The Spiral Staircase

It’s the quintessential Gothic formula: a serial killer traps an innocent, young girl in an old, dark mansion of the past. In the hands of master Robert Siodmak, this formula adds a noir ethos and expressionist aesthetic to create one of the most entertaining period thrillers in the noir cycle: The Spiral Staircase. Set in a Vermont village in 1906, the film features a brilliant, nearly wordless performance by Dorothy McGuire as Helen, a mute girl who works as a live-in servant and companion for the wealthy and ailing Mrs. Warren (Ethel Barrymore), who occupies a mansion with her son Steven (Gordon Oliver), stepson Albert (George Brent), and a staff that includes the dipsomaniac Mrs. Oates (Elsa Lanchester) and exasperated Nurse Barker (Sara Allgood). After a third local woman with a disability is mysteriously murdered, Mrs. Warren expostulates the vocally disabled Helen to leave town at once, but Helen, believing the old woman to be over-wrought or delusional, rejects the suggestion. When another woman’s corpse is discovered in the wine cellar, however, Helen finds herself in serious danger. Using overhead shots, low angles, and innovative pans, Siodmak makes the mansion come alive, the wrought-iron gate, baroque wallpaper, and unending thunderstorms creating a haunted house ambience in which extreme close-ups on the eye of a strange intruder feel right at home. Note Siodmak’s nod to his origins in German silent cinema in the first scene in which Helen attends a makeshift silent movie showing in the lounge of an inn, the projector hand cranked, the piano score played live, and the patrons dazzled.