#doomed by the narrative lesbian cinematic universe

[sewizawa]

I've been coming up with a lot of short story/poem ideas about tragic lesbian romance. i wonder if this is symptomatic of something deeper

[timetravelhouse]

My fellow useless lesbians, can we take a moment to appreciate Raquel Cassidy's stunning performance as Hecate Hardbroom? The fact that we're all here for HB attests to the rich queer coding of this character, and moreover, to the continuing vitality of lesbian decoding practices. I can't stop thinking about how Cassidy masterfully deploys tropes with a deep history of queer connotation, so I wanted to situate Hecate in this genealogy. I'm proposing three longstanding lesbian motifs that resonate with Cassidy's interpretation of Miss Hardbroom, hopefully helping to illuminate why everyone is reading it as hella gay. This is written in the style of a grumpy old teacher, so each section includes an example from film history with a corresponding academic citation (Tumblr blocks posts with outside links; I recommend searching Google Books). :D?

1. lesbian gothic Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

It may be counterintuitive to link this cotton candy show to the gothic, but try shifting your point of view from the students to the teachers. The adults are dealing with family secrets, spectral paintings, authoritarian patriarchs, and of course, magical peril. Gothic references coalesce in Hecate Harbroom, the literally and figuratively dark presence with an uncanny ability to materialize at the moment of peak disobedience (she usually says "Mildred Hubble" but she might as well be saying "boo").

Patricia White, "Female Spectator, Lesbian Specter" from UnInvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Indiana University Press, 1999)

A genealogy of The Haunting–and of the haunting of classical cinema by lesbianism–leads us to Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940), a key example of the female gothic, a genre that as a whole is concerned with heterosexuality as an institution of terror for women (64)... [In this film,] the heroine's desire is channeled toward Rebecca as a powerful presence-in-absence by [Mrs. Danvers], who enjoys a peculiar and intense relation to her former mistress and who functions as a sort of regent of Rebecca's reign at Manderly (65)... In the gothic narrative, the heroine's look is central yet unreliable, precisely because the female object sought by her gaze is withheld. This narrative can be seen to encode the dramas of desire and identification at stake in female spectatorship and the lesbian excess that haunts them, to remind us that we can't always believe our eyes (72).

The severe domestics and governesses of gothic mysteries harbor the story's secrets under their grim austerity, and these secrets always seem to have the flavor of sexual deviance. Hecate Hardbroom's reserved and gloomy vibe – and indeed, her "goth" style – evoke characters like Mrs. Danvers (a little too obsessed with an inappropriate crush from her past). This resonance "haunts" The Worst Witch with "lesbian excess" that can only be seen obliquely, and may even suggest "heterosexuality... as terror" (see s2e11 "Love at First Sight"). Thus the heritage of genre cues us to suspect that whatever repressed feelings animate Hecate's stern control must be tinged with forbidden desire, a queer allusion that is irresistibly seductive.

2. lesbian witch Margaret Hamilton as The Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)

I'm sure I don't have to convince you that witches are the most obvious gay element in The Worst Witch. We're offered a spectrum of witchy genders (headcanon: Mr. Rowan-Webb is trans), and I ask you to bear with me through a theory. I would never call Hecate butch in today's terms – she's so glamorous with her sensuous fabrics and heavy eyeliner – but think 1930s notions of butch. Standing imperiously in head-to-toe black next to the brightly colored and approachable looks of other magical adults, Hecate inhabits the classic witch stereotype. This quintessential witch is threatening in her otherness because she has power that refuses and exceeds the standards of femininity.

Alexander Doty, "'My Beautiful Wickedness': The Wizard of Oz as Lesbian Fantasy" from Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (Routledge, 2002)

It was probably during gay director George Cukor’s stint as production consultant on Oz that the Wicked Witch got her final look: a sharp nose and jawline, green face and body makeup, a scraggly broom, clawlike fingernails, and a tailored black gown and cape. This is the witch as creature, as alien, as monster, and as what straight, and sometimes gay, culture has often equated with these—butch dyke (58)... And let’s not forget that while Glinda may look like a fairy godmother, she is a witch, and is therefore connected to the Wicked Witch and to centuries-long Western cultural associations between witchcraft and lesbianism. So what we have set before us in The Wizard of Oz is the division of lesbianism into the good femme-inine and the bad butch, or the model potentially 'invisible' femme and the threateningly obvious butch (59)... The butch witch is both the potential source of fulfilled desires as well as the potential source of physical danger (68).

