MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #107 NIGHT MUST FALL 1937 / SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR 1947 & NIGHT OF THE HUNTER 1955

SPOILER ALERT!

NIGHT MUST FALL 1937

You know, I still remember the first time I stumbled onto Night Must Fall—a vastly underrated British shocker, and honestly, it rattled me in a way few films from the 1930s ever have. Here I was, expecting a cozy little drawing-room mystery, maybe some clever repartee and a bit of melodrama, but what I got instead was this icy, slow-burn descent into the mind of a killer, years before “serial killer” was even a term in the public consciousness. There’s something deeply chilling about the idea that a film from 1937 could so nakedly explore the psychology of a psychopath, and not just as a shadowy figure lurking off-screen, but right there in the parlor, charming the socks off everyone—except, maybe, us.

And Robert Montgomery—my god, Montgomery! I’d always thought of him as the affable leading man from those fizzy 1930s comedies, but here, he’s a revelation. His Danny is all surface warmth and boyish charm, but you can feel the ice water running underneath. There’s this uncanny calm in the way he moves through the Bramson house, as if he’s rehearsed every gesture, every smile, every glint in his eye. It’s almost as if he’s studied people, learned how to mimic empathy, but never actually felt it. That “series of performances” quality—one minute he’s the devoted son figure, the next he’s whistling a tune with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and then, with a flicker, you see the void behind his eyes.

What really got under my skin was how the film never lets you—or the characters—fully relax. The ticking clock, the way the camera lingers just a beat too long on a locked hatbox, the suffocating sense that something truly evil is at work, but it’s wearing a human face. Montgomery’s performance is so modern in its iciness, so heartless and yet so magnetic, that you can’t look away. There’s a moment where he’s alone, the mask slips, and you see that raw, festering wound of a person underneath—no glamour, just a kind of animal panic and emptiness. It’s a performance that anticipates everything from Psycho 1960 to In Cold Blood 1967, and it’s still as unnerving as anything you’ll find in later noir or horror.

Night Must Fall (1937) is one of those rare masterpieces of psychological suspense that leaves a mark. It’s about the terror of realizing that the real monster might be the person pouring your tea, the one everyone else finds so charming. The film’s darkness doesn’t just seep in from the edges—it’s right there, smiling at you, daring you to look away. Decades later, I still can’t shake the feeling it left me with. That’s the power of a film that truly understands how to get inside your head—and stay there.

Night Must Fall stands as a chilling landmark in psychological horror, translating Emlyn Williams’ stage success to the screen with unnerving precision under director Richard Thorpe. Adapted by John Van Druten, it moves with the slow, inexorable dread of a nightmare, its surface calm masking a psychological storm. The film plunges you into the claustrophobic world of Forest Corner, an isolated English estate where wealthy, cantankerous widow Mrs. Bramson (Dame May Whitty) feigns invalidism, reigning as a wheelchair-bound tyrant over her niece and companion. Her niece, Olivia Grayne (Rosalind Russell), is intelligent, repressed, and quietly resentful, trapped by financial dependence and emotional isolation. Mrs. Bramson also rules her household staff with manipulative cruelty. The household is completed by the tart-tongued cook Mrs. Terence, the anxious maid Dora (Merle Tottenham), and then there’s the unremarkable suitor Justin Laurie (Alan Marshal), whose proposals Olivia repeatedly rebuffs.

The film opens with the local police searching for Mrs. Shellbrook, dragging the river and scouring the countryside looking for a woman who has vanished from a nearby hotel. The mood at Forst Corner is already tense: Mrs. Bramson berates Dora for minor infractions, threatening her job until Dora, desperate, mentions her boyfriend Danny (Robert Montgomery), a page at the hotel. Danny arrives, bringing with him an air of breezy enchanment and a hint of something darker.

The arrival of Danny (Robert Montgomery), a disarmingly charming handyman engaged to the maid Dora, sets the plot in motion. Danny’s calculated charisma—a blend of Irish brogue and predatory charm—masks a sinister core, as evidenced by his unnerving habit of carrying a locked hatbox and his eerie fixation on decapitation. When a local woman is found murdered and headless near the estate, Olivia’s suspicions escalate into a visceral battle of wits and wills, torn between her dread of Danny and a dangerous, reluctant attraction.

He flatters Mrs. Bramson, quickly discerning her need for attention and motherly affection, and manipulates her into offering him a job as her personal attendant. Olivia is immediately suspicious, her intuition pricked by Danny’s effortlessly insincere charm and inconsistencies—she catches him lying about a shawl supposedly belonging to his mother, the price tag still attached.

As Danny insinuates himself into the household, the film’s tension ratchets up. Olivia’s suspicions are dismissed by Mrs. Bramson, who is increasingly besotted with Danny, calling him “my boy” and basking in his attentions.

Danny’s seduction of Mrs. Bramson’s affections in Night Must Fall is as cunning as it is seemingly innocent, and chocolates are one of his secret weapons. For Mrs. Bramson, chocolates aren’t just a treat—they’re a rare, almost forbidden luxury, a symbol of indulgence and comfort that she seldom allows herself. Living in her self-imposed isolation, surrounded by servants who resent her and a niece who barely tolerates her, Mrs. Bramson is starved for genuine attention and pleasure. Danny, with his instinctive knack for reading people’s desires, recognizes this immediately. He offers her chocolates with a flourish and a conspiratorial wink, transforming a simple sweet into a gesture of intimacy and delight. In Danny’s hands, chocolate becomes both a treat and a trap!

Danny, meanwhile, observes everything—Mrs. Bramson’s habit of locking cash in her safe, the routines of the staff, and Olivia’s wary intelligence. The outside world intrudes when Mrs. Bramson’s attorney, Justin, warns her about keeping so much cash at home, and the police visit to inquire about the missing Mrs. Shellbrook. The threat is close: a headless body is soon discovered in the woods near the house, and the entire village buzzes with morbid curiosity.

The discovery of the body brings a macabre celebrity to Mrs. Bramson’s house; she relishes the attention, even as Olivia’s anxiety grows. Danny’s duplicity becomes more apparent as he juggles his attentions between Dora (whom he has gotten pregnant and now avoids), Mrs. Bramson, and Olivia, whose mixture of suspicion and reluctant attraction to Danny gives their scenes a charged ambiguity. In a chilling sequence, the curious and suspicious household searches Danny’s belongings for evidence, their curiosity piqued by his heavy, locked hatbox—a possible hiding place for the missing head. Olivia, torn between fear and fascination, intervenes to protect him, claiming the hatbox as her own when the police arrive. This act, both reckless and intimate, binds her fate to Danny’s and deepens the film’s psychosexual undercurrents.

The film’s atmosphere, shaped by Ray June’s cinematography, is thick with shadow and silence: ticking clocks, creaking floorboards, and the omnipresent threat of violence. One of the most striking visual moments occurs after the body is found. This sequence isolates Danny in his dimly lit bedroom after the victim’s discovery:

Danny, alone in his room, is seen through his window, a box of light in the darkness, the camera tracking inward until ot hovers intimately, trapping us alongside his panic, his bravado stripped away. As night falls, the household fragments. Olivia, unable to bear the tension, leaves, urging Mrs. Bramson to do the same. The other servants depart, leaving Mrs. Bramson alone in the house with Danny. The old woman, now frightened by the noises and shadows she once dismissed, calls for Danny, who soothes her with gentle words and a drink—then, in a moment of cold calculation, suffocates her and empties her safe.

Danny’s murder of Mrs. Bramson unfolds with the chilling intimacy of a lullaby turned lethal. In the hush of the night, as shadows pool around the edges of her bed, he leans in with the gentleness of a dutiful son—his voice soft, his hands steady. The pillow, so often a symbol of comfort and rest, becomes in his grasp a velvet shroud. He lowers it, slow and deliberate, as if tucking her in against the world’s cruelties, but instead, he seals her away from breath and the morning that will never come for her again. The room fills with the silence of withheld air, the weight of unspoken terror pressing down until her struggles ebb, and the only sound left is the faint, final sigh of a life quietly extinguished beneath the guise of his affection and devoted care.

The film’s tension crescendos through the masterful cinematography by Ray June (he also directed two other psychological thrillers Barbary Coast (1935) – Nominated for an Academy Award for cinematography, which blends adventure with noirish visual style, and in 1950 Shadow on the Wall), who uses shadow and framing to mirror Danny’s fractured psyche.

Olivia returns, compelled by a need to confront the truth. She finds Danny preparing to burn the house and destroy the evidence. In a final confrontation, Danny confesses his resentment at being “looked down upon,” his sense of entitlement, and his belief that murder is his only way to assert himself. Danny tells her, “You’re afraid of yourself, aren’t you? You’re like me, really. Only you’re afraid to admit it.”

Olivia, her attraction now replaced by horror, tells him she sees him for what he is—a killer, as Danny moves to silence her. This visual claustrophobia amplifies the narrative’s dread, particularly as Danny’s facade crumbles—first suffocating Mrs. Bramson in her bed, then confessing to Olivia with manic glee, “Everything I love… dies.” The climax, where Danny prepares to burn the house with Olivia inside, is interrupted only by the timely arrival of Justin and the police, exposing his madness in a final, shattering confrontation.

The film’s power lies in its performances. Production anecdotes abound: Montgomery, captivated by the play, “badgered” MGM into casting him and funded part of the shoot, while Sherwood Forest, California, doubled for the English countryside. Robert Montgomery, cast against type, delivers a mesmerizing portrayal of Danny—a charming sociopath whose menace is all the more chilling for being cloaked in wit and vulnerability. Robert Montgomery’s performance as Danny remains the film’s spine, subverting his typical “matinee idol” persona to embody a narcissistic sociopath. Critics of the day were astonished; the National Board of Review named it the best film of 1937, and Montgomery received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. His Oscar-nominated portrayal balances seductive wit with volcanic menace, particularly in scenes where he toys with Olivia’s fraying nerves.

Dame May Whitty, reprising her stage role, is equally compelling as Mrs. Bramson, her imperiousness giving way to terror in her final moments. It earned a Supporting Actress nomination for her turn as the manipulative matriarch, whose gullibility masks a latent terror. Rosalind Russell, in an early dramatic role, though initially overlooked, delivers a nuanced Olivia—icy yet vulnerable, hinting at the comedic prowess she’d later hone. She brings depth to Olivia’s conflicted intelligence and suppressed longing.

Let’s be honest: the true unsung heroines of Night Must Fall aren’t just the ones cowering in the shadow of Danny’s hatbox—they’re the two central staff women, each a comic archetype and a minor miracle of casting. First, we have Merle Tottenham’s Dora, the “pretty but naive and submissive” maid who spends the film in a state of perpetual fluster, as if she’s just remembered she left the kettle on and possibly also the back door open for a murderer.

Tottenham, who had a knack for playing the eternally put-upon servant (see her in This Happy Breed or Cavalcade), brings to Dora a kind of wide-eyed, breathless panic—she’s the sort of girl who’d apologize to a doorknob for bumping into it, and who, when confronted with a crisis, looks as if she’s about to faint into the nearest teacup. Then there’s Kathleen Harrison’s Mrs. Terence, the Cockney cook who is, frankly, the only person in the household with both feet on the ground and a tongue sharp enough to slice bread. Harrison’s style is pure British working-class comedy—she’s got a face like a weathered apple and the kind of voice that can cut through Mrs. Bramson’s self-pity like a hot knife through suet pudding. Mrs. Terence is the comic relief and the unofficial head of the Bramson household, forever muttering about her employer’s “malingering” and not above telling the old bat exactly what everyone else is too terrified to say. She’s the only one who isn’t remotely cowed by Mrs. Bramson’s theatrics, and she provides a much-needed dose of reality (and sarcasm) whenever the suspense threatens to get too thick.

Together, Dora and Mrs. Terence are like a mismatched vaudeville act: Dora, the human embodiment of a nervous squeak, and Mrs. Terence, the world-weary cynic with a rolling pin and a comeback for every occasion. They’re the glue that holds the Bramson house together, even as the whole place teeters on the edge of melodramatic disaster. If you ask me, they’re the only two who’d survive a sequel—Dora by accident, Mrs. Terence by sheer force of will and a well-timed eye-roll.

Contemporary critics were polarized. While some reviewers praised the film’s intelligence and restraint. “A marvelous, suspenseful, tension-filled, atmospheric thriller with absolutely NO ‘blood and guts’… the epitome of an intelligent horror film,” wrote one critic, noting that the film “really did give me the creeps and frightened me, especially in its closing scenes.” Others admired the adaptation’s ability to transcend its stage origins, crediting Thorpe’s direction and June’s cinematography for creating a sense of claustrophobic dread

While the New York Daily News hailed Montgomery’s “eminent position among top-notchers,” Graham Greene dismissed it as “a long, dim film… no more than a photographed stage play”

Audiences, warned by MGM’s unprecedented disclaimer trailer about the film’s “spurious content,” flocked regardless, drawn by its psychological audacity. Retrospectively, the film is celebrated for pioneering themes of repressed sexuality and class resentment—Danny’s rage at being “looked down upon” mirrors the era’s social anxieties—and its influence on later thrillers like Psycho is unmistakable.

Production anecdotes abound: Montgomery, captivated by the play, “badgered” MGM into casting him and funded part of the shoot, while Sherwood Forest, California, doubled for the English countryside.

Despite its tepid box office, Night Must Fall endures as a fine example of suspense, proving that true horror lies not in sensationalism or gore, but in the slow unraveling of a smile that hides a panicked scream.

Night Must Fall endures not just as a psycho-sexual horror film but as a proto-noir classic, remarkable for its psychological complexity, its subversion of genre expectations, and its exploration of the darkness lurking beneath ordinary lives. Its legacy is seen in later thrillers that probe the mind of the killer, and in its refusal to offer easy answers or catharsis. The film’s final image—Danny, exposed and defeated, but still defiant—lingers as a warning: evil is not always monstrous in appearance, but may arrive with a smile and a song at the door.

SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR 1947

There’s a singular, haunted beauty to Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door (1947), a film that feels like wandering through a dream where every corridor leads deeper into the labyrinth of the mind, like the myriad doors in Michael Redgrave’s murder tableaux in the film. It’s a work that wears its influences on its sleeve—Bluebeard 1944, Rebecca 1940, Gaslight 1944, and the Freudian fever of its era—but what Lang conjures is something uniquely his own: a psychological thriller that’s both lush and claustrophobic, as much a love letter to Gothic romance as it is a meditation on the architecture of fear.

The story begins with Celia Barrett, played by Joan Bennett with a mix of cool sophistication and vulnerable curiosity, an heiress whose life of privilege is upended by the sudden death of her brother. Celia’s older brother, Rick, dies early in the film, leaving her with a large trust fund and setting the story in motion. Adrift, she takes a holiday in Mexico, where she meets the enigmatic architect Mark Lamphere, portrayed by Michael Redgrave in his first Hollywood role. Their whirlwind romance is painted in sun-drenched colors, but even here, shadows flicker at the edges—a playful locking-out on their honeymoon turns into Mark’s abrupt withdrawal, and Celia is left alone, already sensing the chill that lies beneath his charm.

In Secret Beyond the Door, the moment when Mark Lamphere realizes his attraction to Celia is charged with a kind of electric, forbidden energy that lingers long after the scene fades. It happens in Mexico, in the thick of a sun-drenched plaza, where Celia and friend Edith (Natalie Schafer) stumble upon a knife fight erupting between two men over a woman. The violence is raw, almost ritualistic—a duel as old as myth, with the crowd pressing in, the air shimmering with heat and danger. Celia is transfixed, not recoiling but instead drawn in, her eyes wide with a secret thrill. She watches the woman at the center of the storm and, with a flicker of envy, wonders what it must feel like to inspire such passion—how proud that woman must be to cause death in the streets.

