Horror Noir: Where Cinema's Dark Sisters Meet
Language: English
Pages: 310
ISBN: 0786445971
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This critical survey examines the historical and thematic relationships between two of the cinema's most popular genres: horror and film noir. The influence of 1930s- and 1940s-era horror films on the development of noir is detailed, with analyses of more than 100 motion pictures in which noir criminality and mystery meld with supernatural and psychological horror. Included are the films based on popular horror/mystery radio shows (The Whistler, Inner Sanctum), the works of RKO producer Val Lewton (Cat People, The Seventh Victim), and Alfred Hitchcock's psychological ghost stories. Also discussed are gothic and costume horror noirs set in the 19th century (The Picture of Dorian Gray, Hangover Square); the noir elements of more recent films; and the film noir aspects of the Hannibal Lecter movies and other serial-killer thrillers.
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proceedings, which adds to the remote, mysterious qualities of the character. Co-stars Robert Paige (who had played the oily crook in The Monster and the Girl) and Louise Allbritton provide most of the dramatic fireworks. Paige’s performance is particularly intense as one of the victims of the vampire woman’s macabre designs, while Allbritton’s elegant vampiress provides the film’s real menace. For the first time special effects were used to show the vampire’s onscreen transitions into bat and fog,
relation, Nicholas Van Ryn (Vincent Price). The missive requests that one of his daughters come to his palatial estate, called Dragonwyck, in the Hudson Valley of New York, for employment as a governess to Nicholas’s eight-year-old daughter, Katrine. Van Ryn is a patroon, a rich landowner of Dutch descent who lords over the tenant farmers on his extensive landholdings who are obliged to pay him rent and tribute. Ephraim, who is a stern, religious man, travels to New York with Miranda to meet
abstract Freudian imagery that includes breaking ocean waves, popping champagne corks, explosions and, most bizarrely, the depiction of Jekyll sadistically whipping Ivy and Beatrix as if they are tandem horses pulling his chariot. Hyde’s features differ from Jekyll’s in that his hair is unkempt, his eyebrows more bushy and the crow’s feet wrinkles on the outer edges of his eyes are more pronounced. In place of the doctor’s perpetually serene expression, Hyde sports a maniacal, Joker-like grin.
documentarian to expressionistic, the realistic early scenes depicting the sleazy goings-on at the grotty boys’ school are contrasted with the later scenes that take place in the dark shadows of a haunted house. Clouzot masterfully shifts between these stylistic polarities while leading the viewer along through Cristina’s subjective narrative viewpoint. The ghoulish events unfold from her naïve, superstitious point of view rather than that of the cold-blooded killers in order to tinge the story
the plot involving amnesia and double identity. The plotline in which an amnesiac investigates a murder where he himself may be the killer is a staple of noir works as diverse as Black Angel (1946) and Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987) and is a central theme in Alan Parker’s gritty horror noir Angel Heart (1987). The film never explains, however, why the kindly Rankin becomes “possessed” by the homicidal Tenant personality once he retrieves the doctor’s murder weapon. By the end of the 1950s the era