Hecate Hardbroom's "obvious" witchyness is frightening in a way that's delectable, because it whispers to us of a land "over the rainbow" where normative rules of gender and sexuality might be unbound. HB both threatens the kids with exposure through the potency of her magic and encourages them into the sisterhood of this forceful female energy. She links the forbidding/forbidden with the desire to adore and become it. When high femme Pippa Pentangle stands alongside Hecate, they echo Glinda's contrast with the Wicked Witch of the West as the light and dark sides of a queer paradigm: the coming-of-age fantasy of escaping from "Kansas" to "Oz" (or Cackle's Academy for girls only).

3. lesbian camp Emilia Unda as Fräulein von Nordeck in Mädchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagan, Germany, 1931)

Camp is probably my #1 axis of delight in Raquel Cassidy's approach to Hecate. In Susan Sontag's formative 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp'" (easily Googled), she defines camp as "the love of the exaggerated" and "the spirit of extravagance"; as "a mode of seduction–one which employs flamboyant mannerisms susceptible of a double interpretation"; as "a new, more complex relation to 'the serious'" that "identifies with what it is enjoying... a tender feeling." I can think of no better way to capture the superb balance of excessively theatrical gestures and glimpses of genuine emotion that I see in this character. Historically, camp is primarily associated with gay and effeminate men, but there has always been a place for women in camp's gender play. Katrin Horn locates the emergence of a visible lesbian camp in the New Queer Cinema moment of the 1990s, with films that took up a referential dialogue with the subtextual queer language of an earlier era.

Katrin Horn, "The Great Dyke Rewrite: Lesbian Camp on the Big Screen" from Women, Camp, and Serious Excess (Springer, 2017)

As a cinematic trope the boarding school setting dates back to at least 1931, when a nearly all-female crew produced Mädchen in Uniform... the associated story – emotional turmoil at all-girls boarding schools resulting in female bonding, homoerotic moments, and declarations of love between women – and its symbolism have been carried from Hollywood's classical era... But I'm a Cheerleader points to the heavily censored history of female-female desire onscreen [and] mocks the absurd and dark one-dimensionality of the boarding school trope (35-36)... [B]y consciously engaging with the cinematic history of lesbian representation, [camp films] reinscribe (pleasurable) lesbian presences into themes and tropes that had hitherto been connected to doomed and/or subtextual lesbian desire... Furthermore, they represent new forms of cinematic pleasure, as they infuse stereotypes which have historically as well as more recently been used mainly to disavow lesbian identity and sexuality with a sincerity of affect that recodes them as objects of identification and desire (37).

Mädchen in Uniform and related films (including the 1958 remake and 2006 reinterpretation Loving Annabelle) are lesbian tragedies, stories where forbidden desire between a teacher and student (or, in the case of 1961's The Children's Hour, two teachers) leads to heartbreak and ruin. The strict headmistress subjects the more romantic teacher to an all-knowing and judgmental gaze – but her relentless pursuit of perversion can always reverberate back to camp up this dour figure. Like the satirical lesbian comedy But I'm a Cheerleader (Jamie Babbit, 1999), The Worst Witch returns to the queer scene of the girls' boarding school in a more playful mode. As a camp performance, Cassidy's Hardbroom is a homage to Fräulein von Nordeck and her ilk, but one that transposes this archetype's threatening quality into a celebration of the deviance she originally stood against. Precisely by being over-the-top, Hecate's expressiveness embraces the stern teachers of yore with tenderness and a "sincerity of affect" that invites possibilities for pleasure and identification into this stereotype. By revisiting and reconfiguring the terms of queer representation, camp can effectively rewrite history – we may take more glee in earlier portrayals of the tragic lesbian or repressed disciplinarian today because she has been retroactively camped. Camp is reappropriation – its affection for extremes is simultaneously ridiculous and erotic (boosted here by liberal use of dramatic low-angle shots to frame Hecate as deliciously imposing). Children's television has always been a welcoming field for camp, which revels in its capacity to signal queerness through the seeming innocence of zany shenanigans. Cassidy described The Worst Witch as "a massive invitation to play" – her total commitment to this opportunity with a joyous camp sensibility enables a really dazzling modulation of lesbian cultural touchstones.