It’s here, in this fevered moment, that Mark notices Celia. He’s watching her as much as she’s watching the fight, his gaze like a hand tracing the outline of her excitement. There’s a current between them—Celia later describes it as “eyes touching me like fingers,” a tingling at the nape of her neck as if the air itself had turned cool and electric.

The violence in the street becomes a kind of mirror, reflecting the turbulence inside both of them. Mark is captivated by the hush before Celia’s smile, likening her to “wheat country before a cyclone—a flat, gold, shimmering stillness,” and when she smiles, it’s like the first gust of wind bending the fields, hinting at the storm beneath.

In that instant, the knife fight is more than a spectacle—it’s a catalyst, a spark that draws these two haunted souls together. Celia, intoxicated by the spectacle of danger and desire, finds herself seen in a way she never has before. Mark, in turn, is drawn not just to her beauty, but to the darkness he recognizes in her—a shared taste for the edge, for the thrill that comes just before chaos. The scene is a dance of glances and unsaid words, a duel played out not with knives but with longing, and it sets the tone for everything that follows: a love story built on the precipice of violence, where passion and peril are forever entwined.

The wedding in Secret Beyond the Door is a fevered vision—Lang’s camera lingers on the Mexican church, its arches and iconography forming a halo around Celia and Mark as they exchange vows. Circles and rings are everywhere: the semi-circular archway framing the church entrance, the ring of candles around the wishing well, the domed balcony railings, and the wedding ring itself—a motif that pulses with both promise and foreboding. The church is thick with religious imagery: saints gazing down in silent witness, the Virgin’s sorrowful eyes, and the flicker of votive candles casting halos of light and shadow. It’s a sacred space, but also a threshold—one that Celia, radiant and a little uncertain, steps across with a sense of both hope and gathering storm.

After the ceremony, the couple retires to their hacienda. There’s a lush, almost erotic haze to these honeymoon scenes: Celia, still in her bridal glow, is attended by a local woman who helps brush out her hair, the ritual both intimate and faintly ceremonial. The bedroom is airy, with white curtains billowing in the heat, and the world outside is all fountains and birdsong. But beneath the languor, tension coils. Mark, playful and teasing, is locked out of the bedroom by Celia—just a bit of newlywed mischief, she thinks, a way to prolong the anticipation. But when he finally returns, his mood has shifted. The playful spark in his eyes is replaced by a sudden chill; he’s distant, almost wounded, and soon after, he announces he must leave for urgent business in America, leaving Celia alone in the echoing villa.

That night—their wedding night—becomes the first fracture in Celia’s fairy tale. The lock on the bedroom door, meant as a flirtatious gesture, has instead triggered something dark and unresolved in Mark. She senses it at once: the way he withdraws, the way the room seems to grow colder, the sense that she’s suddenly on the wrong side of a threshold. The circular imagery that surrounded their union vanishes, replaced by the linear, shadowy corridors of the hacienda as Celia wanders, searching for her absent husband, her white nightgown ghostly in the moonlight.

It is only later that she understands the significance of that night—how her innocent prank awakened Mark’s childhood trauma, his terror of locked doors, and set in motion the chain of suspicion, secrecy, and psychological peril that will haunt their marriage. For all its beauty, the wedding is less a beginning than an initiation: a crossing into a world where love and danger are forever entwined, and every locked door is a question waiting to be answered.

When Celia arrives at Mark’s sprawling New England estate, Blade’s Creek, the film’s true atmosphere settles in: a house as much a character as any of its inhabitants, filled with locked doors, echoing hallways, and secrets that seem to seep from the walls. Here, Lang’s gift for visual storytelling is everywhere—Stanley Cortez’s chiaroscuro cinematography bathes the interiors in pools of light and shadow, every corner a potential hiding place for the past.

The supporting cast is a gallery of Gothic archetypes: Anne Revere as Caroline, Mark’s severe sister; Barbara O’Neil as Miss Robey, the veiled, enigmatic secretary whose scarred face and secretive manner recall Mrs. Danvers from Rebecca; and Mark’s estranged son David, who whispers to Celia that his father murdered his first wife.

The house itself is a museum of violence. Mark, whose fascination with murder borders on obsession, has built a wing of rooms that are meticulous recreations of infamous murder scenes—each one a shrine to a crime of passion, each one haunted by the memory of a woman’s death. At a party, Mark leads his guests through these rooms, narrating the grisly histories with a collector’s pride, but when they reach the seventh room, the door is locked and Mark refuses to open it. The tension is palpable, and Celia’s curiosity becomes a compulsion: what secret lies beyond that door?

As Celia settles into her new role as wife and detective, the film’s psychological machinery clicks into place. She is both observer and participant, her interior monologue (aided by Joan Bennett’s voiceover) guiding us through her mounting unease. Mark’s behavior grows more erratic—tender one moment, distant and cold the next, as if he’s at war with himself. Celia’s investigation brings her into uneasy alliance and rivalry with Miss Robey, who is revealed to be faking her disfigurement to keep her place in the household and whose loyalty to Mark is tinged with jealousy and resentment.

The pivotal moment comes when Celia, having stolen Mark’s key and made a copy, finally enters the forbidden seventh room. What she finds is a perfect replica of her own bedroom, a chilling confirmation of her worst fears: Mark has built a murder room for her, just as he did for his first wife. The revelation is underscored by Miklós Rózsa’s lush, anxiety-laced score, and for a moment, the film teeters on the edge of horror and a true merging of suspense and noir.

Mark’s violent aversion to lilacs in Secret Beyond the Door is rooted in a deeply traumatic childhood memory that becomes one of the film’s most potent psychological triggers. Lilacs are not just flowers for Mark—they are a symbol of betrayal, abandonment, and the suffocating pain of being locked away, both literally and emotionally.

The history behind this is revealed in the film’s climactic sequence, when Celia, determined to confront Mark’s compulsion and save him, brings the lilacs with her to the infamous seventh room, where she waits for Mark, forcing him to confront the buried trauma at the heart of his homicidal urges. The sight and smell of the lilacs, combined with the locked door, trigger his psychological crisis. The room, the perfect replica of her bedroom, is surrounded by lilacs. As she sits with the flowers, she urges Mark to search his mind, to dig back into the memories he’s kept locked away as tightly as the murder room itself. It’s here that Mark’s trauma comes pouring out: as a child, he adored his mother, who filled their home with lilacs. One summer afternoon, after helping her gather armfuls of the fragrant blooms, Mark was promised a bedtime story. But when he went to her room that night, he found the door locked—his mother had gone out dancing, leaving him behind. In his anguish, he pounded on the door until his hands bled, and when he saw her drive away with another man, his love curdled into hatred. In a fit of grief and rage, he crushed the lilacs they had picked together, associating their scent forever with loss and betrayal.

Celia’s use of lilacs is deliberate and pivotal in the film’s final act. Celia flees, but love and obsession draw her back. Mark, tormented by urges he cannot control, confesses his compulsion to kill her. In a climax that is as Freudian as it is melodramatic, Celia helps Mark confront the truth: it was NOT his mother, but his sister, who locked him in as a child. This moment of revelation breaks the spell, allowing him to reclaim his sanity and ultimately, their chance at redemption, but they are interrupted by Miss Robey, who, believing Celia to be alone, locks the couple in the murder room and sets the house ablaze. In a final act of will, Mark breaks down the door, saving Celia and himself from the fire—and from the cycle of violence that haunted them both.

The film closes with Mark and Celia resuming their honeymoon in Mexico, Mark declaring that she has “killed the root of the evil in him.” It’s a conclusion that strains credulity, but in Lang’s hands, it feels less like a tidy resolution and more like the closing of a dream—a return to the surface, but not without scars.

Critics of the day were divided. Some found it ‘overwhelming’ and ‘transformative.’ Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called the film a pretty silly yarn,” but admitted that Lang “knows how to turn the obvious… into strangely tingling stuff.” Variety found it arty and almost surrealistic, while others dismissed it as synthetic psychological suspense incredibility wrapped in a gravity so pretentious it is to laugh.”

Yet even detractors acknowledged the film’s atmosphere, its “precisely-articulated suspense,” and its exquisite visual composition. Later critics, like Jonathan Rosenbaum, have argued that the film’s very murkiness is its strength, and some have gone so far as to call it one of Lang’s greatest American films—a rare Hollywood art-movie, as beautiful as it is strange.

What lingers about Secret Beyond the Door is not its logic, but its mood: the sense of wandering through a house built from memory and fear, where every locked door is a question and every answer is another mystery. Joan Bennett’s performance is a study in controlled anxiety, Michael Redgrave’s Mark is a man fractured by his own mind, and Lang’s direction is a vivid illustration of how to turn the architecture of a house—and a marriage—into a map of the unconscious. It’s a film that may not always make sense, but like the best dreams, it’s impossible to forget.

Secret Beyond the Door (1947) Freud, Lang, the Dream State, and Repressed Poison

NIGHT OF THE HUNTER 1955

I’ll soon be diving deep into The Night of the Hunter with a full-blown essay that explores every shadow and shimmer of Charles Laughton’s singular directorial vision. This piece will be part of a larger feature examining Robert Mitchum’s unforgettable turns as malevolent forces—first as the preacher Harry Powell in Night of the Hunter, and then as the relentless Max Cady in J. Lee Thompson’s Cape Fear 1962. I’ll look at how Mitchum’s performances redefined cinematic villainy, the directors who shaped these films, and the way each story blends nightmare, suspense, and a kind of dark poetry. Stay tuned for an in-depth journey into the heart of darkness—twice over.

“A Hymn in Shadow: The Night of the Hunter and the Spell of Laughton’s Dark Fairytale:

There are films that haunt you, and then there is The Night of the Hunter 1955—a fever dream of a movie that feels as if it was conjured from the deepest, most mythic well of American storytelling.

Charles Laughton’s one and only directorial effort, this 1955 masterpiece is less a conventional thriller than a dark lullaby, a parable sung in chiaroscuro and river mist. It’s the kind of film that, once you’ve seen it, never really lets you go; it lingers in the mind like a half-remembered nightmare, or the echo of a hymn drifting through a balmy summer night, serenaded by the haunting songs of chorus frogs.

Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955) unfolds like a Grimm fairy tale dipped in ink and moonlight—a singular, haunting vision from an actor-director who never again stepped behind the camera, poured his love for German Expressionism and silent-era lyricism into this Gothic fable of innocence stalked by evil.

Though dismissed upon release and a box-office failure, time has crowned it a masterpiece, a film where every shadow whispers and every ray of light feels like a benediction. Roger Ebert has referred to it as an expressionistic oddity, telling its chilling story through visual fantasy,” and Mitchum’s performance as uncannily right for the role, with his long face, his gravel voice, and the silky tones of a snake-oil salesman.

Laughton, better known as an actor of thunderous presence, approached this project with the reverence of a convert. He called Davis Grubb’s source novel “a nightmarish Mother Goose story,” and that’s exactly what he set out to make: a tale where lambs wander the meadow, shadowed by a circling hawk, and the world is at once magical and menacing. He poured his soul into every frame, drawing on his love of a time when silent cinema and German Expressionism reigned, and collaborating with cinematographer Stanley Cortez to create a visual language that feels both ancient and startlingly modern.

Laughton’s vision was a literal baptism by fire. He approached the film with reverence for visual storytelling, studying silent classics like The Birth of a Nation to “restore the power of silent films to talkies.” He battled the Production Code over the depiction of a murderous preacher and reshaped James Agee’s overlong script into a taut, poetic blueprint. His direction was intimate and experimental: he kept composer Walter Schumann on set, let cameras roll continuously like silent reels, and encouraged improvisation. For Laughton, this was less a film than an incantation—a chance to conjure “the feeling that this is a Christmas party wrapped up in a beautiful package” (Cortez, ASC). His sole directorial effort became his legacy: a dark, devotional work about the war between light and shadow.

Cortez’s camera using Tri-X film is a chiaroscuro dreamscape, turning Depression-era West Virginia into an expressionist shadowy fable, where silhouettes stretch across bedroom walls and the river glows with luminous, phosphorescent, and inky blacks amidst the moonlight. The film’s look is pure storybook—if your childhood storybooks were illustrated by nightmares and illuminated by the soft glow of redemption. Crafting silhouettes as sermons, Powell’s hulking shadow against walls, fingers splayed like claws, and water as both grave and womb: Willa’s corpse serene in a submerged car; the children’s boat drifting past skeletal trees, scored by Walter Schumann’s lullaby of dread. The forced perspectives: miniature sets for Powell’s horseback pursuit, dwarfed by an artificial moon. Laughton and Cortez painted with light like Caravaggio—every frame a chapel of contrasts.

The Preacher’s Obsession: Love, Hate, and Holy Terror:

At the film’s heart slithers Robert Mitchum’s Reverend Harry Powell, who is at the core of the “light” that is hunted by the gathering wolves of darkness – a wolf in preacher’s clothing. With “LOVE” and “HATE” tattooed on his knuckles—a sermon prop for his biblical tales of Cain and Abel—Powell weaponizes scripture to mask his greed. Mitchum’s performance is a symphony of menace: velvet-voiced charm transformed into reptilian coldness. His obsession isn’t just the $10,000 hidden by executed thief Ben Harper; it’s the corruption of purity itself. He marries Ben’s widow, Willa (Shelley Winters), not for companionship but to hunt the secret only her children, the sacrificial lambs -John and Pearl, hold. The tattoos become a visual mantra: “H-A-T-E” clawing at “L-O-V-E,” a duality mirrored in every frame.

The story itself unfolds with the inevitability of folklore. Ben Harper (Peter Graves), a desperate father, hides stolen cash in his daughter Pearl’s doll before being arrested and hanged. His last words to his son John are a warning, that haunts like a curse, and a prayer all at once: “Then swear you won’t never tell where the money’s hid, not even your Ma.”

Enter Robert Mitchum as Reverend Harry Powell, jailed with Ben, who learns of the money. Released, he rides into town like a plague—a locomotive’s smoke echoing his menace. He’s a false prophet who drifts into town on a cloud of scripture and snake oil. Mitchum’s performance is a thing of terrible beauty—he’s all velvet menace and sly charm, with existential, contrary forces tattooed on his knuckles, fingers dancing as he delivers his sermon. He is the wolf in the pulpit, a preacher whose obsession is not just with the hidden money, but with the very souls of the children he hunts.

Powell woos and weds Willa Harper, played by Shelley Winters, who paints Willa with the sacrificial fragility of a trembling sparrow. Willa Harper casts a long and sorrowful shadow over the lives of her children in Night of the Hunter.

Her vulnerability and desperate longing for stability make her susceptible to the predatory charm of Harry Powell, and in opening the door to him, she unwittingly ushers in a force of destruction that upends the sanctuary she tries to maintain for John and Pearl. Winters’ performance is layered with emotional complexity—she embodies a woman so starved for affection and guidance that she confuses Powell’s manipulative piety for salvation, surrendering her own instincts and, by extension, her children’s safety.

And her own safety – her murder—a throat slit in moonlit silhouette, her body dumped in a river—is a still life of martyrdom, seaweed tangling in her hair like a crown of thorns. Winters turns Willa into a moth drawn to Powell’s flame, her sexual longing sublimated into religious fervor as he denies her even the comfort of a wedding bed. Their marriage is a mausoleum; the bridal suite becomes a shrine of denial. Her sexual frustration darkens into religious mania after Powell denies her intimacy, transforming her bedroom into a coffin-like chapel, with Willa praying for forgiveness as Powell’s shadow looms over her.

When she overhears him threaten Pearl, her fate is sealed. In one of cinema’s most unforgettable tableaux, after he slits her throat in their bed -her bloodless face framed like a saint in a shrine, Willa’s body floats underwater, hair streaming like river grass, her face serene as a martyr’s beneath the surface—death rendered as a tragic benediction. Willa’s lifeless body is perhaps one of the most startling, terrifying images in cinematic history.

