By Michael Bayer
The Gothic novel is even more quintessentially English than the film noir is quintessentially American. And when the atmospheric terror of the former combines with the criminal alienation of the latter, the result is Gothic noir, undoubtedly the most striking and romantic strain of the noir cycle.
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In the late 18th-century, English writers like Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto), Ann Radcliff (The Mysteries of Udolpho), and Matthew Lewis (The Monk), having stared wistfully at remote landscapes and abandoned Medieval castles, invented the Gothic, which takes its name from the sublime Gothic architecture of the Middle Ages. This type of thrilling fiction soon became England’s dominant literary style and was later refined by the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens, and countless others. Widely classified as both a genre and a style, much like noir, Gothic novels often featured a vulnerable, young woman trapped in an old, dark mansion or a cold, dark marriage or both, assailed by endless threats in the form of ancient prophecies, ominous relatives, and quasi-supernatural forces that produce strange noises in the night.
The Gothic often resurrected the strangeness of the past, twisted romanticism into terror, combined the mysterious with the macabre. It also gave birth to the horror novel, its earliest specimen Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which is also widely credited as the first science fiction novel. The Gothic was popularized in America in the work of Edgar Allan Poe, who, while bathing his readers in opulent terror in “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), among many others, invented the American detective in the form of C. Auguste Dupin in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), an early inspiration for Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. (The 1951 noir The Man with a Cloak pays a sort of homage to Poe). When you think about it, the birth of the Gothic novel might have been the single most important historical event that led to the proliferation of entertainment genres we have today.
In cinema, the Gothic literary style found a natural home in the imaginative masterworks of early German Expressionism, most notably Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). Soon after, Gothic horror was capitalized by Hollywood, especially Carl Laemmle’s Universal Studios, which dominated the horror genre beginning in the early 1930’s with Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932) and The Invisible Man (1933).
So, when and how did Gothic and noir collide? The year was 1940. The event was the first American film of an up-and-coming British director named Alfred Hitchcock. An adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s blockbuster novel produced by the legendary David O. Selznick, Rebecca not only won the 1940 Academy Award for Best Picture but instantly became the paragon of romantic suspense on screen. Blending the emotional terror of Gothic with the criminal mystery of noir, the film vaguely hinted at a supernatural presence, but in the end the evil forces were all too human, which tips the film into noir territory. Rebecca stars Joan Fontaine as the naïve, nameless heroine who marries the obscenely wealthy Max De Winter (Laurence Olivier) after mere days of acquaintance and moves into his massive estate – “Last night I went to Manderley again” – which appears to be dominated by the spirit of Max’s first wife, who recently died under mysterious circumstances. Fueled by a textbook Gothic premise that morphs into a psychological murder mystery, Hitchcock’s lush craftsmanship and capacious direction produced the first Gothic noir masterpiece.
Through the 1940’s, many American crime films attempted to replicate Rebecca’s success and took on Gothic dimensions either through their physical settings (Dark Waters, 1944; The Amazing Mr. X, 1948), their historical periods (The Lodger, 1944; Hangover Square, 1945) or both (The Spiral Staircase, 1946; Dragonwyck, 1946). This meant a temporary but necessary reversal of the gender roles typically found in noir: Gothic noir generally omits the femme fatale, replacing female malice with female naivete and shifting the evil and mystery onto the male character (the homme fatale) or at least a misunderstood Byronic hero. This merger of romance with violence appealed especially to female audiences, which explains why Gothic noir peaked during and just after World War II when so many American men had been shipped overseas, leaving women to attend the cinema alone. (Arthur Lubin’s 1955 Footsteps in the Fog is one of a handful of stragglers released well into the 50’s).
Some consider horror noir its own crossover category, but Gothic noir accommodates many of these films too, barring explicit supernatural elements (apologies to Cat People fans). Gothic flourishes abound, for example, in Robert Wise’s The Body Snatcher (1945): moonlit graveyards dripping with shadows, corpses delivered in the middle of the night, a phantom-like figure seizing control of a horse and carriage during a thunderstorm. Based on an 1844 short story by Robert Louis Stevenson, whose Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a classic of the Gothic literary canon, The Body Snatcher’s Victorian period setting adds romanticism and remoteness to a story about grave robbers supplying cadavers to a local medical school. (Victorian and Edwardian settings tend to evoke the Gothic almost automatically – note 1944’s Gaslight, 1948’s The Woman in White, and others.) Despite a wink to the supernatural at the end (we assume the ghost rider to be a hallucination), The Body Snatcher is about a criminal plot with fraud and blackmail thrown in for good measure. It’s a crime film in a Gothic gauze.
Similarly, while Jacques Tourneur’s The Leopard Man (1943) has a title that evokes a monster movie, implying that a prodigious leopard (actually, a panther) has transformed into a serial killer, we discover the feline is merely a front for a human being out for revenge. No supernatural forces at work. Existing within an exotic locale ripe with Native American traditions, this film too features expressionistic graveyard scenes, but its primary setting is a nightclub that would feel just at home in Tourneur’s later noir classic, Out of the Past (1947). The Body Snatcher was one in a series of entertaining Gothic films produced by Val Lewton’s low-budget horror division at RKO, which aimed to compete with Universal’s prowess.
The Gothic noir is a perfect paradox. It adds resplendent beauty to a cycle known for grittiness, exotic fantasy to a cycle known for realism, innocent victims to a cycle known for rampant cynicism. Its noir essence is the alienation of its characters, whose inner fears, rather than leading to desperation and shame, are more likely to escalate to epic terror that blazes beautifully across the screen.
© 2024 Heart of Noir