It would be worthwhile to read Hecate Hardbroom intertexually in relation to Raquel Cassidy's previous queer comedic roles... but that's a story for another day. I just wanted to explain why I think what she's given us in The Worst Witch is quite remarkable (and justify why I am utter trash right now). It's meaningful to me to connect the soup of digital ephemera and intemperate feels we're all swimming in now to a lineage of lesbian representation and spectatorship. Maybe this lofty outpouring is totally inappropriate to Tumblr [EDIT: so pleased it is appropriate <3], but I don't seem to be able to help myself – thank you truly for reading if you made it this far. Grumpy gay teacher signing off!

GIFs Hecate: all-we-must-be | dismantledrose | andforgotten Mrs. Danvers: Old Hollywood Films on giphy Wicked Witch: gifswithkriz Fräulein von Nordeck: mine

[thesswrites]

Global Terror

Fear is a universal constant. Everyone on earth is afraid of something; it might be irrational like the number thirteen or clowns, or a very abstract concept like death of a loved one, but everyone knows fear, down in their bones. A lot of factors will eventually decide what an individual fears - someone who was stung by a bee as a very small child may well develop a fear of flying insects in later life, for example, while someone who was in a car accident is likely to find car journeys stressful in future. While individual experiences are likely to define our fears, the experiences that we share as a culture are equally likely to define our more abstract fears. This in turn will define trends in horror media in a nearly self-perpetuating cycle of societal fear response. This essay takes a look at various cultures and their reactions to societal terrors as shown in horror media, beginning with some of the less examined cultures and ending with the 'melting pot' that is, for better or worse, the perceived core of mass media.

Europe is an interesting source of horror, largely because of its early fairy tales being the progenitor of most commonly-used modern Western horror stories. Eastern Europe as a whole has lived with monsters for a very long time, from the narrative perspective. While the vampire mythos has existed since ancient Greece, and the forerunners of the modern vampire were British and Irish (John William Polidori first with the much-forgotten Lord Ruthven and Bram Stoker with Dracula), Romania and Slavic Europe have a surprising number of myths about vampires. Slavic and Romanian folklore is, in fact, so riddled with monsters that it's almost impossible to be truly afraid of them, as most fear is, at its root, of the unknown. That combined with the ease and blamelessness in which one can become a vampire in Slavic folklore means that there is an entirely different kind of horror involved in tales involving the blood-drinking undead; combined with the fact that everything from birth defects to an animal jumping over someone's open grave can make a vampire, the only way to truly find the fear and horror from these creatures is to become these creatures, at least from the narrative perspective. Films like Night Watch, Let The Right One In and Not Like Others delve into the lives of these cast-out souls, and the horror is found in the tragedy of their haunted, hunted existence and their battle with their own natures, not in the fates of their victims.

There is another purpose to the focus on the monster as the terrorised party in Slavic culture; the fear of standing out. Up until fairly recently, to stand out in Eastern Europe was the worst thing, when survival largely depended on keeping one's head down and not being noticed. Particularly post-World War II, the idea of birth defects or living 'impiously' by local standards being an offense punishable by death is a familiar one to those in Germany, Poland and Russia, even if that last is largely because of a significant guilt for letting it happen to countries that were ostensibly under its purview beginning with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. All told, in the tale of 'the different need to be exterminated because the world says they're wrong and dangerous', countries with their chequered history are likely to show sympathy for the different. Since supernatural creatures have been used as an allegory for the different and bizarre for at least a century, that makes it entirely unsurprising that that entire section of Europe will find the horror in being the 'different' one, rather than being the one hunted by the 'monster'.

Great Britain is a particularly interesting case, given its approach to life as a whole. The British Empire, and the two islands in general, have suffered a great many highs and lows, to the point where 'Keep Calm and Carry On' was effectively its motto long before they quasi-officially adopted it during World War II. Also, its folklore is full of just as many horrors as those found in Eastern European folklore, though British folklore mostly focuses on trickster beings that live somewhere in the middle of the Venn diagram covering spirit, monster and god. All things taken into account, it's surprisingly difficult to find a truly terrifying British horror story. The 'Keep Calm and Carry On' mentality mean that even the great classics, such as Dracula and Frankenstein, convey more of a clinical if occasionally suspenseful retelling than a conventional horror story. More modern British entries into the hallowed halls of horror show the other side of British esprit de corps - the ability to laugh at themselves in even the most dire of circumstances. This is a country that deals with terrorist attacks by stating in a ha-ha-only-serious way that "I've been blown up by a better class of bastard than this", flagging up that the surest show that this was an emergency was that a popular sandwich bar chain had run out of chocolate cake, and interrupts live coverage of the incident to air a popular soap opera. These are not a people that seek visceral terror as a form of entertainment, simply because it's so difficult to achieve. Even the few things they do find scary are often subject to parody; for every 28 Days Later apocalypse scenario, there's a film - usually by or starring Simon Pegg - to parody it, a Shaun of the Dead or a The World's End or, most recently, a Slaughterhouse Rulez.