John and Pearl, now orphaned in all but name, become the film’s true protagonists. Their flight down the river is a passage through a landscape of nightmare and wonder: barn owls blink from rafters, frogs croak in the reeds, and the world seems both vast and intimate, as if the children are drifting through the pages of a haunted picture book. Cortez’s cinematography turns the river into a ribbon of silver, the children’s small boat, like a cradle adrift between darkness and dawn. The journey is scored by Walter Schumann’s lullaby, a melody that is equal parts comfort and warning.

Pearl, cradling her doll stuffed with stolen cash, the children’s river escape becomes an odyssey through a dreamlike American Gothic. John’s watchful eyes hold the weight of lost innocence; Pearl’s doll is a totem of childhood co-opted by sin. As they flee in their skiff, with Powell’s silhouette howling from the shore, their journey—past ghostly barns and kind strangers—feels like a passage through limbo.

Their pursuer, Powell, is never far behind. His silhouette—horse and rider—stalks the horizon, a living shadow that seems to grow with every mile—a true boogeyman in pursuit. But in actuality, the chase is less a pursuit and more like a ritual, a testing of faith and will. It’s only when the children reach the sanctuary of Rachel Cooper, played by the legendary Lillian Gish, that the spell is broken.

Gish, silent-cinema royalty, embodies divine strength. Her Rachel is the film’s moral center—a Mother Goose with a shotgun gathering lost children beneath her wing and facing down Powell’s evil with hymns and unflinching resolve.
—She wields a shotgun and scripture with equal grit. She is Powell’s antithesis: light to his shadow, singing hymns not to seduce but as sanctuary. “I’m a strong tree with branches for many birds. I’m good for something in this world, and I know it, too.”

This line beautifully captures Rachel’s role as the steadfast protector and nurturer of lost and vulnerable children, standing in stark contrast to the darkness that stalks them. In the film’s crescendo, Powell lurks outside Rachel’s home. Their showdown is a battle of songs—Powell’s “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” answered by Rachel’s own hymn, the house divided by music and conviction.

The climax comes in Rachel’s barn, where Powell is cornered, finally revealed, and arrested, his power broken not by violence but by the steadfastness of love and the resilience of innocence. The stolen money spills from Pearl’s doll, raining cash- a mockery of his quest and all the preacher’s greed and blasphemy. In the film’s closing moments, as Christmas dawns and Rachel gathers her “little lambs” around her, the story circles back to its beginning—a tale of endurance, of abiding through the night until the light returns.

When The Night of the Hunter was released, critics and audiences didn’t know what to make of it. The New York Times’ original review of The Night of the Hunter, written by Bosley Crowther, described the film as “a weird and intriguing endeavor,” later calling it “audacious” and a difficult thesis.” In more recent years, The New York Times has called The Night of the Hunter“haunting and highly personal… clearly the work of a master.”

It was a box-office disappointment, leaving Laughton so wounded he never directed again. But time has vindicated his vision. The film is now considered one of the greatest American movies ever made—and I would agree – a work of art that fuses horror, noir, and fairytale into something wholly original. Mitchum’s preacher, with his tattooed hands and velvet croon, is an icon of cinematic evil; Gish’s Rachel is his perfect foil, a reminder that goodness, though battered, endures.

Its DNA threads through the Coens’ Fargo, Scorsese’s chiaroscuro, and del Toro’s Gothic romances. Laughton, who never directed again, crafted a sermon on the fragility of goodness—a film where evil wears a revivalist’s smile, and salvation floats on a river under a sky “full of stars meant for everyone.” In the end, it is less a thriller than a psalm: a testament to the children who outrun the wolf, and the light that outlives the dark.

Laughton once said he wanted to make a film “full of the poetry of dread,” and that’s exactly what he achieved. The Night of the Hunter is a hymn sung in shadow, a story where love and hate wrestle in the dark, and where, against all odds, the children abide. Rachel reflected on the resilience of children, specifically John and Pearl, but also all the vulnerable, innocent souls she cares for. After the harrowing ordeal they’ve survived, she looks at the children gathered around her and says: “They abide, and they endure.”

#107 down, 43 to go! Your EverLovin’ Joey, formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl!

MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #42 DEAD OF NIGHT 1945 / FLESH AND FANTASY 1943 / CARNIVAL OF SINNERS 1943

DEAD OF NIGHT 1945

Dead of Night (1945) is A masterclass in haunting anthology storytelling. The 1945 British film stands as a landmark in horror cinema, weaving together five distinctively eerie and macabre tales within a framing narrative that loops back on itself like a nightmare refusing to end.

Produced by Ealing Studios—a studio better known for its whimsical comedies—the film marked a bold departure into the supernatural realm, blending psychological tension, literary inspiration, and the beauty of technical innovation.

Directed collaboratively by one of my favorite underrated directors Basil Dearden (Victim 1961, All Night Long 1962 and perhaps one of the best heist movies The League of Gentleman 1960) Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, and another terrific British director Robert Hamer (Kind Hearts and Coronets 1949 where Alec Guiness’s shine’s in eight separate irreverant roles and It Always Rains on Sunday 1947  collaborating once again  with Hamer, Googie Withers in an outstanding performance.) With a screenplay by John Baines, Angus MacPhail, and T.E.B. Clarke, Dead of Night remains a landmark in anthology horror, influencing everything from The Twilight Zone to the portmanteaus of extravagance of Hammer to the little horror studio that could, Amicus’s (1972’s Asylum, Tales From the Crypt) modern psychological horror thrillers.

Douglas Slocombe worked at Ealing Studios and created classics like Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1952), and The Man in the White Suit (1951). His cinematography subtly amplifies the film’s unease by playing with contrasts of light and shadow, reality and illusion. Its seamless blend of gothic atmosphere and psychological complexity resonated deeply with audiences trying to navigate the uncertainties of the post-war era.

A Dream That Won’t End & The Tales of Unease in Five Acts:

The film opens with architect Walter Craig (Mervyn Johns) arriving at a country house in Kent, invited by owner Eliot Foley (Roland Culver) to consult on renovations. Craig is immediately unsettled: he recognizes the guests from a recurring dream that always ends in disaster. As Dr. van Straaten (Frederick Valk), a skeptical psychiatrist, dismisses Craig’s fears, the other guests share their own supernatural experiences, each story building toward the film’s chilling conclusion. Dearden does an incredible job of weaving the vignettes together, creating a sense of inevitability as Craig’s dread intensifies.

1. “The Hearse Driver” (Directed by Basil Dearden) Based on E.F. Benson’s short story “The Bus-Conductor,” this segment follows racing driver Hugh Grainger (Anthony Baird), who survives a crash only to encounter a hearse driver ominously declaring, “Room for one more, sir.” Later, the same phrase is uttered by a bus conductor (Miles Malleson), prompting Grainger to avoid hopping on board—Grainger narrowly avoids death after being haunted by the sinister premonition – a decision that saves his life when the bus crashes. Dearden’s taut direction and Douglas Slocombe’s shadowy cinematography turn this into a lesson in less is more: much of the time, abject fear thrives in simplicity.

2. “The Christmas Party” (Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti) Sally O’Hara (Sally Ann Howes) attends a holiday party and, during hide-and-seek, encounters the ghost of Francis Kent, a boy murdered by his sister in a case inspired by the real-life 1860 Constance Kent scandal. Cavalcanti infuses the segment with a gothic atmosphere, using mirrors and empty nurseries to evoke childhood innocence corrupted by violence. When Sally encounters the ghost of the murdered Victorian boy, it evokes the plight of wartime evacuees—children sent away from their families to unfamiliar and sometimes hostile environments. For audiences who had lived through these tragic upheavals, these stories must have struck a poignant chord.
3. “The Haunted Mirror” (Directed by Robert Hamer) Joan Cortland (Googie Withers) gifts her husband Peter (Ralph Michael) an antique mirror that reflects not their bedroom but a 19th-century chamber where its former owner, a jealous husband, whose frustrations led him to murder his wife. Joan’s fiancé, Peter, becomes possessed by the spirit of the Victorian patriarch. As Peter’s psyche merges with the mirror’s history, Hamer crafts a haunting exploration of possession and marital distrust. The segment, based on John Baines’s original story, benefits from Slocombe’s camerawork, which contrasts the warmth of the couple’s home with the mirror’s cold, distorted reality.

4. “The Golfer’s Story” (Directed by Charles Crichton) A rare comedic interlude, this segment—adapted from H.G. Wells’ “The Story of the Inexperienced Ghost”—follows two golf-obsessed friends (Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, reprising their The Lady Vanishes personas) who wager over a woman’s affection. When the loser drowns himself, his ghost returns to demand that the winner vanish instead. Though tonally lighter, Crichton’s direction underscores the absurdity of male rivalry, even in death. Class-based anxieties also surface in “The Golfer’s Story,” where Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne reprise their upper-class personas from earlier films but are caught in an absurd rivalry over love and death

5. “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy” (Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti) is the film’s most iconic segment because it masterfully combines psychological horror, surrealism, and deeply unsettling themes in a way that has rarely been matched. It stars Michael Redgrave with such neurotic verve as Maxwell Frere, a tormented ventriloquist driven to madness by his dummy, Hugo, who appears to have a life of his own. Hugo isn’t just a menacingly creepy doll; he embodies Frere’s fractured psyche, blurring the line between control and autonomy. The dummy’s primacy symbolizes fears of losing your identity—whether over one’s mind or one’s place in society—and echoes Freud’s concept of the uncanny, where familiar objects become disturbingly alien. As Hugo “defects” to rival performer Sylvester Kee (Hartley Power), Frere’s identity unravels in a crescendo of psychological torment and chaos. Director Cavalcanti’s Expressionist lighting and Redgrave’s unhinged performance—his descent into madness with every gesture and expression radiating fear, switching between Frere’s desperation and Hugo’s sneering malice—elevate this tale into a Freudian nightmare.

Redgrave’s portrayal of an artist consumed by his creation makes this particular segment a haunting exploration of identity and madness. The segment’s influence echoes in films like Richard Attenborough’s taut psychological thriller Magic (1978), starring Anthony Hopkins and Ann-Margret, and the iconic The Twilight Zone’s “The Dummy” (1962), starring Cliff Robertson.

Dead of Night 1945 thrives on the collaboration of Ealing’s talent. Cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, later famed for his work on Indiana Jones, uses high-contrast lighting and claustrophobic framing to heighten the film’s sense of dread. The ensemble cast—particularly Redgrave’s frenzied unhinged ventriloquist and Johns’ increasingly unmoored architect—deliver performances that ground the supernatural in a pervasive sense of human fragility.

The themes of fear and mortality in Dead of Night resonated deeply with audiences in post-war Britain, reflecting the psychological and societal anxieties of the time. Upon its release in September 1945, Dead of Night unsettled audiences emerging from the trauma of World War II, offering not escapism but a reflection of existential dread. Released just months after World War II ended, the film captured a nation grappling with the trauma of conflict, the uncertainty of the future, and the lingering specter of death.

The film’s bleak ending, where Craig is trapped in an endless loop of his dream, felt both nihilistic and urgent to audiences. Initially cut down in the U.S. (with the golfing and mirror segments removed), the restored version revealed a film ahead of its time, blending genres and experimenting with narrative structure. Its cyclical ending—where Craig’s nightmare begins anew—shows how potent fear is and how horror films that are ‘art’ can haunt us over and over again.

FLESH AND FANTASY 1943

Flesh and Fantasy (1943): A Dreamlike Exploration of Fate and Free Will

From The Vault: Flesh & Fantasy (1943)

Flesh and Fantasy, directed by Julien Duvivier, is a hauntingly elegant anthology film that is a dreamlike exploration of fate that blends supernatural intrigue with philosophical musings on destiny, free will, and the mysteries of human nature.

Released in 1943 by Universal Pictures, the film predates the better-known Dead of Night (1945) but shares a similar structure, weaving together three hauntingly atmospheric tales possessing elegance and emotional depth; it’s an early example of the portmanteau format of storytelling with strong artistic vision.

With its literary roots, striking visuals, and stellar cast, including Edward G. Robinson, Charles Boyer, Barbara Stanwyck, and Betty Field, Flesh and Fantasy is a forgotten gem in the history of supernatural cinema.

The film showcases three loosely connected tales tied together by a framing device featuring humorist Robert Benchley, whose lighthearted presence provides a contrast to the darker themes explored in each story. Each one dives into the push and pull between the choices we make and the strange, unseen forces that seem to guide our lives, blending romance, suspense, and just the right amount of eerie twists.

What makes Flesh and Fantasy so compelling is how each tale explores the delicate balance between the choices we make and the unseen forces that shape—or disrupt—our lives.

The surreal first segment, written by Ellis St. Joseph, has the spirit of a fairytale. Set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, it follows Henrietta (Betty Field), a plain, self-conscious, and embittered woman who secretly yearns for affable law student Michael (Robert Cummings).

Her life changes when she visits a strange mask shop where the mysterious shopkeeper (Edgar Barrier) gives her a beautiful white mask. However, she must only wear it that evening. And is warned that it must be returned by midnight. The masks in this sequence create an atmosphere of dreamlike transformation.

With her newfound confidence disguised by the mask, Henrietta attends a party where Michael falls for her beauty and charm – unaware of her true identity. As midnight approaches, Henrietta removes the mask only to discover that her newfound allure is no longer an illusion—It turns out it was her bitterness all along that had cast a shadow over her real beauty.

The second story, adapted from Oscar Wilde’s Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, features Edward G. Robinson as Marshall Tyler, a skeptical lawyer whose world is turned upside down when a palmist (Thomas Mitchell) predicts he’s destined to commit a murder.

Consumed by paranoia, leading him into increasingly dark territory, Tyler becomes obsessed with fulfilling his supposed destiny in order to rid himself of its looming shadow.

In a darkly ironic twist, his attempts to outsmart fate only drag him deeper into chaos until, in a fit of rage, he strangles the very palmist who made the prediction—fulfilling the prophecy he was so desperate to escape.

This segment is widely regarded as the strongest in the film due to Robinson’s intense performance and Stanley Cortez’s noir-inspired cinematography, which uses shadows and reflections to mirror Tyler’s fractured psyche.

The third tale features Charles Boyer as Paul Gaspar, a high-wire artist plagued by recurring dreams of falling to his death while a mysterious woman (Barbara Stanwyck) looks on in horror. When Paul crosses paths with Joan Stanley (Stanwyck)—the exact woman he’s been seeing in his dreams—he gets entangled in the wreckage of her troubled life, all while his own fears start to unravel his career.

The sequence builds to a gripping climax as Paul decides to confront his fate head-on during a daring tightrope act while Joan comes face to face with her own reckoning with the law. Written by László Vadnay, this segment stands out for its surreal dream sequences, brought to life through double exposures and moody, atmospheric lighting, making it both visually arresting and rich with thematic resonance.

Julien Duvivier brought his European sensibilities to Hollywood with Flesh and Fantasy, crafting a film that feels both sophisticated and otherworldly. Duvivier had previously directed Tales of Manhattan (1942), another anthology film that explored human frailty through interconnected stories. For Flesh and Fantasy, he collaborated with screenwriters Ernest Pascal and Samuel Hoffenstein to adapt stories by St. Joseph, Wilde, and Vadnay into a cohesive narrative.

Cinematographers Stanley Cortez (The Magnificent Ambersons 1942) and Paul Ivano infused the film with an Expressionistic style that heightens its dreamlike quality.

The use of shadows, reflections, and surreal imagery creates a hazy atmosphere where reality and fantasy seamlessly blur, drawing you into a mysterious and mesmerizing world. Alexandre Tansman’s moody score shifts between romantic melodies and ominous undertones.

Flesh and Fantasy was originally planned as a four-part anthology, but things shifted before its release. One of the stories, about an escaped convict who finds redemption through a blind girl, was cut after test screenings—even though audiences liked it. That segment didn’t disappear entirely, though; it was later expanded into its own feature film called Destiny (1944), directed by Reginald Le Borg.

