Noirvember Horrors—London, New York, & Nowhere

It's Noirvember, and this week I'm writing about three horror movies that are also noirs (some significant spoilers for the first, lighter spoilers for the other two) . . .

From the Grave.

Three ideas from horror cinema's past.

1. Noir horror/horror noir. Most genre hybrids lean in one direction or another, but not John Brahm's Hangover Square (1945) (streaming for free on YouTube). There’s so much (“gaslight”) noir here—its black-and-white cityscape, its bleakness and sense of anxiety, its story of a life upended by a femme fatale. There’s so much horror too—the portrait of the serial killer, the camera's assumption of the killer’s POV, the killer’s hands stretching his makeshift garrote, a Guy Fawkes mask on a lifeless body. Hangover Square, when it comes to these genres, inhabits them fully and equally. There’s a touch of the ambiguous image here—the rabbit that is also the duck.
2. Playing through it. Hangover Square tells the story of a murderous composer, so it’s natural that it ends with a concert. Laird Cregar’s George Bone presents his concerto at the piano, accompanied by an orchestra. The music, and the scene, are dark and romantic—candlelit, camera gliding, chandelier glinting. It gets darker as it goes, and George soundtracks his own sad, sinister end. Police arrive, he leaves the piano to his friend (and near-murder-victim) Barbara long enough to set a fire, and we see him playing through the ensuing mayhem. His music continues even as the orchestra abandons the concert, and the crowd flees. We see him, finally, alone, still playing through it, fire and smoke all around. It’s a concert that rhymes with the film itself—a bleak but captivating work of art with a clear direction and an unhappy end. In Hangover Square we always know where things are heading. We’re there to watch the flames.
3. Remember, remember. Hangover Square contains one of the greatest and most horrific scenes of body disposal in cinema. It’s November 5, Guy Fawkes Night, and crowds in London burn effigies on a giant bonfire. George carries a body—Fawkes mask covering her face—through the crowd, climbs the huge bonfire pyre, and places his victim on top. In a crowd all carrying effigies for the fire, he blends in. A real body burns, camouflaged by the mass, symbolic burning. In horror, there’s often the need for places outside civilizational notice, usually isolated places where horrors can manifest, where characters can confront them without help. Hangover Square suggests another opportunity for this kind of place—our shifting, elastic, context-dependent social spaces, when the moment is right.

Right Behind You.

A thought on horror's present.

4. Escape Trap. Jim Thompson’s The Getaway features a famously dark, surreal ending in which its on-the-run lovers make their way to the criminal haven El Rey, but the place turns into its own kind of nightmare. There’s something of this in the set-up of Michael Felker’s sci-fi-horror-noir Things Will Be Different. Its criminal siblings, bags of cash in-hand, escape police through a portal to another timeline, but they find themselves stuck, in the new timeline, with horrors they weren’t expecting. Both narratives suggest a problem with escape—the same boundaries that present an opportunity for those in flight (whether they're controlled by criminals or defy linear time) might also make the perfect trap.

Living Deliciously.

A recommendation.

5. Hail. The fact that it is my favorite movie probably says more about me than it does about the film—but The Seventh Victim is one of the great horror noirs. All about death and obsession with death, the film is as remorseless as it is delightful. Its energy arises from its two contrasting siblings—the iconic (at least for those in the know) proto-goth Jacqueline (Jean Brooks) and her innocent but steely sister Mary (Kim Hunter) whose search for Jacqueline in New York ultimately involves moving into her sister’s neighborhood and romancing her sister’s husband. Oh, and this is also a movie about Satanists.

Dead of Night publishes every Tuesday. Last week, the president nominated Steve Pearce to head the Bureau of Land Management. A former oil industry executive, Pearce loves extractive industries and the privatization of public lands. A nightmare pick, the nomination continues this administration's assault on public lands—an assault on our national resources, our wildernesses, and our climate. The moment to resist fascism is now.