However, looking at that example, as well as classics like Dracula, Frankenstein and Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde, there is one thing that the British seem to fear: a breakdown of the normally accepted rules of conduct, be they scientific, political or societal. Victor Frankenstein brought on his own doom by over-reaching himself in his field, and compounded it by ignoring his responsibilities to his creation. There are too many examples of this to count in Dracula, though the most notable is the fate of poor Dr Seward, who delved too deeply into things he should not have touched. This trend continues in microcosm and macrocosm in British cinema today; The Quiet Ones follows scientists tormented because they breached a realm of study best left unexplored, whereas 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later touches on both "Science Shouldn't Go Too Far" and "What Happens When The Rules Stop Working?".

Going to the other side of the globe for a moment, some of the front-runners of the horror genre are from the Pacific Rim. Japan and South Korea are renowned for their dark, suspenseful horror films, with Japan adding extra bombast with disaster movies whose messages and cultural impact have stood the test of time even if their special effects have not. The disaster movies are easy ones to dissect from a cultural standpoint; nuclear radiation and its effects, as well as large-scale property damage, have been a stark scar across the Japanese consciousness since 1945. Like the aforementioned car accident victim attempting to ride in a car without panicking, the radiation fears and mass-destruction imagery of the Godzilla movies are an almost guaranteed poke to the hindbrain.

Going back further in the consciousness of the region, however, we come to the underlying cultural fear evoked by the more subtle horror films of both Japan and South Korea. From Ringu in Japan to South Korean films such as The Wishing Stairs, the largest driving force for the supernatural plot elements are guilt and revenge, evoking the honour code that has driven both nations for a very long time, while also touching on the horrors left after their various wars of attrition with the 'death of innocence' trope. However, while Japan focuses on these themes in a more general way, South Korea often approaches the matter in a somewhat more focused - and, to the modern eye, disturbing - way in that many of its defining offerings to cinematic history touch on the latent homophobia of the nation. The Wishing Stairs, Whispering Corridors and particularly Memento Mori all focus on teenage girls, and all of them either imply lesbian relationships or outright feature them. It's unclear whether this is a call to arms, trying to see homosexuality as something more acceptable by framing it as a trait held by a sympathetic character, or a show that 'queers get what they deserve'. It's certainly seen as a common enough situation to be nearly commonplace in movies of that type, though blending it into the horror genre so completely frames it as something to fear.

Across the Pacific, we find Hollywood, and the so-called 'melting pot' that is the United States. Arguably the primary source of the world's entertainment media, the US should theoretically produce a range of horror as broad as the cultural heritage of its people. In a way, that's the case, as American horror authors and scriptwriters often borrow from the folklore of other nations or even simply remake them. However, as these are framed in the American idea of what 'scary' is rather than tapping into the cultural fear that inspired the originals, these remakes seldom come off as well unless they deviate significantly from the source material. Even going back past the days of cinema, consider HP Lovecraft - while born in the United States, America at that time was still only a few generations removed from being a British colony, rebuilding on its own after a bloody civil war. It had hardly been long enough for the nation to develop its own cultural identity, although it was clearly trying. Lovecraft began that in terms of horror; while still deeply entrenched in the "break rules to delve into things you should not examine and be damned" mentality of British horror, his deep-seated racism showed the first glimmer of a largely American fear of the black population, so recently freed.

Nowadays, however, US horror is a difficult subject to examine because of the subgenres on offer in the wider horror genre. Paranormal romance, for example, has taken a great deal of the horror out of classic movie monsters like vampires and werewolves, with the 'action-adventure' label making them one more antagonist to shoot. These days, the true horror in US entertainment media comes from a source whose very mundanity makes it all the more terrifying - other people. Born of urban legends as much as real-life serial killers, slasher movies are the one movie genre that is very specifically American (the British being too inured to the idea of the knife-wielding stranger by Jack the Ripper to really bother with it). Despite supernaturally-born outliers like Freddy Krueger, slasher-killers have always simply been troubled individuals, from Norman Bates to Jason Voorhes to the convoluted chain of Jigsaw killers. The Purge franchise takes it one step further, casting everyone in the immediate vicinity as a potential killer just waiting for the opportunity. While the actual reasoning behind this cultural paranoia is unclear, the fact that most entertainment media is optioned by committee under the auspices of swathes of marketing data means that there is at least a vocal minority of the American public that identifies enough with this mindset to engage it on an emotional level. Given the shape of US politics today, this is worrying on so many levels it's impossible to discuss them all in an essay of any reasonable length; it would probably take a proper academic paper written by someone with several degrees and preferably no personal investment. Perhaps someone living somewhere sane like Switzerland.