Flesh and Fantasy is unique in that it avoids punishing its main characters for their inherent flaws; instead, there is the potential for them to learn something about themselves and maybe even find redemption though those moments of clarity; those shades of opportunity come at great cost.

The film truly deserves recognition as one of the earliest anthology films executed with beautifully artistic flair. Its blend of eerie supernatural intrigue, psychological complexity, and gorgeous visuals delivers Flesh and Fantasy to a secure place in cinematic history as a fascinating exploration of human nature—and a haunting reminder that our fates may not be entirely our own.

CARNIVAL OF SINNERS 1943

Sunday Nite Surreal: Daughter of Darkness (1948) & Carnival of Sinners (1943)-The Right Hand of God/The Left Hand of the Devil

Carnival of Sinners (originally titled La Main du Diable, or The Devil’s Hand) is a 1943 surreal French fantasy-horror film directed by Maurice Tourneur (Jacques Tourneur’s father), one of the silent era’s most celebrated auteurs. This darkly elegant film is based on Gérard de Nerval’s novel. It is a haunting exploration of morality, temptation, and redemption, seen through the lens of a cursed talisman—a macabre severed left hand—that grants the one who possesses it fame and fortune but at the cost of their eternal soul.

The film opens in an isolated mountain inn, cut off from the world by an avalanche. Roland Brissot (Pierre Fresnay), a famous painter missing his left hand, arrives carrying a mysterious casket. When his casket is stolen during a blackout, clearly uneasy, he reluctantly agrees to tell the other guests his story. We’re pulled into a flashback that reveals Brissot’s Faustian bargain and his frantic attempt to escape its terrifying consequences.

Brissot begins as a struggling artist in Paris who persuades Irène (Josseline Gaël), a glove shop worker, to pose for him. Frustrated by his lack of talent and success, he encounters Mélisse (Noël Roquevert), a chef who offers him a magical talisman that will grant him everything he desires—for the price of one sou (penny).

The talisman turns out to be a severed left hand that obeys commands and imbues Brissot with extraordinary artistic skill. Despite warnings from Ange (Pierre Larquey), an angelic figure, Brissot buys the hand and quickly rises to fame and riches. He marries Irène and signs his paintings under the pseudonym “Maximus Leo.” Soon after, however, he realizes that his success comes at a steep price: he must sell his hand at a loss before he dies or faces eternal damnation.

As Brissot struggles to rid himself of the cursed talisman, he encounters its previous owners—a musketeer, a thief, a juggler, an illusionist, and others—each recounting their tragic fates in stylized vignettes reminiscent of theatrical tableaux. The little man (Palau), representing the Devil, relentlessly pursues Brissot as he tries to escape his fate. Ultimately, Maximus Leo himself appears—a saintly monk whose hand was stolen centuries ago—and declares that all bargains are invalid since the Devil cannot sell what does not rightfully belong to him. Brissot must return the hand to Leo’s tomb to break the curse.

In the film’s big finale, Brissot faces off with the Devil in a tense showdown at the ruins of an old abbey. The fight ends with Brissot’s death, but nearby, the casket is discovered empty at Leo’s tomb—a powerful symbol of Brissot’s ultimate redemption.

Maurice Tourneur’s direction imbues Carnival of Sinners with a dreamlike, almost otherworldly moodiness, seamlessly blending elements of both fantasy and horror.

Known for his visual artistry in silent classics like The Wages of Sin (1915) and While Paris Sleeps (1923), Tourneur uses striking monochromatic imagery and noir-inspired shadows to create an atmosphere steeped in dread and paradox.

The vignettes featuring the talisman’s previous owners are especially memorable. They’re stylized tableaux with surreal visualizations that feel like a mix of Gothic theater and Expressionist cinema.

Cinematographer Armand Thirard—later celebrated for his work on Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Diabolique (1955) and The Wages of Fear (1953)—enhances Tourneur’s vision with dramatic lighting and carefully composed frames that emphasize the film’s themes of temptation and moral decay. The dance between light and shadow beautifully captures Brissot’s inner conflict, reflecting the weight of the choices he’s struggling to come to terms with.

Pierre Fresnay delivers a compelling performance as Roland Brissot, capturing both his initial arrogance and eventual desperation as he realizes the cost of his ambition.

Palau steals scenes as the Devil’s representative—a charming yet sinister figure whose mild-mannered demeanor disguises his ruthless pursuit of souls.

At its core, Carnival of Sinners is a morality play about human weakness and redemption. The film explores timeless themes such as greed, vanity, and the price of ambition through Brissot’s journey from naivety to self-awareness.

The cursed hand serves as both a literal object of temptation and a metaphor for humanity’s struggle with free will versus predestination. With its haunting imagery, nuanced performances, and thought-provoking themes,

Carnival of Sinners stands as one of Maurice Tourneur’s finest works—a reminder that even in darkness, there is room for redemption.

The story also reflects broader cultural anxieties tied to its production during World War II under Nazi-occupied France. Some critics have interpreted the film as an allegory for collaboration with evil forces—whether political or personal—and the moral compromises individuals make under pressure.

#42 down, 108 to go! Your EverLovin’ Joey, formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl!

Secret Beyond the Door (1947) Freud, Lang, the Dream State, and Repressed Poison

SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR (1947)

“Most people are asleep.”

“Wind was there and space and sun and storm”¦ everything’s beyond the door.”

Fritz Lang’s psychological film noir, Secret Beyond the Door (1947), is suggestive of a dream state, from which the characters never quite emerge. The film draws blurry lines between what is latent and obvious desire. The doors are symbolic of the compartmentalized anxieties within the dark recesses of the mind. Secret Beyond the Door is steeped in metaphor, sunless and surreal, and has an evocative score by Miklós Rózsa. Cinematography is by Stanley Cortez, who is responsible for another dream-like milieu in Night of the Hunter (1955). It was Joan Bennett who insisted on using Cortez as cinematographer.

The film co-stars marvelous character actor Anne Revere as Mark’s sister Caroline, Barbara O’Neil, Natalie Schafer, and Paul Cavanagh.

Bosley Crowther, “Lang is still a director who knows how to turn the obvious, such as locked doors and silent chambers and roving spotlights, into strangely tingling stuff.” For all its psycho-nonsense, this film is mildly creepy.”

The screenplay by Sylvia Richardson is based on Rufus King’s novel Museum Piece No. Thirteen also appeared in the December 1945 issue of Red Book.

Long ago I read a book that told the meaning of dreams. It said that if a girl dreams of a boat or a ship she will reach a safe harbor, but if she dreams of daffodils she is in great danger. But this is no time for me to think of danger. This is my wedding day. ““Celia Lamphere

The film opens with a voice-over by Joan Bennett. Celia Lamphere (Bennett) journeys through her surreal and sleepy addiction to her new husband, architect Mark Lamphere (Michael Redgrave). Celia’s obsessed with the suspicion that Mark is hiding hideous secrets; she plans to succumb to his murderous compulsions. But Mark is not the only one with creeping psychosis. Celia herself is driven by a troubled, neurotic psyche that initially drew her to his enigmatic nature.

Celia wanders through a corridor literally and metaphorically, first in a reverie and then a shadowy nightmare. She first meets Mark on a trip to Mexico when she is mesmerized by the power of passion, which can drive two men to fight each other to the death for a woman (Donna Martell). “How proud that woman must be to cause death in the streets.” She realizes that Mark is watching her excitement in this, his eyes like fingers. At that moment, Celia has a taste for danger. Like Mark, the thrill of death represents a strong aphrodisiac for her.

Celia: Suddenly I felt that someone was watching me. There was a tingling at the nape of my neck as though the air had turned cool. I felt eyes touching me like fingers. There was a current flowing between us… warm and sweet… and frightening, too, because he saw behind my make-up what no-one had ever seen. Something I didn’t know was there.

Throughout the film Celia strays from reality and finds herself adrift within a conscious flowing daydream. Her voice-over shows she is controlled by the intense beating of her heart. She relates the feeling to drowning “When you are drowning, your whole life flashes before your eyes.”

British actor Michael Redgrave made his U.S. film debut as Mark. Initially Lang wanted James Mason in the lead role. Mark turns dark and brooding soon after he marries his new bride. He has been married before and his first wife has died under curious circumstances. Also part of the plot is his serious young son David — who blames him for his mother’s death.

There is also, his strangely loyal secretary Miss Robey (Barbara O’Neil) who wears a scarf over one side of her face having been disfigured In a fire. One thinks of Rebecca later on. The film co-stars character actor Anne Revere as Mark’s sister Caroline.

Celia: I heard his voice and then I didn’t hear it anymore, because the beating of my blood was louder. This was what I’d hunted those foolish years in New York. I knew before I knew his name or touched his hand and for an endless moment, I seemed to float like a feather blown to a place where time had stopped.

Mark:You were living that fight. You soaked it all in – love, hate, the passion. You’ve been starved for feelings – any real feelings. I thought: 20th Century Sleeping Beauty. Wealthy American girl who has lived her life wrapped in cotton wool but she wants to wake up. Maybe she can.
Celia: Is it as hard as all that? 
Mark: Most people are asleep. 

Mark shows all the telltale signs that he is delusional, having a preoccupation with several murder rooms and one locked door #7 in his estate. He’s filled with macabre declarations, “I have a hobby collecting “˜felicitous’ rooms”, (Celia mistaking the word for happy, not “˜apt’ for murder) “the way a place is built determines what happens in it”, “certain rooms cause violence even murders.”

Mark Lamphere takes his guests on a tour of his murder rooms.

“As an architect Mark Lamphere gives particular credence to the influence of space and human lives. He repeatedly uses the word “felicitous” to describe his theory that elements of particular space make certain human actions possible. And therefor “˜apt’ for that locale.” “” The Dark Mirror Psychiatry and Film Noir by Marlisa Santos

Redgrave understands how to walk that fine line between innate intensity and male hysteria — one just needs to see his performance as Maxwell Frere in Dead of Night’s (1945) segment The Ventriloquist’s Dummy, where he wrestles with his “˜dummy partner’ Hugo.

Mark is fascinated by the connection between the action of murder and the significance of his locked rooms as psychological theatre. The film utilizes production design by Max Parker (Chandu, the Magician 1932, Arsenic and Old Lace 1944), who creates a dreamworld of disruptive psychosis. It’s within this fairytale steeped in misogyny that Redgrave wants to act out his fantasist murderous impulses. Secret Beyond the Door is a retelling of Bluebeard, the archetype of the serial killer who desires to annihilate women who dominate him. We see a hint of Mark’s roiling demons when he takes a group of party guests on a tour of his rooms as curios — original replicas of historic murders. One of his guests, a psychology major, associates the murder of a wife or lover with “unconscious hatred for the mother.”

Celia confronts Mark, “It was the way you immersed yourself in those stories you were almost happy about their deaths.”

“Probably the most overt Freudian depiction of noir psychosis is found in Secret Beyond the Door, a film that features various re-castings of fairy tale patterns bound up with the psychoanalytic interpretations of childhood trauma and sexual relationships. From the start, the film makes no artistic attempt to submerge its psychoanalysis frame [ ] all of Celia’s fears and desires are open for scrutiny from the time that she first encounters Mark.”The Dark Mirror Psychiatry and Film Noir by Marlisa Santos

She takes a subconscious journey, both surreal and substantive, as she navigates her new relationship with Mark and her awakened death wish.

During their honeymoon, Celia unleashes Mark’s sinister urges when she locks the door to their room. This catalyst brings his childhood trauma to the surface. As a young boy, he perceived a painful transgression by his mother. His recollection of this seemingly insignificant incident turned into hatred of all women, which has carried throughout his life. These machinations bring him to homicidal delusion. His memories are locked away just as his morbid rooms are showpieces.

Celia embraces her husband’s impulses, setting herself up within the replica frozen in time of the death room #7 meant for her. But she desires to unlock Mark’s subconscious as well as his locked room.

Celia- “This is my room, waiting for me.”

She waits with lilacs, waiting to trespass on the madness that has led him to this dark place. The link between love and death becomes interwoven as Celia prepares to sacrifice herself to Mark if she cannot save him from his tortured sickness. Kelly Oliver and Benigno Trigo cover Freud’s fascination with Eros/Thanatos in their analysis of Secret Beyond the Door, drawing this connection between love and death. Which, according to the film’s logic, death is love’s uncanny double.” 

“Inasmuch as closed space can be interpreted as cave’, the grave, a house, woman entry into it is interpreted on various levels as “˜death, conception’ return home and so on: moreover all these acts are thought of as mutually identical”.-Teresa de Lauretis

Mark’s voice-overs wrestle with the urge to strangle Celia if left alone with her. He imagines what he will say when asked if the murder was premeditated. Redgrave is framed within the scene by the prominent energy of his twisting a scarf as if he is preparing to strangle Celia. Holding the scarf, the murder weapon from Don Ignacio’s room, his voice-over gives us the sense of the film’s prowling unconsciousness. The darker counterpart to Celia’s dream-like twists and turns.

Mark: There’s something in your face that I saw once before in South Dakota. Wheat country. Cyclone weather. Just before the cyclone, the air has a stillness. A flat, gold, shimmering stillness. You have it in your face – the same hush before the storm and when you smile it’s like the first breath of wind bending down the wheat. I know that behind that smile is a turbulence that…” 

Mark’s Freudian Oedipal struggle with hatred for his mother and all women with latent murderous desire is never quite explored as deeply as it could be in the film. In a flashback, we understand that he has been shut out of his mother’s affection in one scene. Though here, murder seems to be an expression of male exasperation, one wonders if this was consequential in creating such a conflicted and disturbed monster?

“The symbolism of shutting Freud’s psychological door is present yet after all the Freudian iconography, the basic motivation lies still in the darkness, with one door closed, leaving us outside the Interior turmoil.” (Marlisa Santos)

*From Women in Film Noir Edited by E. Ann Kaplan

“In the threatening family mansions of the gothic, or in The Haunting’s evil old Hill House, a door, a staircase, a mirror, a portrait are never simply what they appear to be, as an image from Fritz Lang’s paranoid woman’s film’ Secret Beyond the Door. The title sums up the enigma of many of these films in which the question about the husband’s motives becomes an investigation of the house (and of the secret of a woman who previously inhabited it.) 

Freud believed dreams were masks that disguised wish fulfillment. They are metaphorical inroads that point to our subconscious desires. And dreams,” like folklore and images in art,” are used as symbolism manifesting these unconscious emotional conflicts. Director Fritz Lang very often infused his films with an appetite for expressionist symbolism. With recurring iconography of doors and corridors, Secret Beyond the Door is perhaps one of his most pronounced visions of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams cloaked in the cinematic vogue of film noir.

Some Men Destroy What They Love Most!

This is your EverLovin’ Joey saying, there are no secrets between us, here at The Last Drive In! See ya soon!

Chapter 4 – Queers and Dykes in the Dark: Classic, Noir & Horror Cinema’s Coded Gay Characters:

CODED CLASSIC HORROR THEORY “The Uncanny & The Other”

“Scenes of excessive brutality and gruesomeness must be cut to an absolute minimum.”

“As a cultural index, the pre-Code horror film gave a freer rein to psychic turmoil and social disorientation because it possessed a unique freedom from censorship… the Hays Office admits that under the Code it is powerless to take a stand on the subject of ‘gruesomeness.‘(Thomas Doherty)

Horror films in particular have made for a fascinating case study in the evolving perceptions of queer presence; queer-horror filmmakers and actors were often forced to lean into the trope of the “predatory queer” or the “monstrous queer” to claim some sense of power through visibility and blatant expressions of sexuality.- Essential Queer Horror Films by Jordan Crucciola-2018

Though Hollywood execs refused to show explicit queerness, they were willing to pay for scripts that dealt with characters who were social outcasts and sexually non-normative. The horror genre is perhaps the most iconic coded queer playground, which seems to have an affinity with homosexuality because of its apparatus of ‘otherizing’ and the inherent representation of difference. The horror genre crosses over boundaries that include transgressions between heterosexuality and queerness. The villain, fiend, or monster plays around with a variety of elements that, while usually separate, might merge male and female gender traits.

