Abstract
This paper examines the prestige 'shocker ' The Spiral Staircase (1946), suggesting that it challenges the perception of the decline in quality in the horror genre in the 1940s, as well as assumptions in scholarship that the genre has historically been addressed to a male audience. Whilst the film is usually discussed as a woman's film, on release it was centred as part of a distinct shift in the horror genre from 'grade B thrillers to deluxe chillers'. The reclassification of films like The Spiral Staircase as woman's films could be seen as an attempt to make text fit established theory -the film is addressed to a female audience and thus cannot be a horror film. Through an analysis of textual and extra-textual discourses, including reception and publicity materials, this paper will challenge the pervasive theories that suggest female pleasure or identification is unattainable in horror spectatorship. Whilst the theory is that women refuse to look at horror, averting their eyes or turning away, in 1946 The Spiral Staircase asked a predominantly female audience to take a closer look and question the very act of looking at the cinema screen. The dominant perception of 1940s horror is embodied in the iconic poster image for Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) , in which Universal's classic monster franchises strangle each other atop an unspecified European hillside. This is an apt metaphor for that studio's then project of wringing the last revenue out of its coterie of creatures, but is far from representative of this period as a whole. The critical focus on the decreasing quality and increasing monster count of Universal's output (from the innovation of The Wolf Man [1941] to the said werewolf's third reincarnation in as many years alongside all his cohorts in House of Dracula [1945] ) ignores a wider Hollywood trend that saw horror become comparatively highbrow. 1 In 1944 the New York Times hailed the arrival of a 'new horror cycle' that was 'dressed in full Class "A" paraphernalia, including million dollar budgets and big-name casts' (Stanley 1944, 4) . It highlighted the release of films such as Gaslight (1944 ), Phantom Lady (1944) , and The Uninvited (1944) as indicators of this trend, continuing that many more were in production. One such film was The Spiral Staircase (1946) . Although this film is typically identified as a 'woman's film' in contemporary scholarship, on its release The Spiral Staircase was centred as epitomic of this shift from 'grade B thrillers to deluxe chillers' (Rosenfield 1946, 10) . This paper will argue that The Spiral Staircase challenges both the perception of the decline in quality in the horror genre in the 1940s, and usual assumptions about female horror spectatorship in the classical period. Like the aforementioned films in Stanley's 'new horror cycle', The Spiral Staircase is usually ignored in scholarship on 1940s horror. As suggested, it is mostly discussed in terms of the all-encompassing demarcation of the woman's film, and usually specifically as an extension of the literary female Gothic (Doane 1987 (Doane , 1994;; Walsh 1984 ). If released today, however, The Spiral Staircase would likely be discussed in terms of a serial killer or slasher film, with its female protagonist Helen Capel representing what Carol Clover refers to as the cycle's 'final girl'. However, Clover (1987 Clover ( , 1992) ) assumes that the audience for slasher films is predominantly male, with the final girl allowing these male spectators to vicariously experience the victimisation of the female hero, whilst simultaneously reaffirming myths of male superiority by stressing victimhood as ultimately female. This idea that the horror genre is addressed to a male audience has become an almost common-sense assumption in scholarship, whilst recognition of any potential female pleasure derived from horror spectatorship is certainly assumed to be a contemporary phenomenon (Neale 1980; Williams 1984; Modleski 1986; Creed 1993) . The redefinition of films like The Spiral Staircase as woman's films could be seen as an attempt to make text fit established theory -the film is addressed to a female audience and thus cannot be a horror film as horror films are addressed to a male audience. Diane Waldman makes a clear distinction between the male address of 'horror' and female address of the 'Gothic romance films of the 1940s'. She suggests: the central feature of the Gothics is ambiguity [ . . . ] This it shares with other filmic and literary genres, for example, the horror film and the fantastic. Yet in the Gothic, this hesitation is experienced by a character (and presumably a spectator) who is female. (1984, 31) Obviously generic labels are open to contestation and historical rewriting. Steve Neale (1993) has demonstrated the disparity between the trade's understanding of the term 'melodrama' in the 1940s and 1950s (used predominantly to designate 'masculine' action genres) and its use in later academic criticism as an alternate label for the 1940s and 1950s woman's film. However, the intention of this paper is not to return The Spiral Staircase to its 'rightful' genre, rather it is an attempt to resituate the film into its historical context in order to investigate this perceived contradiction between the horror genre and female spectatorship. The paper will
Showing the abstract — retrieve the full paper via the Exa API.