So what does all this tell us about the cultural makeup of the countries under discussion? It certainly indicates that Slavic Europe and the Pacific Rim are still haunted by the spectres of a particularly violent past, and that Britain has an inborn need for order that may or may not have originated with the loss of the Empire. The United States, meanwhile, shows some deep-seated paranoia, a fear of itself that shows no signs of abating and even seems to be ramping up as the years go by. It's entirely possible that the entire world needs whatever the cultural equivalent of therapy is, but given the cathartic nature of entertainment media, this is supposed to be a form of therapy from the cultural standpoint. At least most of the rest of the nations seem to be recovering, though they will always still be suffering from whatever the cultural equivalent of PTSD is; Britain, in fact, has recovered well enough to laugh about it, although given the shape of the sociopolitical landscape, they may have recovered too well and be doomed to repeat the lessons they refused to learn from history. The United States, meanwhile, appears to be wallowing in its own divisiveness from a cultural standpoint, with the primary indicator of the things it fears showing a nation that would be happiest alone in a bunker surrounded by land mines with a high-powered firearm, shooting at anyone who gets too close.

There’s no great sociopolitical message here, unless it’s one that a reader wants to find for themselves. It’s just fascinating from an anthropological standpoint how much what people - on a cultural level - are afraid of can sometimes tell us about what kind of people they are.

[gp-synergism-blog]

Gothic Film in the ‘40s: Doomed Romance and Murderous Melodrama

Posted by: Samm Deighan for Diabolique Magazine

Secret Beyond the Door (1947)

In many respects, the ‘40s were a strange time for horror films. With a few notable exceptions, like Le main du diable (1943) or Dead of Night (1945), the British and European nations avoided the genre thanks to the preoccupation of war. But that wasn’t the case with American cinema, which continued to churn out cheap, escapist fare in droves, ranging from comedies and musicals to horror films. In general though, genre efforts were comic or overtly campy; Universal, the country’s biggest producer of horror films, resorted primarily to sequels, remakes, and monster mash ups during the decade, or ludicrous low budget films centered on half-cocked mad scientists (roles often hoisted on a fading Bela Lugosi).

There are some exceptions: the emergence of grim-toned serial killer thrillers helmed by European emigres like Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Ulmer’s Bluebeard(1944), Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase (1945), or John Brahm’s Hangover Square(1945); the series of expressionistic moody horror film produced by auteur Val Lewton, such as Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943); and a handful of strange outliers like the eerie She-Wolf of London (1946) or the totally off-the-rails Peter Lorre vehicle, The Beast with Five Fingers (1946).

Thanks to the emergence of film noir and a new emphasis on psychological themes within suspense films, horror’s sibling — arguably even its precursor — the Gothic, was also a prominent cinematic force during the decade. One of the biggest producers of Gothic cinema came from the literary genre’s parent country, England. Initially this was a way to present some horror tropes and darker subject matter at a time when genre films were embargoed by a country at war, but Hollywood was undoubtedly attempting to compete with Britain’s strong trend of Gothic cinema: classic films like Thorold Dickinson’s original Gaslight (1940); a series of brooding Gothic romances starring a homicidal-looking James Mason, like The Night Has Eyes (1942), The Man in Grey(1943), The Seventh Veil (1945), and Fanny by Gaslight (1944); David Lean’s two best films and possibly the greatest Dickens adaptations ever made, Great Expectations(1946) and Oliver Twist (1948); and other excellent, yet forgotten literary adaptations like Uncle Silas (1947) and Queen of Spades (1949).