The horror film, in particular, found its place asserting a queer presence on screen. The narratives often embraced tropes of the “˜predatory queer’ or the “˜monstrous queer’ in order to declare themselves visible while cinematic queers were elbowed out of the way. Filmmakers had to maneuver their vision in imaginative ways to subvert the structure laid out for them by the Code.

As Harry M. Benshoff explains in his book Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality in the Horror Film, “Immediately before and during the years of World War II, Universal Studio’s horror films began to employ a more humanistic depiction of their monsters,” and the films of Val Lewton, like Cat People, reflected “a growing awareness of homosexuality, homosexual communities, and the dynamics of homosexual oppression as it was played out in society and the military.” So even though Hollywood execs refused to show explicit queerness, during the first true horror boom in American cinema, they were willing to pay for stories about social outcasts and sexually nonnormative figures. Horror fans thus found themselves awash in some of the genre’s most iconic queer-coded characters of all time.

On a Greek Island, Boris Karloff plays Gen. Nikolas Pherides in Val Lewton/Mark Robson’s Isle of the Dead, 1945. Driven insane by the belief that Thea (Ellen Drew), who suffers from catalepsy, is the embodiment of an evil vampiric force, is a demon called a vorvolaka. Lewton drew on collective fears, and all his work had an undercurrent of queer panic and a decipherable sign of homophobia.

The Vorvolaka has beset the island with plague. Thea- “Laws can be wrong, and laws can be cruel, and the people who live only by the law are both wrong and cruel.”

The Pre-Code era was exploding with American horror films that reflected the angst, social unrest, and emotional distress that audiences were feeling. Personified in films that used graphic metaphors to act as catharsis, the images were often filled with rage, as Thomas Doherty calls it ‘the quality of gruesomeness, cruelty and vengefulness’. Think of the angry mobs with their flaming torches who hunt down Frankenstein’s monster, eventually crucifying him like a sacrificial embodiment of their fury. James Whale’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 1931 was a smash hit for Universal. Other studios were trying to ride the wave of the awakening genre of the horror picture. Paramount released director Rouben Mamoulian’s adaptation of the novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, published in 1886. The film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which was released in 1931, stars Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins. During the Pre-Code period, many horror films proposed grisly subject matter that would shock and mesmerize the audience. For example, actor/director Irving Pichel’s The Most Dangerous Game (1932) starring Joel McCrea, Leslie Banks, and Fay Wray.

In 1932 Michael Curtiz directed Doctor X starring Lionel Atwill who would become one of the leading mad scientists of the genre.

Michael Curtiz’s macabre horror/fantasy experiment of homosocial ‘men doing science’, crossing over into profane territories and embracing dreadful taboos!

All scenes below are from Dr. X (1932).

Fay Wray is Atwill’s daughter who is the only woman surrounded by a group of scientific nonconformists.

The adaptation of Bram Stoker’s story of the Eastern European incubus was interpreted by Tod Browning in Dracula 1931, immortalized by Hungarian stage actor Bela Lugosi with his iconic cape and mesmerizing stare. While his nightly visitations were blood-driven and cinematically sexual in nature, there is a very homoerotic element to his influence over Renfield (Dwight Frye) and his gaze of gorgeous David Manners as John Harker.

Bela Lugosi looks down upon David Manners in a scene from the film ‘Dracula’, 1931. (Photo by Universal/Getty Images)

Robert Florey directed the macabre Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe. And a film that has no connection to Poe’s story but in the name is one of the most transgressive, disturbing horror films, rampant with vile taboos, such as necrophilia, incest, sadism, satanism, and flaying a man alive, is the unorthodox The Black Cat (1934). The film stars Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, one of four pictures they would do together. A pair of enemies who have a score to settle, ghosts of a past war, and stolen love all take place against the backdrop of a stylish Bauhaus set design and high-contrast lighting.

Paramount released Murders in the Zoo (1933) with Lionel Atwill, a sadistic owner of a zoo who uses wild animals to ravage and kill off any of his wife’s (Kathleen Burke) suitors. Kathleen Burke is well known as the panther girl in Erle C. Kenton’s horrifically disturbing Island of Lost Souls 1932, an adaptation of master fantasy writer H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau. Incidentally, Welles, Laughton, and his wife, Elsa Lanchester, had been good friends earlier on, before the filming of Lost Souls. The film stars Charles Laughton as the unorthodox, depraved scientist who meddles with genetics and nature. He creates gruesome human/animals, torturing them with vivisection in his ‘house of pain.’ The film also stars Richard Arlen, Leila Hyams, and Bela Lugosi as The Sayer of the Law.

In 1933, King Kong showed a giant ape grasping the half-naked object of his affection, with unmentionable connotations of bestiality between the ape and Fay Wray. With scenes of Wray writhing in his gigantic paws, he lusts after her until his desire kills him. It’s almost like fantasy noir: the object of your desire will ultimately kill you!

The 1930s and 1940s Fear the Queer Monsters:

Re-assessing the Hitchcock Touch; by Wieland Schwanebeck -As Rhona Berenstein asserts, the horror genre “provides a primary arena for sexualities and practices that fall outside the purview of patriarchal culture, and the subgeneric tropes of the unseen, the host and the haunted house.”

By the same token, Kendra Bean concludes that Mrs. Danvers is portrayed as “a wraith; a sexual predator who is out to make Mrs. de Winter her next victim.”

Queer characters in horror films during the early period, reveal similarities between Mrs. Danvers and the staging of earlier sapphic characters, such as Gloria Holdens’s well-known portrayal of Countess Marya Zaleska in Dracula’s Daughter 1936. Yet, similar to the self-discipline of Mrs. Danvers, Dracula’s Daughter remains a figure of primacy and pity Ellis Hanson argues Dracula’s Daughter presents “the possibilities of a queer Gothic” early on in Hollywood history, “rich in all the paradox and sexual indeterminacy the word queer and the word Gothic imply.

There was a revival of the horror craze during the period of WWII. The Hollywood studios, both major and ‘Poverty Row” like Monogram and Republic, realized that horror movies were a lucrative business. The studios began to revisit the genre, looking for not only fresh formulas but they resurrected the classic monsters, dropping them into new plots. They also envisioned uniting gangster films with horror films, and this homogenizing led to a ‘queering’ of the two styles that demonstrated phallocentric ( guns, scientific penetration) and homoerotic themes and images into a sub-genre.

Public awareness of homosexuality reached a new height during these years, primarily due to the new set of social conditions wrought by war. Slowly , the love that dare not speak its name was being spoken, albeit in ways almost always obscurantist, punitive and homophobic. The linkage of homosexuality with violence and disease remained strong. Monsters in the Closet -Harry Benshoff

Rhona Berenstein, in her insightful book Attack of the Leading Ladies points out that films featuring the mad scientist trope operate with the homosocial principle, which speaks of the homoeroticism of males working together in consort subverting science together as a group of men who hide behind their objectification -the female object of their gaze, are in fact, figures of objectification themselves. They are simultaneously homosocial, homoerotic, and homophobic in aspect; … potentially possessing an extra-normative commitment between the two men.

Mad Doctor movies are homosocial in nature. The Mad Doctor movie is a subgenre that, below the surface, glorifies intimate male camaraderie and male homosexuality, and by the close of the picture, society, the prevailing culture, must, in turn, annihilate that which is repressed. However, it is not exclusively a vehicle to express homosexuality through homosocial interactions. There is a component not only of male bonding, but also a world without women; the thrust is a synthesis of misogyny and patriarchal tyranny and oppression of women. Homosocial relationships between men in these science horrors show the man’s desire for connection to other men, even one created by his own hand.

According to Twitchell in his Dreadful Pleasures and Attack of the Leading Ladies, Rona Berenstein, Colin Clive as Dr. Frankenstein in all three Universal pictures, was at least performing bisexuality. Whale’s 1933 Frankenstein might give way to the homosocial realm of the mad scientist trope of ‘homoerotic indulgence’ as these men exclude women from the pursuit of their fulfillment. Twitchell views the scientist’s fluid sexuality in order to examine the concept of a man controlling women’s primacy of giving birth. This might explain Dr. Frankenstein’s venture into unnatural reproduction—a process he wants to divert to himself without women’s exclusive right to motherhood. In the scene where he is as close to giving birth to a full-grown man, he seems to display sexual arousal when his creation comes to life. Henry Frankenstein provokes nature and defies his heterosexuality. As Whale was an openly gay director in Hollywood, it can be pondered whether he knew exactly what he was suggesting. Thesiger’s sexually ambiguous, or okay, not so ambiguous Dr. Pretorius, the mad scientist who pressures Henry Frankenstein to revitalize his experiments and create a mate for the monster. Pretorius is the scientist who insists that Henry continue his creative efforts in Bride of Frankenstein. Vitto Russo called Thesiger, a “man who played the effete sissy”¦ with much verve and wit.”

George Zucco, like Lionel Atwill, often portrayed the unorthodox scientist who flirted with taboos. He plays mad scientist Dr. Alfred Morris in The Mad Ghoul (1943) As a university chemistry professor, he exploits medical student Ted Allison (David Bruce) with his experimental gas that transforms Ted into a malleable, yielding macabre ghoul, whom Morris directs to kill and remove the victim’s hearts using the serum to temporarily bring Ted back from his trance like death state. David Bruce’s character is represented as a ‘queer’ sort of young man. He is not quite masculine and is unable to get his girlfriend, Evelyn Ankers, to fall in love with him. As the Mad Ghoul, he becomes a monstrous queer.

In 1932, director Tod Browning’s Dracula was based on Bram Stoker’s story of a fiendish vampire who, in a sexually implicit way, violates his victims by penetrating them with his fangs. The story pushed the boundaries of storytelling, and there was an inherent subtext of ‘queer’ ravishment when he sucks the blood of Dwight Frye to make him his loyal servant.

In Jonathan Harker’s Journal, the protagonist recounts his impressions of his interaction with the vampire, Dracula “As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me I could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which do what I would, I could not conceal.” For (Noël Carroll) the entry in his diary conveys revulsion by the Count’s closeness and offensive presence, which causes him to become sickened.

But it also could be read that Harker’s ‘shudder’ is not about his revulsion, but rather, an uncontrolled sexual response to the vampire’s looming over him, which could be interpreted not just as hunger for his ‘blood’ but an expression of repressed sexual desire and the fear it causes.

Horror movies have always pushed the boundaries of normalcy, by virtue of the fact that these films are inhabited by ‘monsters’, something ‘queerly’ different. And it is natural to observe two diverging responses to the impact of the horror genre and often, its persecution of what is ‘different’ and the source of what causes our anxiety.

Dracula may appear as the image of a man, but the count is far from human. While monsters in classical horror films are based on systems of maleness, they are split from being actual men. Although there are physical interactions and suggestive contact with the heroine, there isn’t the foundation of heterosexuality, but something quite deviant within their aggressively erotic encounters and/or assaults. The understanding of sexuality and the most narrow identifications that are assigned to varying orientations in a large sense is not translatable for the deeper layers of the monster and their relationship to their victims. In Hollywood, horror films can be seen as heterosexuality being invaded by an abhorrent outside force; inherent in the underlying message could be racism, classism, sexism, and gay panic. Though it can be interpreted as a landscape of heterosexuality that is in the full power of its universal presence, horror films are perfect platforms that can illustrate the collapse of heterosexuality and the subversion of sexuality.

The horror genre is a breeding ground for portrayals of the shattering of heterosexual power. This can be seen in Lambert Hillyer’s Dracula’s Daughter (1936) starring Gloria Holden as the sapphic vampire who lives in a New Village-type artist’s den, which signals her outsider status from domesticity and normalcy.

In White Zombie (1932), Bela Lugosi plays the eerily menacing Legendre. He turns men into lifeless workers who run the sugar mill. Legendre also begins to turn the plantation owner, Charles Beaumont (Robert Frazer), into one of his zombies. His motivation for his control over people is ambiguous, though there seems to be sexual reasoning for both the beautiful Madeline (Madge Bellamy) and Beaumont. In the scene where Beaumont is nearly paralyzed, Legendre’s control over his male victim parallels the sexual entrapment of the movie’s heroine.

MAD LOVE (1935) I have conquered science! Why can’t I conquer love?

Karl Freund’s Grand Guignol Mad Love (1935) shifts from gazing at the female to gazing at the male. Here, the focus is on Peter Lorre in his American screen debut as Dr. Gogol, who has an obsession with Frances Drake as Yvonne Orlac, an actress who works at the Grand Guignol Theatre. To Gogol, she is the typified defenseless heroine whom he tries to lure away from her husband, Stephen (Colin Clive), using his knowledge of scientific alchemy.

Though Gogol tries to become Yvonne’s master, his Galatea, there are critics who read the struggle between the two men as not just a rivalry for Yvonne’s love but Gogol’s desire for Stephen as well. Gogol is responsible for grafting new hands onto Stephen’s mangled body after a train crash. Mad Love could fit the criteria for the subgenre of science/horror films where the male gaze is diverted from the female object toward other men, in this case, what connected the two was the preservation of Stephen’s hands. Why, then, is it not possible that the focus could shift from Gogol’s attraction to Yvonne to the homosocial dynamics between Gogol as a doctor and his subject, Stephen?

Mad Love possesses some of the horror genre’s most tenacious performances of gender play. (Carol Clover) asks us to take a closer look at Freund’s film. It is less about the “suffering experienced by women, but at a deeper, more sustained level, it is dedicated to the unspeakable terrors endured by men.”

In a similar fashion to Waldo Lydecker’s (Laura) and Hardy Cathcart’s (The Dark Corner) pathology of objectifying Laura and Mari, Gogol worships Yvonne – his Galatea, with a measure of scopophilia that lies within his gaze upon the perfection of female beauty. To control and possess it. The pleasure is aroused by the mere indulgence of looking at her.

Gogol pays 75 francs to purchase the wax statue of Galatea. The seller remarks, “There’s queer people on the streets of Montmartre tonight.”

Gogol’s maid, Francoise, talks to the statue, “Whatever made him bring you here. There’s never been any woman in this house except maybe me… “I prefer live ones to dead ones.”

A Time Magazine review of Mad Love in 1933 notes this queer appeal directly, even comparing Lorre’s acting skills to those of another homosexual coded actor: I find the comment about their faces rude and insulting to both Lorre and Laughton, both of whom I am a tremendous fan.

Mad Love’s insane doctor is feminized throughout the film… In fact, the same reporter who noted Gogol’s sadism argues for his feminine demeanor: “Lorre, perfectly cast, uses the technique popularized by Charles Laughton of suggesting the most unspeakable obsessions by the roll of a protuberant eyeball, an almost feminine mildness of tone, an occasional quiver of thick lips set flat in his cretinous ellipsoidal face. This reviewer came closer than any other to articulate the subtext of mad doctor movies. He seems on the verge of noting that Lorre, Like Laughton is an effeminate madman obsessed by unspeakable homosocial desire. Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender Sexuality and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema by Rhona Berenstein.

Frances Drake’s heroine masquerades as a wife who deludes herself into believing that her husband is more masculine than he really is. Gogol has a curious empathy with Stephen, whom he touches frequently and prolonged. Although Gogol pursues the heroine, Yvonne, at the theater, forcing a kiss on her, his focus is primarily manipulating Stephen’s body, rejoining his hands and massaging them to stimulate life back into them. When he realizes that Stephen’s hands cannot be grafted back successfully to his wrists, he turns to another man, the hands of a knife thrower who was executed as a notorious murderer. Once Stephen recovers from the surgery, he can no longer continue as a concert pianist, but does develop the desire to throw sharp knives.

