adapting Poe: Re-Imaginings in Popular Culture (Palgrave-Macmillan 2012).

selma a. Purac is assistant professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University. Her recent work focuses on the critical reimagining of myth and fairy tale in various media, ranging from cinema and advertising to music videos and manga.

Gary D. rhodes is lecturer at The Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is the author of such books as Lugosi (1997), White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film (2002), and Alma Rubens, Silent Snowbird (2006), as well as the editor of Horror at the Drive-In (2001), Edgar G. Ulmer: Detour on Poverty Row (Lexington Books, 2008), and The Films of Joseph H. Lewis (2010-pending). Rhodes is the writer-director of the documentary

About the Editors and Contributors

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films Fiddlin’ Man: The Life and Times of Bob Wills (1994), Chair (2000), and Banned in Oklahoma (2004). Currently, he is working on a book about the early history of the American horror film.

rick trembles is a Montréal-based illustrator, writer, filmmaker, and musician. Two collections of his Motion Picture Purgatory illustrations have been published by the U.K.’s FAB Press. His comix have been published in internationally distributed books, periodicals, and anthologies such as Russ Kick’s The Graphic Canon, Robert Crumb’s Weirdo, Thomas Waugh’s Montreal Main, Fantagraphics Books’ Pictopia, Portugal’s Mutate & Survive, and France’s Hopital Brut for Le Dernier Cri. His award-winning animated film Goopy Spasms has toured the festival circuit globally.

Document Outline

- Contents

- Part I Interventions

- A “Darkly Hypothetical Reality”
- “Strange Pleasure”
- Dead Zone

- Val Lewton, Mr. Gross, and the Grand-Guignol

- Part II Hybridity

- Robert Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase
- The Child Witness
- Making Visible the Sonic Threat

- Poe, Horror, and the Cinematic Mystery Hybrids of the 1940s

- “The Murderer’s Mind”

- Part III History

- Serial Killers, Deals with the Devil, and the Madness of Crowds

- “Always Hearing Voices, Never Hearing Mine”
- The Demise of the Cinematic Zombie
- Fears New and Old

- Part IV Poverty Row

- Hypodermic Needles and Evil Twins
- Of Apes and Men(and Monsters and Girls)
- “The Perfect Neanderthal Man”
- The Vampire’s Ghost

- Index

Table of Contents

- Contents

- Part I Interventions

- A “Darkly Hypothetical Reality”
- “Strange Pleasure”
- Dead Zone

- Val Lewton, Mr. Gross, and the Grand-Guignol

- Part II Hybridity

- Robert Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase
- The Child Witness
- Making Visible the Sonic Threat

- Poe, Horror, and the Cinematic Mystery Hybrids of the 1940s

- “The Murderer’s Mind”

- Part III History

- Serial Killers, Deals with the Devil, and the Madness of Crowds

- “Always Hearing Voices, Never Hearing Mine”
- The Demise of the Cinematic Zombie
- Fears New and Old

- Part IV Poverty Row

- Hypodermic Needles and Evil Twins
- Of Apes and Men(and Monsters and Girls)
- “The Perfect Neanderthal Man”
- The Vampire’s Ghost

- Index