The American films, which not only responded to their British counterparts but helped shape the Gothic genre in their own right, tended towards three themes in particular (often combining them): doomed romance, dark family inheritances often connected to greed and madness, and the supernatural melodrama. Certainly, these film borrowed horror tropes, like the fear of the dark, nightmares, haunted houses, thick cobwebs, and fog-drenched cemeteries. The home was often set as the central location, a site of both domesticity and terror — speaking to the genre’s overall themes of social order, repressed sexuality, and death — and this location was of course of equal importance to horror films and the “woman’s film” of the ‘40s and ‘50s. Like the latter, these Gothic films often featured female protagonists and plots that revolved around a troubled romantic relationship or domestic turmoil.

Wuthering Heights (1939)

Two of the earliest examples, and certainly two films that kicked off the wave of Gothic romance films in America, are also two of the genre’s most enduring classics: William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights (1939) and Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940). Based on Emily Brontë’s novel of the same name (one of my favorites), Wyler and celebrated screenwriter Ben Hecht (with script input from director and writer John Huston) transformed Wuthering Heights from a tale of multigenerational doom and bitterness set on the unforgiving moors into a more streamlined romantic tragedy about the love affair between Cathy (Merle Oberon) and Heathcliffe (Laurence Olivier) that completely removes the conclusion that focuses on their children. In the film, the couple are effectively separated by social constraints, poverty, a harsh upbringing, and the fact that Cathy is forced to choose between her wild, adopted brother Heathcliffe and her debonair neighbor, Edgar Linton (David Niven).

Wuthering Heights is actually less Gothic than the films it inspired, primarily because of the fact that Hollywood neutered many of Brontë’s themes. In The History of British Literature on Film, 1895-2015, Greg Semenza and Bob Hasenfratz wrote, “Hecht and Wyler together manage to transfer the narrative from its original literary genre (Gothic romance) and embed it in a film genre (the Hollywood romance, which would evolve into the so-called ‘women’s films’ of the 1940s)… [To accomplish this,] Hecht and Wyler needed to remove or tone down elements of the macabre, the novel’s suggestions of necrophilia in chapter 29, and its portrayal of Heathcliffe as a kind of Miltonic Satan” (185).

This results in sort of watered down versions of Cathy — who is selfish and cruel as a general rule in the novel — and, in particular, Heathcliffe, whose brutish behavior includes physical violence, spousal abuse, and a drawn out, well-plotted revenge that becomes his sole reason for living. It is thus in a somewhat different — and arguably both more terrifying and more romantic — context that the novel’s Heathcliffe declares to a dying Cathy, “Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you–haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe–I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always–take any form–drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” (145).

Despite Hollywood’s intervention, the novel’s Gothic flavor was not scrubbed entirely and Wuthering Heights still includes themes of ghosts, haunting, and just the faintest touch of damnation, though it ends with a spectral reunion for Cathy and Heathcliffe, whose spirits set off together across the snow-covered moors. These elements of a studio meddling with a film’s source novel, doomed romance, and supernatural tones also appeared in the following year’s Rebecca, possibly the single most influential Gothic film from the period. This was actually Hitchcock’s first film on American shores after his emigration due to WWII, and his first major battle with a producer in the form of David O. Selznick.

Rebecca (1940)

Based on Daphne du Maurier’s novel of the same name, Rebecca marks the return of Laurence Olivier as brooding romantic hero Maxim de Winter, the love interest of an innocent young woman (Joan Fontaine) traveling through Europe as a paid companion. She and de Winter meet, fall in love, and are quickly married, though things take a dark turn when they move to his ancestral home in England, Manderlay, which is everywhere marked with the overwhelming presence of his former wife, Rebecca. The hostile housekeeper (Judith Anderson) is still obviously obsessed with her former mistress, Maxim begins to act strangely and has a few violent outbursts, and the new Mrs. de Winter begins to suspect that Rebecca’s death was the result of a homicidal act…

The wanton or mad wife was a feature not only of Rebecca, but of earlier Gothic fiction from Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre to “The Yellow Wallpaper.” In the same way that Cathy of Wuthering Heights is an example of the feminine resistance to a claustrophobic social structure, Rebecca is a similar figure, made monstrous by her refusal to conform. The dark secret that Maxim’s new wife learns is that Rebecca was privately promiscuous, agreeing only to appear to be the perfect wife in public after de Winter already married her. She pretends she is pregnant with another man’s child and tries to goad her husband into murdering her, seemingly out of sheer spite, but it is revealed that she was dying of cancer.