On the surface, the plot of Mad Love appears to be a heterosexual obsession; the most unspoken context is the connection between Gogol and Stephen. As is true of Frankenstein’s labor of love in Whale’s first film, Gogol sews men’s body parts together, and the result is a monster of sorts. (Berenstein)

In the film’s climax, Yvonne hides in Gogol’s bedroom and pretends to be the wax statue of Galatea. When Gogol touches the statue, she lets out a scream. In a euphoric daze (as in the original story), he believes that he has the power to bring Galatea’s statue to life. Yvonne begs him to let her go as he tries to strangle her.

Stephen then rushes to his wife and holds her in his arms. With his eyes fixed on the offscreen space in which Gogol’s body lies, he croons: “My darling.” The homosocial desire is destroyed when Stephen murders Gogol who intones, “Each man kills the thing he loves”“” echoing on the soundtrack.

In the film’s closing moments, the secret desire is finally spoken out loud…Has Stephen killed the man he loves? Given that the phrase that Gogol mutters was written originally by Oscar Wilde, whose homosexuality scandalized the British social and legal system in 1895, reading the homosocial desire into Mad Love within the very last moments, we are left to decipher the suspended cues. We are left with Stephen’s gazing at Gogol’s face and his knifed body as he lay dying, he speaks the words, “˜My darling” while the camera frames the two men sharing that moment in the closing scene.

The mad doctor narrative is particularly predisposed to homosocial impulses. “intense male homosocial desire as at once the most compulsory and the most prohibited of social bonds” – Epistemology of the Closet (Sedgwick)

Sedgwick investigated early fantasy/horror novels, Shelley’s Frankenstein 1818, Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 1886, and Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau 1895. At the beginning of the 1930s, these stories centered around mad doctors who delved into unorthodox, profane explorations and were all adapted to the screen. All of these nefarious or scientific, inquisitive men cultivated secret experiments, challenging the laws of nature. What Sedgwick found was that the Gothic literary representations of men performing homosocial collaborations were ‘not socially sanctioned and shunned.’

It was considered a necessary narrative element as well as a monstrous possibility that threatened to subvert the status quo. The combination of these two attitudes is expressed in homosocial narratives- male bonding is both horrifying and guaranteed, entailing the simultaneous introjection and expulsion of femininity. (Sedgwick)

“My darling”…

James Whale was a gay auteur who often imbued his work intentionally or with the ‘intentional fallacy’ of a ‘queer’ sense of dark humor. This comical, campy absurdity was always on the edge of his vision of horror and subtle profanity. His picture, The Invisible Man (1933), adapted from H.G. Wells’s story and starring Claude Rains, was classified as a horror film by the Code.

Dr. Jack Griffin (Rains), the antihero, is a frenzied scientist addicted to his formula as he seeks the ability to make himself invisible. His sanity begins to ‘vanish’ as his hunger for power, delusions of grandeur, and bursts of megalomania grow out of control. He plans on assassinating government officials, and he becomes more belligerent the longer he turns invisible. The idea that he displays radical ideas and runs around in the nude didn’t seem to arouse the censors; in 1933, a letter from James Wingate to Hays states, “highly fantastic and exotic [sic] vein, and presents no particular censorship difficulties.”

What’s interesting about the presentation of the story is that the coded gay leitmotifs were paraded out, right under the Code’s noses, and didn’t stir any indignation for its ‘queer’ humor.

Gloria Stuart and Claude Rains in James Whale’s The Invisible Man 1933

The Invisible Man perpetrates campy assaults on all the ‘normal’ people in his way, with intervals of sardonic cackles and golden wit and, at the same time, a menacing reflection of light and shadow. Claude Rains is a concealed jester who makes folly of his victims.

“An invisible man can rule the world. Nobody will see him come, nobody will see him go. He can hear every secret. He can rob, and wreck, and kill.” –Dr. Jack Griffin (The Invisible Man)

Claude Rains plays Dr. Jack Griffin, an outsider (a favorite of James Whale’s characters) who discovers the secret of invisibility, which changes him from a mild yet arrogant scientist into a maniacal killer. The film bears much of Whale’s campy sense of humor, with Griffin’s comic shenanigans abound until things turn dark and he becomes uncontrollably violent. “We’ll begin with a reign of terror, a few murders here and there, Murders of great men, Murders of little men, just to show we make no distinction. I might even wreck a train or two… just these fingers around a signalman’s throat, that’s all.”

According to Gary Morris (Bright Lights Film Journal), ‘The film demands crypto-faggot reading in poignant scenes such as the one where he reassures his ex-girlfriend, who begs him to hide from the authorities: “the whole world’s my hiding place. I can stand out there amongst them in the day or night and laugh at them.”

Though Griffin’s (Claude Rains) character is unseen at times, there are potent moments when he is animated as he skips to the tune, “Here we go gathering nuts in May,” flitting around like a fairy.

It is suggested that The Invisible Man is a metaphor for the way homosexuals are seen/not seen by society – as “effeminate, dangerous when naked, seeking a male partner in “crime,” tending to idolize his fiance rather than love her, and becoming ‘visible’ only when shot by the police…monitored by doctors, and heard regretting his sin against God (i.e., made into a statistic by the three primary forces oppressing queers: the law, the medical establishment, and religious orthodoxy” (Sedgwick)

The Invisble Man [undressing] “They’ve asked for it, the country bumpkins. This will give them a bit of a shock, something to write home about. A nice bedtime story for the kids, too, if they want it”

Continue reading “Chapter 4 – Queers and Dykes in the Dark: Classic, Noir & Horror Cinema’s Coded Gay Characters:”

Chapter 3 – Queers and Dykes in the Dark: Classic, Noir & Horror Cinema’s Coded Gay Characters:

The subtle gay gangster films of the early 1930s – Little Caesar 1931, The Public Enemy 1931 and Scarface 1932

"Criminals should not be made heroes"¦ The flaunting of weapons by gangsters will not be allowed"¦"

“… the fashion for romanticizing gangsters” must be denounced.

The three films also evenhandedly parcel out social pathology and sexual aberration: homosexuality in Little Caesar. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy from the novel by W.R. Burnett Little Caesar was first out of the gate and an immediate sensation. A diminutive bandit whose single-minded ambition compensates less for his stature than his repressed homosexual desire, Caesar Enrico Bandello is compact, swarthy and tightly wound; his golden boy pal Joe played by the scion of Hollywood royalty Douglas Fairbanks Jr. is tall, patrician and easygoing.

When Joe finds a female dancer and show business success, the jilted Caesar unhinged by a jealousy that dare not speak its name even to himself, makes his first mistakes in judgement. The male triangle is completed by Caesar's worshipful lapdog Otera (George E. Stone) who gazes up at Rico with a rapturous desire that, unlike Rico, he barely bothers to sublimate. Doubly deviant Rico dies for his social and sexual sins, asking in tight close-up and choked up tones, "mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?"The famous last words inspired an incisive remark from Robert Warshow on gangster psychology:" Even to himself he is a creature of the imagination" from FILMIC – From Sissies to Secrecy: The Evolution of the Hays Code Queer by Mikayla Mislak

"This is what I get for likin' a guy too much," Rico ‘Caesar’ tells himself after he realizes he’s lost, Joe. Joe, who he has referred to as "soft" and a "sissy." The very pretty Joe (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) has decided to give up the racket, to be a professional nightclub dancer. Robinson wisecracks, “Dancin’ just ain’t my idea of a man’s game.”

Joe is romantically involved with Olga (Glenda Farrell). ‘Caesar’ is not only jealous of Joe’s relationship with Olga, but he also appears to have no use for women at all.

In the end, there is a telling close-up, a well of tears in his eyes, a subtle quiver in his face. Rico cannot shoot Joe, even though he needs to keep him from squealing. The image of Robinson coming head-on with his feelings reveals his struggle with the repressed love for his dancing pal. The scene is very effective when the camera closes in on Robinson, capturing his dewy, wide-eyed stare. Behind the scenes what helped the intensity of the look of longing turned out to be a serendipitous moment when Robinson had to fire a pistol while looking into the camera, and was unable to keep his eyes open, each time he pulled the trigger. Eventually, they had Robinson’s eyes held open with cellophane tape. The effect worked perfectly.

Another interesting point in Little Caesar that hints at his latent homosexuality is a scene that highlights his clumsy fussiness. Rico is trying on a tuxedo and gazing at himself in the mirror. Posturing gleefully as he swishes at his own reflection. In this scene, Rico also becomes caught in his effete sidekick Otero’s (George E. Stone) gaze, who joyfully watches his boss flit for the mirror.

In The Public Enemy (1931) there is a noteworthy scene when Tom (James Cagney) goes to his tailor to get fitted for a suit. It’s a hilariously fidgety few moments for Cagney while the flamboyant tailor fawns over his arm muscles. When the movie was re-released, the sequence wound up on the cutting room floor.

According to Mislak In Howard Hawk’s Scarface (1932), it could be seen as having a gay subtext, as Antonio ‘Tony’ Camonte (Paul Muni) shows a repressed homosexual desire for his best friend Guino Rinaldo played by George Raft. Hawk’s film doesn’t work on a blatant exhibition of violence, instead, Scarface’s subtlety draws on the subliminal impression of his sexual impulses.

Through my readings, it has been noted that there is a coded gayness inferred from the character of Camonte in Scarface. Rather than the repressed sexual desire for his close friend Guino, I catch more a wind of an incestuous desire for his sister Cesca (Ann Dvorak). Camonte hovers over her with an iron will, not allowing her to have any man touch her. She even alludes to his untoward attentions at one point telling him that he loves her more than just a brother. Camonte (Muni) does focus obsessively over his hair and his wardrobe, which Poppi (Kathy Morely) tells him is ‘sweet’. But there are a few references to Guino being queer. He wears a carnation which is a code for being a gay man in film. Camonte says he’d like a carnation too, takes it out of Guino’s lapel, and tells him “Better no one sees you with this.” He also makes a comment about one of the North Side gang members not being taken seriously because he owns a flower shop! Guino doesn’t show any interest in women until nearly close to the end of the picture, when he submits to Camonte’s sister, Cesca.

“The placement of homosexuality or the real possibility of it in an antisocial context is quite natural. Homosexuality when it is invisible is antisocial. The only condition under which homosexuality has ever been socially acceptable has been on the occasion of its voluntary invisibility, when homosexuality were willing to pass for heterosexuals. Obvious homosexual behavior is reflected onscreen as in real life, only in the ‘twilight world’ of misfit conduct. During the brief period of explicit reference to homosexuals in pre-Code films of the early 1930s. Gay characters were psychologically ghettoized by their routine relegations to a fantasy world or an underworld life….

….in addition to strengthening the Code in 1934, Will Hays reacted to criticism by inserting morals clauses in the contracts of performers and compiling a “doom book’ of 117 names of those deemed “unsafe” because of their personal lives. Homosexuality was denied as assiduously off screen as it was on, a literally unspeakable part of the culture. By 1940 even harmless sex-roles farces such as Hal Roach’s Turnabout were considered perilous in some quarters. The film, about a married couple (Carol Landis and John Hubbard) who switch roles by wishing on an Oriental statue, was described by the Catholic Legion of Decency as dealing with ‘subject matter which may provide references dangerous to morality, wholesome concepts of human relationships and the dignity of man.’ ” –Vito Russo

HITCHCOCK SUBVERTS SUSPENSE!

Hitchcock sensed the ambiguous sexuality in Mrs. Danvers (nicknamed Danny) who embodies the forbidding identity of the coded lesbian in 1940s films. As she strides down the halls of Manderley, there is an element of the angry older woman trope, who is vacant of male companionship by choice, with an added streak of dissatisfied longing. She embodies the sterile matron, showing characteristics of an ‘old maid’ attributed to a repressed lesbian.” Rebecca serves as Fontaine’s idealized mother and that Hitchcock’s films present images of ambiguous sexuality that threaten to destabilize the gender identity of the protagonist.” -(Tania Modleski)

Gay Coding in Hitchcock films

Article by Scott Badman & Connie Russell Hosier

“In typical Hitchcock-ian fashion, the “Master of Suspense” often employed in his films subtle references to gay culture, defying conservative attitudes of the late ’50s.”-Scott Badman & Connie Russell Hosier | February 7, 2017- Editor's note: The following article, like many of Alfred Hitchcock's films, includes references to sex and violence.

Did Martin Landau play a homosexual in North by Northwest? Did Alfred Hitchcock really show gay sex on-screen in Rope, albeit in an unusual way? Was the whole plot of Rebecca driven by the twisted jealousy of an evil lesbian? And, most surprisingly, did Hitchcock depict a gay marriage way back in 1938's The Lady Vanishes?”

Alfred Hitchcock was a complicated man, who put a singular stamp on all his films, infusing them with his droll and macabre sense of humor and imbuing his work from the point of view of a satyr. Hitchcock projects his dark and twisted view of the world as at the end of his films there is sort of a perverted release that he leaves us to contemplate. It also appears that he was playful with the use of his gay-coded characters in many of his films.

Nothing Hitchcock did was unintentional, thereby reinforcing proof that there is a gay subtext to many characters in various films. He was very measured in every detail even before the camera captured the scene. But this method of implying a queer pathology and positing queer elements to the narrative. He was ingenious in the way he veiled his ciphers within the cloak of deniability, in order to slip it by the censors in his cheeky manner.

Though Hitchcock would often imbue his pictures with coded gay characters, among scholars it is still speculative as to which side his view fell on. Given that everything Hitchcock constructed was intentional, it’s easy to see why he would be viewed as homophobic, due to his use of stereotypes that eventually led to queerness possibly being as the source of the crimes. But you have to consider that during the time he reigned, it’s a tribute to Hitchcock that he even embraced the complex issue of homosexuality. It shows me that there was a conscious level of understanding.

In his life, Hitchcock surrounded himself with gay culture be it in England or Hollywood, and he worked with many gay writers and actors. Ivor Novello who starred in two of Hitchcock’s silent pictures was good friends with him and Alma. Hitchcock was also friends with Rope stars John Dall and bisexual Farley Granger who played coded gay characters in the film. Granger also had the lead in Strangers on a Train, co-starring Rober Walker who plays another of Hitchcock’s coded gay characters, Bruno. Anthony Perkins who struggled with his sexuality in real life, plays the ambiguous, stammering, Norman Bates in Psycho. According to Jay Poole, Robert Bloch was interested in ‘abnormal psychology’ and was familiar with Freudian theories on sexual identity. His novel was more suggestive of the taboos, in terms of the incestuous relationship with Norman’s mother and his confused sexual identity.

The assessment of ‘camp’ and queerness can be seen as negative. More contemporary audiences might perceive Psycho as more campy than lurid or scary. Norman’s appearance in the fruit cellar might register with audiences as if he’s a big ugly ridiculous drag queen with a knife. The rest of the film is darkly humorous. (Doty cites Danny Peary)

In contrasting these male characters, one representative of sexually suspect psychosis, the other of gendered and sexual normalcy, Hitchcock blurs the lines between them, creating effects that will inform future depictions of American masculinity… While Lila Crane has been read positively as a lesbian character, and also as Carol Clover’s prototype for the ‘final girl” I demonstrate here that Lila is a more ambiguous figure, tied to social repression and the law. […] (Norman’s voyeurism and Lila’s examination of Norman’s room as pornographic) Infusing these pornographic motifs with addition levels of intensity and dread was the increasingly public threat of homosexuality within the Cold War context in which Hitchcock’s related themes gained a new, ominous visibility. What emerges in Psycho is a tripartite monster-voyeurism-homosexuality-pornography.” — (Scott Badman & Connie Russell Hosier)

WARNING SPOILERS:

Saboteur (1942) producer/writer Joan Harrison wrote the screenplay and collaborated with Hitchcock on many projects for both film and television. In the period of the 1940s to the 1950s, movies often conflated homosexuality with unsavory characters like Nazis, communists, and terrorists.

Saboteur stars Robert Cummings as plane mechanic Barry Kane who is framed for the terrorist bombing of a military installation’s aircraft hanger where they manufacture planes. After he sees his friend die in the explosion, police assume that it was Kane who filled the fire extinguisher with gasoline. Kane goes on the run, to try and find the man he suspects is the saboteur, Frank Fry (Norman Lloyd) who is the real murderer who committed the heinous crime.

Kane stumbles onto a secret group of ‘the firm’, 5th columnists who are plotting to sabotage key targets, military planes, ships, and dams. Kane is dropped into the middle of a cabal of dangerous Americans who have infiltrated positions of power in order to carry out their nefarious plan to disrupt the democratic system and cause chaos. Socialite dowager Mrs. Henrietta Sutton (Alma Kruger) is a New York philanthropist who provides cover for the ‘firm’ run by Otto Kruger as the coldly, sinister Tobin. Kane pretends to go along with the group, and in one scene in a taxi with Alan Baxter who plays Mr. Freeman, there is a queer exchange between the two. Freeman tells Kane about his two little children, one of them is a boy, whom he wishes was a girl. He’s letting his son’s hair grow long and hesitates to cut it. Then he shares his reminiscence about his boyhood when he had glorious long blonde curls. Kane tells him to cut his son’s hair and “save yourself some grief.”

Purely by Hitchcockian fate, Kane is thrown together with Pat (Priscilla Lane) who comes to his aid and at one point tries to distract Fry at the top of the Statue of Liberty. The beautiful Pat flirts with Fry in order to stall him until the police get there, but he isn't the slightest bit interested in her at all. In fact, he seems annoyed by her presence. He's a slim effete figure, a swishy loner with a serpent-like grin. Theodore Price, in his book ‘Hitchcock and Homosexuality (1992), has no doubt Fry was gay. (Ken Mogg 2008)

Saboteur climax prefigures that of North by Northwest between Thornhill (Cary Grant) and the sinister Leonard (Martin Landau) who is also a gay Hitchcockian figure.

We first hear a remark spoken by socialite Mrs. Sutton (Alma Kruger) when Barry (Kane) is taken to the saboteurs’ New York lair, as Barry enters the upstairs room. Mrs. Sutton is addressing a couple of her male colleagues, whom she reprimands: ‘I have to hover over you like an old hen.’

This is precisely the line Hitchcock uses in Rebecca to characterize the somewhat de-natured estate manager Frank Crawley (Reginald Denny) – nearly all the men in the film are so afflicted – and will be used again in The Paradine Case to characterize the gay Latour (Louis Jourdan).

Frank Crawley is ‘as fussy as an old mother hen’; Latour, we’re told, had been ‘like an old mother hen’ to his beloved master, the blind Colonel Paradine.- Ken Mogg (2008)

In North by Northwest (1959) Martin Landau’s character Leonard, displays an undercurrent of homosexuality, that is subtly implied. He’s a devoted bodyguard whose gaze on his boss, Phillip Vandamm, seems to be bubbling with a refined sensibility, romantically fixated on Vandamm (James Mason), a communist spy being hunted by the CIA. For a 1950s film, Leonard’s immaculate fashion sense and his fastidious swagger are a cue of his being queer. Nearing the climax of North by Northwest, the telling scene set in a mid-century modern house reveals Leonard’s love for Vandamm. Hitchcock even sets up the motive for Leonard shooting the object of his affection, jealousy, and rejection. In a notable line toward the end of the movie, Leonard remarks, “Call it my woman’s intuition” affirming the effete stereotype of a feminine gay man. Vandamm is genuinely flattered (contrary to homosexual panic) by Leonard’s feelings, which hints at his motivation for killing the thing he loves. Vandamm (Mason) tells him in that coldly sober tone of his, “I think you’re jealous. I mean it, and I’m very touched. Very.” As Scott Badman & Connie Russell Hosier point out, Hitchcock’s direction shows a “progressive perspective for its time but so brief that it doesn’t fully register with most viewers. Much later, Landau acknowledged that he played Leonard as a homosexual, albeit subtly.”

From the opening of Strangers on a Train (1951), Hitchcock frames the entranceway to the story with a close shot of the main character’s shoes walking to catch the train. Bruno wears elaborate wing tips with high heels and Guy wears a more toned-down fashionable pair of shoes, which are in opposition to each other and illustrate the contrast between the two main characters.

Robert Walker’s Bruno is a menacing, creepy guy with flashy ties, who positions himself after a chance meeting on a commuter train, to assert his influence over famous tennis player, Guy Haines (Farley Granger). Bruno begins to flatter Guy and insinuate himself by sharing his knowledge of Guy’s personal life. He is very proud of the tie that his mother gave him. It is a garish accouterment dappled with lobsters. Like his silken smoking robe and another tie with the name, Bruno embroidered on it. Bruno also spouts a lot of ‘ideas’ he has in that ever prompted mind of his, when talking about Guy’s upcoming divorce and bigamy scandal, “I've got a wonderful theory about that."

Bruno insists on Guy having lunch with him, “sent to my compartment… You see you'll have to lunch with me.” It is obvious, though Hitchcock is very subtle about broadcasting the cues, that Bruno is wooing Guy. Bruno is very effeminate in his demeanor, you could say that he has a ‘flaming’ air about him, always dropping hints about his sexuality. “My father hates me”, insinuating that he is not the kind of man he expects of him. “I've got a theory that you should do everything before you die." He tells Guy amorously, “I like you, I’d do anything for you.”

Bruno Anthony’s plan is for both men to exchange for each other’s murders. There are several scenes that scream Hitchcock’s gay coding. Initially, when the two men meet each other on the train, Bruno is flirtatious, dressed in ‘flamboyant clothes’, which to gay audiences, is seemingly clear to be a gay pickup. Bruno’s not only attracted to the handsome Guy, but he is in fact stalking him as an ‘object’ to fulfill his needs and be his ‘partner’ in his deranged homoerotic plot.

His mother, Mrs. Anthony (the wonderful character actor Marion Lorne) does Bruno’s nails and dotes on her son. As Bruno tells his mother, he wants his nails to look right.

Homosexuality is not explicitly stated, but there is too strong an import for critics and audiences in the know, to ignore. And, considering Hitchcock’s fascination with homosexual subtexts, it’s not a stretch to read into various scenes this way.

There is also the insinuation that Bruno has some serious mother issues, which is one of Hitchcock’s points of reference for his gay coding, such as his use of it with Norman Bates in his film Psycho. Bruno amuses himself by antagonizing his mother (Marion Lorne) who is completely in the dark about the twisted pathology of her homicidal son.

Bruno has set up a visit from Guy who finds himself talking to the sociopath, who’s been waiting for Guy while lying in bed in his silky pajamas. Is this actually arranged as a bedroom seduction?

Another brief sequence takes place at the end which centers around a carousel, a possible symbol of fluid sexuality, and sexual foreplay. The scene shows Bruno and Guy wrestling with each other, the movements could be read as Bruno really achieving what he wanted, to have sex with Guy. Hitchcock even cut different versions of the movie for Britain and the U.S., toning down the implied homosexuality in the American version "” proof positive that he was fully aware of the gay implications in his movies. –(Badman and Hosier)

Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) is based on the play by Patrick Hamilton Rope's End is perhaps one of the more obvious coded gay films with homosexual subtexts in his canon. Arthur Laurents, who eventually came out of the closet and wrote the screenplay, said during a commentary “What was curious to me was that Rope was obviously about homosexuals. The word was never mentioned. Not by Hitch, not by anyone at Warners. It was referred to as ‘it’. They were going to do a picture about ‘it’, and the actors were ‘it’.” The original British stage play was loosely based on the sensational true crime committed by Chicago students Leopold and Loeb in 1924, who killed a fellow student, just to see if they could get away with a motiveless crime. The script was penned by Arthur Laurents in collaboration with Hume Cronyn and Ben Hecht.

Brandon (John Dall) and Philip (Farley Granger) are entitled, affluent snobs, who are self-aggrandizing psychopaths with a Nietzschean superiority. Hitchcock arranges a taut stage play, around a case of Folie à deux. Brandon and Philip are implied coded lovers, who used the crime of murder to stimulate each other as if it were a sex act. The intellectual discourse they have at the beginning of the picture is overshadowed by the sexual banter that precedes what ultimately will become the act of committing a murder. Rope from the beginning of the picture inaugurates a very feverish sexual undercurrent.

In real life, John Dall was gay but died in 1971 without talking openly about his homosexuality. Farley Granger was bisexual when making the movie and then was in a lifelong gay relationship starting in 1963. Alfred Hitchcock was well aware of the sexual orientations of both actors and was reportedly pleased with what is now called the on-screen "chemistry" between the two.

He coded Brandon and Philip as gay by their "sex scene." It occurs at the very beginning of the movie, which is also the murder scene. Hitchcock is strongly equating murder with sex. The murder-sex occurs behind curtained windows. The death scream corresponds to the orgasm. Now visible, the murderers Brandon and Philip quickly put the body in a cabinet and go into a postcoital exhaustion. Philip doesn't even want the light turned on. In an inspired touch, Hitchcock has Brandon light a cigarette, a standard Hollywood indicator for "we just had sex." – (Badman and Hosier)

The unorthodox murderers throw a dinner party with the victim stuffed inside an antique trunk. The film was initially banned in Chicago and other cities, because of its implied homosexual relationship between the two killers. In 1959, the story was revised as Compulsion directed by Richard Fleischer scripted by Richard Murphy, and based on the novel by Meyer Levin. Compulsion remains closer to the actual true-life crime, and the implicit queer undertones are brought more to the surface, with less of Hitchcock’s cheeky innuendo.

Hitchcock employs many homoerotic symbology and allusions, as the couple reenact the murder, with the director conflating violence and sex. For instance, Brandon gets a bottle of champagne still invigorated by the murder, while Philip the weaker of the murderous pair, is nervous. Brandon fondles the bottle of champagne as the two stands close together very intimately. He grasps the champagne bottle as phallus and flirts with the top of the bottle, yet not releasing the cork. All this is stages as foreplay. Philip finally takes the bottle from Brandon and liberates the cork. They then toast to their victim. Film Critic Robin Wood asserts, in The Murderous Gays: Hitchcock’s Homophobia, that these films could be made as more positive or sensitive to homosexuality rather than “traffic in homophobia” and that it perpetuate the notion that homosexuality leads to violence.

Psycho (1960)

Psycho works as a warped adult fairytale about getting lost and paying for one’s transgressions. Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is a Phoenix secretary who embezzles forty thousand dollars from her employer’s client and goes on the run. Marion is also shown to be a fallen woman, a sexual deviant herself with no morals, not only is she a thief but she is also having an affair with a married man Sam Loomis, (John Gavin). Driving in torrential rain, she pulls into the Bates Motel, an eerie, remote motel off the beaten path. The motel is run by a ‘queer’ sort of young man, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) who lives up in the brooding house on the hill, under the dominant authority of his cruel and elusive mother. As Poole puts it, Norman “remains locked in a disturbed world, and, as the film progresses, becomes murderously mad.”

Norman Bates: “A boy’s best friend is his mother.”

Norman is not a masculine figure, he is a mama’s boy who does his mother’s bidding. He is continually identified with his mother and, according to Freud and his psychological tunnel vision, would probably have evolved into a homosexual because of his Oedipal desires. Hitchcock perverts Freud’s narrow theory, by making sure the narrative shows Norman to be attracted to women, not men. It is when Norman’s arousal by the female body, that he dresses in frumpy dresses to represent his mother, who then takes over and annihilates the object of Norman’s desire. Many viewers assume that Norman is a repressed homosexual because he dressed in women’s clothing when manifesting his mother’s personality. Cross-dressing was stereotypically associated with homosexuality, however, Hitchcock’s film tries to make it clear that Norman is attracted to women from the very beginning with the seductive Marion. The concept of fluid sexuality was not understood in 1960, so conflating cross-dressing with homosexuality was a commonly misleading view.
Another interesting point that Jay Poole (Queering Hitchcock’s Classic) brings out is how the décor of the house is itself, queer. Referring to what he cites Foucault’s theory of ‘We Other Victorians’ which essentially invokes ‘the image of the imperial prude.’ Therefore the Bates house itself with its provincial Victorian style from a queer perspective represents the constraints of Victorian sexual expectations, which is — we do not speak of sex, and any relations are to remain between a heterosexual married couple in the privacy of their own bedroom. Norman is surrounded by this oppressive atmosphere and tries to fight his impulses and his carnal desires. He does this by dwelling in his mother’s house, hoping that she will control the voyeuristic, dirty lustful desire he is having about Marion.

Norman Bates: “People never really run away from anything. The rain didn’t last long, did it? You know what I think? I think that we’re all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out. We scratch and we claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we never budge an inch.”

Marion Crane: “Sometimes we deliberately step into those traps.”

Norman Bates: “I was born in mine. I don’t mind it anymore.”

Psycho, is the first of Hitchcock’s films to break tradition from his usual cultured mystery/suspense tropes. He decided to present this narrative using a pallet of B&W to set up a different tonality. Without the use of the vivid colors that he often used with cinematographer Robert Burks. Psycho deals with a more graphic, monochromatic, psycho-sexual sickness. A sickness that erupts in unprecedented perversity and violence for the director. Hitchcock also kills off his heroine in the first 20 minutes of the film. Psycho, will forever be known for ‘the shower scene.’

It also brings to the screen one of THE most hauntingly intense scenes that will remain in the collective consciousness, for what it lacks in vivid bloodshed, it possesses an uncomfortable voyeuristic gaze that brings us into Norman’s mind with the twists and turns, it assaults us, because of its deeper brutality, a more queasy feeling of psychic angst and inverts our gaze, as Marion stares back at us with her lifeless eyes.

“It’s not like my mother is a maniac or a raving thing. She just goes a little mad sometimes. We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven’t you?”

In the 1950s into 1960 was a time when Americans were seeking out the American ideal, and cultural conformity. It was also a time when many audiences did not explore alternative sexualities and would have conflated homosexuality with a deviant and dangerous personality. Poole suggests “Hitchcock queers the image of sexual purity but reinforces naturalized heterosexuality as the film progresses… Hitchcock utilizes the Freudian explanation of homosexual development in his explanation of Norman’s development as a psychopathic killer despite Norman’s apparent heterosexual orientation.”

Hitchcock believed he made the perfect choice in casting Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, the homicidal misfit who put on a dress and wig to embody his cruel mother. Norman became a serial killer with a fixation on his castrating mother because she dominated his life and turned him into a monster. Perkin’s himself soft-spoken, androgynous, even perhaps a slightly effete actor. Alfred Hitchcock envisioned another gay character whose inherent corrupted humanity stems from their conflict of being queer. By queer, it can refer to the process of shattering normalcy and vision from the perspective of a heternormative lens. Psycho takes the audience into a place of dis-ease, where seemingly ordinary people are capable of monstrous acts. If Hitchcock’s film is subverting the value of 1950s America, and the transgressive content of Psycho breaks from societal norms, then it can be read as a ‘queer’ film.