A surprisingly faithful adaptation of the novel, Rebecca presents the titular character’s death as a suicide, rather than a murder, thanks to the Production Code’s insistence that murderers had to be punished, contrary to the film’s apparent happy ending, and restricted the (now somewhat obvious) housekeeper’s lesbian infatuation for Rebecca. Despite these restrictions, Hitchcock managed to introduce some of the bold, controversial themes that would carry him through films like Marnie (1964). For Criterion, Robin Wood wrote, “it is in Rebecca that his unifying theme receives its first definitive statement: the masculinist drive to dominate, control, and (if necessary) punish women; the corresponding dread of powerful women, and especially of women who assert their sexual freedom, for what, above all, the male (in his position of dominant vulnerability, or vulnerable dominance) cannot tolerate is the sense that another male might be “better” than he was. Rebecca is killed because she defies the patriarchal order, the prohibition of infidelity.”

Wood also got to the crux of many of these early Gothic films (and the Romantic/romantic novels that inspired them) when he wrote, “The antagonism toward Maxim we feel today (in the aftermath of the Women’s Movement) is due at least in part to the casting of Olivier; without that antagonism something of the film’s continuing force and fascination would be weakened.” Heathcliffe and de Winter are similarly contradictory figures: romantic, but also repulsive, objects of love and fear in equal measures, they mirror the character type popularized in England by a young, brooding James Mason — an antagonistic, almost villainous (and sometimes actually so) male romantic lead — that would appear in a number of other titles throughout the decade.

Rebecca (1940)

In “‘At Last I Can Tell It to Someone!’: Feminine Point of View and Subjectivity in the Gothic Romance Film of the 1940s” for Cinema Journal, Diane Waldman wrote, “The plots of films like Rebecca, Suspicion, Gaslight, and their lesser-known counterparts like Undercurrent and Sleep My Love fall under the rubric of the Gothic designation: a young inexperienced woman meets a handsome older man to whom she is alternately attracted and repelled. After a whirlwind courtship (72 hours in Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door, two weeks is more typical), she marries him. After returning to the ancestral mansion of one of the pair, the heroine experiences a series of bizarre and uncanny incidents, open to ambiguous interpretation, revolving around the question of whether or not the Gothic male really loves her. She begins to suspect that he may be a murderer” (29-30).

As Waldman suggests, there are many films from the decade that fit into this type: notable examples include Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941), where Joan Fontaine again stars as an innocent, wealthy young woman who marries an unscrupulous gambler (Cary Grant) who may be trying to kill her for her fortune; Robert Stevenson’s Jane Eyre (1943) yet again starred Fontaine as the innocent titular governess, who falls in love with her gloomy, yet charismatic employer, Mr. Rochester (Orson Welles); George Cukor’s remake of Gaslight (1944) starred Ingrid Bergman as a young singer driven slowly insane by her seemingly charming husband (Charles Boyer), who is only out to conceal a past crime; and so on.

Another interesting, somewhat unusual interpretations of this subgenre is Experiment Perilous (1944), helmed by a director also responsible for key film noir and horror titles such as Out of the Past, Cat People, and Curse of the Demon: Jacques Tourneur. Based on a novel by Margaret Carpenter and set in turn of the century New York, Experiment Perilous is a cross between Gothic melodrama and film noir and expands upon the loose plot of Gaslight, where a controlling husband (here played by Paul Lukas) is trying to drive his younger wife (the gorgeous Hedy Lamarr) insane. The film bucks the Gothic tradition of the ‘40s in the sense that the wife, Allida, is not the protagonist, but rather it is a psychiatrist, Dr. Bailey (George Brent). He encounters the couple because he befriended the husband’s sister (Olive Blakeney) on a train and when she passes away, he goes to pay his respects. While there, he he falls in love with Allida and refuses to believe her husband’s assertions that she is insane and must be kept prisoner in their home.

In some ways evocative of Hitchcock (a fateful train ride, a psychiatrist who falls in love with a patient and refuses to believe he or she is insane), Experiment Perilous is a neglected, curious film, and it’s interesting to imagine what it would have been if Cary Grant starred, as intended. It does mimic the elements of female paranoia found in films like Rebecca and Gaslight, in the sense that Allida believes she has a mysterious admirer and, as with the later Secret Beyond the Door, she’s tormented by the presence of a disturbed child; though Lamarr never plays to the level of hysteria usually found in this type of role and her performance is both understated and underrated.

Experiment Perilous (1944)

Tourneur was an expert at playing with moral ambiguities, a quality certainly expressed in Experiment Perilous, and the decision to follow the psychiatrist, rather than the wife, makes this a compelling mystery. Like Laura, The Woman in the Window, Vertigo, and other films, the mesmerizing portrait of a beautiful woman is responsible for the protagonist becoming morally compromised, and for most of the running time it’s not quite clear if Bailey is acting from a rational, medical premise, or a wholly irrational one motivated by sexual desire. Rife with strange diary entries, disturbing letters, stories of madness, death, and psychological decay, and a torrid family history are at the heart of the delightfully titled Experiment Perilous. Like many films in the genre, it concludes with a spectacular sequence where the house itself is in a state of chaos, the most striking symbol of which is a series of exploding fish tanks.

But arguably the most Gothic of all these films — and certainly my favorite — is Fritz Lang’s The Secret Beyond the Door (1947). On an adventure in Mexico, Celia (Joan Bennett), a young heiress, meets Mark Lamphere (Michael Redgrave), a dashing architect. They have a whirlwind romance before marrying, but on their honeymoon, Mark is frustrated by Celia’s locked bedroom door and takes off in the middle of the night, allegedly for business. Things worsen when they move to his mansion in New England, where she is horrified to learn that she is his second wife, his first died mysteriously, and he has a very strange family, including an odd secretary who covers her face with a scarf after it was disfigured in a fire; he also has serious financial problems. During a welcoming party, Mark shows their friends his hobby, personally designed rooms in the house that mimic the settings of famous murders. Repulsed, Celia also learns that there is one locked room that Mark keeps secret. As his behavior becomes increasingly cold and disturbed she comes to fear that he killed the first Mrs. Lamphere and is planning to kill her, too.

A blend of “Bluebeard,” Rebecca, and Jane Eyre, Secret Beyond the Door is quite an odd film. Though it relies on some frustrating Freudian plot devices and has a number of script issues, there is something truly magical and eerie about it and it deserves as far more elevated reputation. Though this falls in with the “woman’s films” popular at the time, Bennett’s Celia is far removed from the sort of innocent, earnest, and vulnerable characters played by Fontaine. Lang, and his one-time protege, screenwriter Silvia Richards, acknowledge that she has flaws of her own, as well as the strength, perseverance, and sheer sexual desire to pursue Mark, despite his potential psychosis.

This was Joan Bennett’s fourth film with Fritz Lang – after titles like Man Hunt (1941), The Woman in the Window (1944), and Scarlet Street (1945) — and it was to be her last with the director. While her earlier characters were prostitutes, gold diggers, or arch-manipulators, Celia is more complex; she is essentially a spoiled heiress and socialite bored with her life of pleasure and looking to settle down, but used to getting her own way and not conforming to the needs of any particular man. (Gloria Grahame would go on to play slightly similar characters for Lang in films like The Big Heat and Human Desire.) In one of Celia’s introductory scenes, she’s witness to a deadly knife fight in a Mexican market. Instead of running in terror, she is clearly invigorated, if not openly aroused by the scene, despite the fact that a stray knife lands mere inches from her.

Secret Beyond the Door (1947)

Like some of Lang’s other films with Bennett, much of this film is spent in or near beds and the bedroom. The hidden bedroom also provides a rich symbolic subtext, one tied in to Mark’s murder-themed rooms, the titular secret room (where his first wife died), and the burning of the house at the film’s conclusion. Due to the involvement of the Production Code, sex is only implied, but modern audiences may miss this. It is at least relatively clear that Mark and Celia’s powerful attraction is a blend of sex and violence, affection and neurosis. As with Rebecca and Jane Eyre, it is implied that the fire — the act of burning down the house and the memory of the former love (or in Jane Eyre’scase, the actual woman) — has cleansing properties that restore Mark to sanity. It is revealed that though he did not commit an actual murder, the guilt of his first wife’s death, brought on by a broken heart, has driven him to madness and obsession.

This really is a marvelous film, thanks Lang’s return to German expressionism blended with Gothic literary themes. There is some absolutely lovely cinematography from Stanley Cortez that prefigured his similar work on Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter. In particular, a woodland set – where Celia runs when she thinks Mark is going to murder her – is breathtaking, eerie, and nightmarish, and puts a marked emphasis on the fairy-tale influence. But the house is where the film really shines with lighting sources often reduced to candlelight, reflections in ornate mirrors, or the beam of a single flashlight. The camera absolutely worships Bennett, who is framed by long, dark hallways, foreboding corridors, and that staple of film noir, the winding staircase.