[voiceover in police custody, as Norman is thinking]” It’s sad, when a mother has to speak the words that condemn her own son. But I couldn’t allow them to believe that I would commit murder. They’ll put him away now, as I should have years ago. He was always bad, and in the end he intended to tell them I killed those girls and that man… as if I could do anything but just sit and stare, like one of his stuffed birds. They know I can’t move a finger, and I won’t. I’ll just sit here and be quiet, just in case they do… suspect me. They’re probably watching me. Well, let them. Let them see what kind of a person I am. I’m not even going to swat that fly. I hope they are watching… they’ll see. They’ll see and they’ll know, and they’ll say, “Why, she wouldn’t even harm a fly…”

As ‘Judith Butler’ Gender scholar, and ‘Hall’ speak of gender as performance, Hitchcock was clear in the way he developed Stephano and Bloch’s central characters in Psycho. In the final scene, the murderer is revealed and his inner monologues keep hidden, the source of a disturbed, untroubled ‘victim’ of faulty psychological development.’ The opening montage sets the scene for the dark thing that takes place inside ordinary towns and inside the minds of ordinary people. (source: Poole)

Psycho was a vehicle that queered what the public had come to expect from Hitchcock films, and,much like its real-life inspiration (Ed Gein), it queered the notion that America was a place where ‘normal,’ was defined as a quiet, safe, small town life, free from the darkness that lurds in modest roadside motels… With Psycho, Hitchcock abetted by Stefano’s script, would shock audiences with sexual innuendo, apparent nudity coupled with a sadistic stabbing scene. Perhaps most shocking of all, he would leave audiences wondering what might lie below the surface of family, friends neighbors and themselves.” (Jay Poole)

Rebecca (1940), was not one of Hitchcock’s favorite films at all. Adapted from the Gothic novel by Daphne du Maurier, the sick soul here is a menacing lesbian. The formidable Mrs. Danvers ( played by the equally formidable Judith Anderson) is the head Matron of Manderley, living in the shadows of the former Mrs. de Winter. She is a lovesick sapphic with an unnourished desire for her dead mistress, Rebecca. Manderley itself is like a hollow mistress that consumes those inside its ominous hallways. ‘Danny’ resents the new Mrs. de Winter and in one revelatory scene taunts her (Joan Fontaine) trying to drive her to suicide through her cruel torments. She parades Rebecca’s lingerie with a lustful smirk on her diabolical face, running her hands under the sheer, delicate fabric as if she were fondling Rebecca herself.

Mrs. Danvers’ jealousy of Maxime de Winters’ new bride is driven by obsession, a lesbian-coded manifestation, one of jealousy and sexual desire. For Joan Fontaine’s character, Danvers reenacts through storytelling, all the attention she used to lavish on her beloved mistress, running her bath, brushing her hair, admiring the finery of her monogrammed pillowcases. Though Rebecca is only seen as the painting of an alluring woman her ghost haunts Manderley and the new Mrs. de Winter.

In Hollywood movies of the 1940s, coded lesbian characters were far less common than coded gay men. Portrayals of lesbians might define them as dangerous and threatening, as is the case with Mrs. Danvers. Mrs. Danvers implies that she had been married. This allowed Hitchcock's deniability against Judith Anderson’s lesbianism But Mrs. Danver’s eventual demise is brought about by her inability to accept Rebecca’s death or allow anyone to replace her love. And so her desire consumes her literally, in fire.

The Lady Vanishes (1938)

When I first saw Charters (Basil Radford) and Caldicott (Naughton Wayne) in The Lady Vanishes my radar went off like a firehouse siren during the scene where they are both sitting up together in a small bed, one wearing the pajama tops and the other wearing the bottoms, (giving the appearance of both being naked in bed. It was such a marvelous coded moment and I knew they were a loving married gay couple. I found it so refreshing to see the British comedy duo playing a cheeky proper English couple who are cricket fanatics trying to get back to London while the Hitchcockian espionage is happening under their noses.

I enjoyed their farcical vignette about a pair of golfers, the one comedic entry in an otherwise moody collection of ghost stories- Dead of Night (1945) which like The Lady Vanishes, also stars Michael Redgrave.

Hitchcock excelled at getting fine performances from his supporting cast members. They usually are finely honed characterizations portrayed by perfectly cast actors, fascinating and funny, imbued with his dry British humor. Charters and Caldicott are wonderful examples. Played by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, two fine stage actors who reprised these characters in subsequent movies and BBC radio programs, Charters and Caldicott follow a long tradition of comedy duos of older men in British Music Hall, vaudeville and stage performances. Most audiences of the time, especially British audiences, would have interpreted their relationship simply as one between eccentric, middle-aged bachelors. (Badman and Hosier)

Though there are so many elements of the duo that is ambiguous, Hitchcock imbues Charters and Caldicott with an affection and closeness that reads like a positively coded gay pairing. The two aren’t played as stereotypically flamboyant or campy. Later in the movie, Charters and Caldicott are heroic in facing down danger, during an onslaught of gunfire by fascist spies.

Charters and Caldicott are stranded at the only hotel in a tiny alpine village. The desk clerk informs them that they must share the maid's room. When they meet the voluptuous Germanic blonde, they glance at each other with an expression that appears to be saying they’re not interested. When they follow the maid to her cramped room, Charter cracks “It’s a pity they couldn’t have given us one each” which could be interpreted as each having their own woman, to have a bit of a romp with. But Charters clarifies himself by saying he meant two rooms. One for the maid and one for them. A mainstream audience could read their conduct as two heterosexual British gentlemen, but if you read between the lines, it is suggested that they have no interest in women. In another scene when the maid enters their shared room without knocking, both men act startled by the intrusion. Caldicott moves in a way that conjures up the role of a protective mate. Once she leaves, Caldicott locks the door.

A master of queering the screen, Hitchcock plays with sexuality using his skillful methods of innuendo and artful suggestiveness "” In an already masterful way of blurring the lines of reality and adeptly flirting with transgression, Hitchcock's milieus are perfect playgrounds for coded gay characters.

Continue reading “Chapter 3 – Queers and Dykes in the Dark: Classic, Noir & Horror Cinema’s Coded Gay Characters:”

Postcards from Shadowland no. 16 Halloween edition –

The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) Directed by Jack Arnold adapted by Richard Matheson and starring Grant Williams
Five Million Years to Earth (1967) Directed by Roy Ward Baker, written by Nigel Kneale starring Barbara Shelley and Andrew Keir
The Manster (1959) Directed by George P. Breakston starring Peter Dyneley, Jane Hylton and Tetsu Nakamura
The Twilight People (1972) Directed by Eddie Romero
Bluebeard (1972) Directed by Edward Dmytryk. Starring Richard Burton, Raquel Welch, Virna Lisi, Natalie Delon, Agostina Belli, Karen Schubert, Sybil Danning, Joey Heatherton and Marilù Tolo
The Beast with Five Fingers (1946) Directed by Robert Florey with a screenplay by Curt Siodmak. Starring Robert Alda, Peter Lorre, Andrea King and J. Carrol Naish
Carnival of Souls (1962) Directed by Herk Harvey starring Candace Hilligoss
The Beast with Five Fingers (1946) Directed by Robert Florey Starring Robert Alda, Peter Lorre, Andrea King and J. Carrol Naish
Bedlam (1946) Directed by Mark Robson Starring Boris Karloff, Anna Lee, Ian Wolfe,Billy House, Richard Fraser, Glen Vernon and Elizabeth Russell. Produced by Val Lewton
Dracula (1931) Directed by Tod Browning adapted from the novel by Bram Stoker-Starring Bela Lugosi, Helen Chandler, David Manners, Dwight Frye, Frances Dade and Edward Van Sloane
Blood and Roses (1960) Directed by Roger Vadim. Adapted from the novel by Sheridan Le Fanu- Starring Mel Ferrer, Elsa Martinelli, Annette Stroyberg
Black Sunday (1960) La maschera del demonio-Directed by Mario Bava Starring Barbara Steele, John Richardson and Andrea Checci
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) Directed by William Dieterle Starring Charles Laughton, Maureen O’Hara and Cedric Hardwicke adapted from the novel by Victor Hugo
War of the Colossal Beast (1958) Directed by Bert I. Gordon Starring Sally Fraser and Roger Pace
It Conquered the World (1956) Directed by Roger Corman- Starring Beverly Garland, Peter Graves Lee Van Cleef and The Cucumber Monster
Curse of the Faceless Man (1958) Directed by Edward L. Cahn–Starring Richard Anderson, Elaine Edwards, Adele Mara and Luis Van Rooten
The Old Dark House 1932 directed by James Whale-Gloria Stuart and Boris Karloff
Dead of Night (1945) Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, and Robert Hamer.–Starring Michael Redgrave, Mervyn Johns, Roland Culver, Googie Withers, Mary Merrall, Sally Ann Howes, Frederick Valk, Anthony Baird
Die! Die! My Darling! (1965) directed by Silvio Narizzano with a screenplay by Richard Matheson adapted from a novel by Anne Blaisdell–Starring Tallulah Bankhead, Stephanie Powers, Peter Vaughan, Donald Sutherland and Yootha Joyce
The Tenant (1976) Directed by Roman Polanski–Starring Roman Polanski, Isabelle Adjani, Melvyn Douglas, Jo Van Fleet, Bernard Fresson, Lila Kedrova, Claude Dauphin and Shelley Winters
House of Horrors (1946) Directed by Jean Yarborough starring “The Creeper” Rondo Hatton, Martin Kosleck and Virginia Gray
Spirits of the Dead (Italy/France 1968) aka Histoires extraordinaires
Segment: “William Wilson” Directed by Louis Malle
Shown from left: Brigitte Bardot, Alain Delon
Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965) Directed by Freddie Francis–Screenplay by Milton Subotsky–Starring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Neil McCallum, Ursula Howells, Peter Madden, Katy Wild, Alan Freeman, Ann Bell, Phoebe Nichols, Bernard Lee, Jeremy Kemp
Doctor X (1932) Directed by Michael Curtiz-Starring Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Lee Tracy, Preston Foster, John Wray, Harry Beresford
Frankenstein (1910) Produced by Thomas Edison Directed by J. Searle Dawley
Horror Hotel aka The City of the Dead (1960) Directed by John Llewellyn Moxey Starring Christopher Lee, Patricia Jessel, Dennis Lotis, Tom Naylor and Betta St. John. From a story by Milton Subotsky
House of Frankenstein (1944) Directed by Erle C. Kenton from a story by Curt Siodmak. Starring Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr. J.Carrol Naish, John Carradine, Anne Gwynne, Peter Coe, Lionel Atwill and George Zucco
Island of Lost Souls (1932) Directed by Erle C. Kenton Starring Charles Laughton, Bela Lugosi, Richard Arlen, Leila Hyams and Kathleen Burke based on a story by H.G.Wells
Isle of the Dead (1945) directed by Mark Robson written by Ardel Wray-Starring Boris Karloff, Ellen Drew, Marc Cramer, Katherine Emery, Helene Thimig, Alan Napier, Jason Robards Sr.
Carl Theodor Dreyer Leaves from Satan’s Book (1921) starring Helge Nissen
Diabolique (1955) Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot adapted by Pierre Boileau Starring Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot and Paul Meurisse
The Wolf Man (1941) Directed by George Waggner Starring Lon Chaney Jr. Claude Rains, Warren William, Ralph Bellamy, Patric Knowles, Bela Lugosi, Maria Ouspenskaya, Evelyn Ankers and Fay Helm original screenplay by Curt Siodmak
Night Must Fall (1937)
Directed by Richard Thorpe
Shown from left: Robert Montgomery, Dame May Whitty
Phantom of the Opera (1925) Directed by Rupert Julian and Lon Chaney. Starring Lon Chaney and Mary Philbin story by Gaston Leroux
Strangler of the Swamp (1946) directed by Frank Wisbar-starring Rosemary La Planche, Robert Barrat with an original story by Leo J. McCarthy
Nosferatu (1922) directed by F.W.Murnau Starring Max Schreck
The Abominable Snowman (1957) Directed by Val Guest starring Forrest Tucker, Peter Cushing and Maureen Connell written by Nigel Kneale
The Bat Whispers (1930) Directed by Roland West-starring Chance Ward, Richard Tucker, Wilson Benge, DeWitt Jennings, Una Merkel Grace Hamptom, and Chester Morris
The Curse of the Cat People (1944) directed by Gunther von Fritsch- Starring Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Jane Randolph, Ann Carter, and Elizabeth Russell. Screenplay by DeWitt Bodeen
Mighty Joe Young (1949) Directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack
Young Frankenstein (1974) Directed by Mel Brooks Starring Gene Wilder, Peter Boyle, Marty Feldman, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, Teri Garr, Kenneth Mars and Liam Dunn.
The Devil Bat (1940) directed by Jean Yarborough Starring Bela Lugosi
The Fly (1958) directed by Kurt Neumann screenplay by James Clavell, Starring David Hedison, Patricia Owens and Vincent Price
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) directed by Tobe Hooper. Starring Marilyn Burns, Edwin Neal, Allen Danziger and Gunnar Hansen as Leatherface
The Undead (1957) Directed by Roger Corman written by Charles B. Griffith and Mark Hanna Starring Pamela Duncan, Richard Garland, Allison Hayes, Val Dufour, Bruno VeSota, Mel Welles, Dorothy Neumann and Billy Barty
The Witches (1966) directed by Cyril Frankel Written by Nigel Kneale Starring Joan Fontaine, Kay Walsh and Alec McCowen
The Uninvited (1944) directed by Lewis Allen Starring Ray Milland, Ruth Hussey, Donald Crisp, Cornelia Otis Skinner and Gail Russell
THE NIGHT CALLER [BR 1965] aka BLOOD BEAST FROM OUTER SPACE MAURICE DENHAM, JOHN SAXON, JOHN CARSON Date: 1965
Poltergeist (1982) directed by Tobe Hooper written by Steven Spielberg. Starring JoBeth Williams, Beatrice Straight, Craig T. Nelson, Dominique Dunne Heather O’Rourke

A Trailer a Day Keeps the Boogeyman Away! Goodbye Gemini (1970)

“Jacki and Julian have evil twins. Each other.”

GOODBYE GEMINI (1970)

Goodbye Gemini film poster

Based on the screenplay by Edmund Ward and the novel ‘Ask Agamemnon’ by Jenni Hall, the film stars British cutie Judy Geeson as Jacki and Martin Potter (Fellini Satyricon (1969),Satan’s Slave 1976) as brother Julian, who play incestuously menacing twins that wear flashy clothes and travel with a creepy black teddy bear in tow, whom they talk to. They insert themselves into high society circles, scheming and submerging themselves in the underground Swinger scene in London.

Jacki and Julian

The murderous siblings kill their landlady right before they get themselves invited to a party where all the ‘swingers’ hang out. Bi-sexual brother Julian is a little too enamored of his sister Jacki, and is quite possessive of her affections. Once they attract gambler Clive Landseer (Alexis Kanner) who is heavily in debt, the deadly sequence of events unfold, as Clive manipulates Julian into helping him concoct a plan of blackmail and ultimately murder. The film’s flash and trash derives it’s sensationalism from the inhabitants of ornamental transvestites, swingers, and the beautiful people of London’s counter-culture.

A little romp

It’s and obscure film from director Alan Gibson who worked on Journey To Midnight (1968) and a few of the episodes in 1968-1969 for the resulting tv series that followed called Journey to the Unknown Gibson directed another psycho-sexual thriller Crescendo (1970) Of course there’s also his, The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973) and Dracula A.D. (1972)

Dracula+AD+1972+1

Goodbye Gemini party

Goodye Gemini lobby card 4

Goodbye Gemin lobby card 5

Goodye Gemini lobby card 6

Goodbye Gemini

It’s an interesting moody and untempered piece of psycho-sexual 70s fare, that also co-stars veteran British actor Michael Redgrave as James Harrington-Smith, Mike Pratt as Rod Barstowe, Marian Diamond as Denise Pryce-Fletcher and Freddie Jones as David Curry. Peter Jeffrey plays Detective Inspector Kingsley, and Daphne Heard is Mrs. McLaren.

The film features songs from the soundtrack, “Nothing’s Good and Nothing’s Free”, “Forget About the Day” with music by Christopher Gunning and lyrics by Peter Lee Stirling. Both performed by Peter Lee Stirling. Plus “Goodbye Gemini” Written by J. Alexander Ryan and Rick Jones , performed by Jackie Lee and “Tell the World We’re Not In” Written by Denis King and Don Black , performed by The Peddlers

Goodbye just for now, from your Cancerian MonsterGirl