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The crossroads of horror and noir
Mar. 2nd, 2011 11:23 amI just finished reading _Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City_ by Nicholas Christopher (Simon & Schuster, 1997), in which Christopher (who is also a poet) explores the mythic themes of noir. Although the author does not explicitly set out to connect horror with noir, I found a lot of what he said applied to both genres, and especially to that strange little crossroads where both genres intersect.
Christopher's main theme is to link the modern city with images of the labyrinth, especially the image of the labyrinth as it represents the underworld, the shadowy place which goes down and in. This sense of going down and in, of being endlessly in flight but never managing to escape outward, is the sense which I always feel from the best horror and noir, for the physical flight through the twisted and decayed external architecture of the night city or the dark old house mirrors the internal flight through the twists and turns of the psyche. Corruption, in all of its connotations, is the word which I would apply to this sense of physical and psychological disintegration and unraveling, and to somedegree, one could think of the cityscapes of noir and horror as an endless series of those crossroads which feature so prominently in those American blues songs about dealing with the Devil.
The incessant running and searching for the noir/horror protagonist almost always involves the need to uncover a secret, and during this quest for information the protagonist is likely to discover too much, rather than too little, infromation. In noir, such communications tend to come through modern technologies, such as phone messages, newspapers, police radios and public announcements, etc., while for the horror protagonist such communications come through more outmoded sources, such as old diaries, yellowed newspaper clippings, antiquarian books, stolen or secret files, or faded photographs. This external commotion of noise reflects the internal moral commotion or, as Christopher says:
block quote start
The continual motion of cities, in machines of transportation and communication, in electronic impulses and cascades of words, is the foundation for much of the moral commotion in film noir. pp. 87-88
block quote end
Christopher mentions that the name of Hell's city is Pandemonium, and pandemonium, in its connotation of a loud and manic combination of many noises, conveys the sense of confusion which the noir/horror hero feels as he accumalates the many conflicting messages which he is given in his quest to uncover the secret.
Not that the horror/noir protagonist ever starts from a point of rationality and stability.
In an older post titled "Horror is for losers"
http://kestrell.livejournal.com/495023.html
I wrote that in horror, the main character is typically a loser, a loner and an outsider, someone close to the edge economically, psychologically, and/or socially, and this is no less true of the noir protagonist. Even in the most explicitly heroic of these outsiders, Philip Marlowe, for instance, it is his outsider status which allows (compels?) him to pursue the secret. Along the way, such investigators are often offered a Faustian bargain, whether it is money, love, or merely the chance to rest and not be under constant threat of vilence. The more heroic will turn this offer down, but whether the protagonist sells out or not, his choice doesn't prevent his destruction. Fredric Brown's novels provide some strong examples of this "damned if you do,damned if you don't" moral ambiguity, especially in _Here Comes a Candle_ (1950) and _The Screaming Mimi_ (1949), which provided the basis for Dario Argentos film "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage" (1970).
I mentioned that the horror/noir protagonist is often close tot eh edge psychologically, and this only serves to make the protagonist more prone to dreams, hallucinations, and paranoid misperceptions regarding what is real and what exists only inhis own shadowed psyche. It's not always clear if the character's mental instability is the result of trying to comprehend an irrational world or if the unreality and irrationality of the world is a manifestation of the character's own unbalanced mind.
In both horror and noir, creating this sense of physical and moral ambiguity is indicated strongly in setting, and anything from the geometry of a building's architecture to the weather can set the mood--for one of my favorite examples of how weather is used to indicate an irrational world, read Chandler's short story "Red Wind," in which the Santa Ana winds set the tone from the first sentence of the story.
Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Tom Piccirilli, Laird Baron, and Paul Tremblay have all written superb stories which inhabit the crossroads between horror and noir, and the upcoming anthology _Supernatural Noir_ edited by Ellen Datlow promises to contain some new interpretations of this intriguing intersection of two genres.
Christopher's main theme is to link the modern city with images of the labyrinth, especially the image of the labyrinth as it represents the underworld, the shadowy place which goes down and in. This sense of going down and in, of being endlessly in flight but never managing to escape outward, is the sense which I always feel from the best horror and noir, for the physical flight through the twisted and decayed external architecture of the night city or the dark old house mirrors the internal flight through the twists and turns of the psyche. Corruption, in all of its connotations, is the word which I would apply to this sense of physical and psychological disintegration and unraveling, and to somedegree, one could think of the cityscapes of noir and horror as an endless series of those crossroads which feature so prominently in those American blues songs about dealing with the Devil.
The incessant running and searching for the noir/horror protagonist almost always involves the need to uncover a secret, and during this quest for information the protagonist is likely to discover too much, rather than too little, infromation. In noir, such communications tend to come through modern technologies, such as phone messages, newspapers, police radios and public announcements, etc., while for the horror protagonist such communications come through more outmoded sources, such as old diaries, yellowed newspaper clippings, antiquarian books, stolen or secret files, or faded photographs. This external commotion of noise reflects the internal moral commotion or, as Christopher says:
block quote start
The continual motion of cities, in machines of transportation and communication, in electronic impulses and cascades of words, is the foundation for much of the moral commotion in film noir. pp. 87-88
block quote end
Christopher mentions that the name of Hell's city is Pandemonium, and pandemonium, in its connotation of a loud and manic combination of many noises, conveys the sense of confusion which the noir/horror hero feels as he accumalates the many conflicting messages which he is given in his quest to uncover the secret.
Not that the horror/noir protagonist ever starts from a point of rationality and stability.
In an older post titled "Horror is for losers"
http://kestrell.livejournal.com/495023.html
I wrote that in horror, the main character is typically a loser, a loner and an outsider, someone close to the edge economically, psychologically, and/or socially, and this is no less true of the noir protagonist. Even in the most explicitly heroic of these outsiders, Philip Marlowe, for instance, it is his outsider status which allows (compels?) him to pursue the secret. Along the way, such investigators are often offered a Faustian bargain, whether it is money, love, or merely the chance to rest and not be under constant threat of vilence. The more heroic will turn this offer down, but whether the protagonist sells out or not, his choice doesn't prevent his destruction. Fredric Brown's novels provide some strong examples of this "damned if you do,damned if you don't" moral ambiguity, especially in _Here Comes a Candle_ (1950) and _The Screaming Mimi_ (1949), which provided the basis for Dario Argentos film "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage" (1970).
I mentioned that the horror/noir protagonist is often close tot eh edge psychologically, and this only serves to make the protagonist more prone to dreams, hallucinations, and paranoid misperceptions regarding what is real and what exists only inhis own shadowed psyche. It's not always clear if the character's mental instability is the result of trying to comprehend an irrational world or if the unreality and irrationality of the world is a manifestation of the character's own unbalanced mind.
In both horror and noir, creating this sense of physical and moral ambiguity is indicated strongly in setting, and anything from the geometry of a building's architecture to the weather can set the mood--for one of my favorite examples of how weather is used to indicate an irrational world, read Chandler's short story "Red Wind," in which the Santa Ana winds set the tone from the first sentence of the story.
Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Tom Piccirilli, Laird Baron, and Paul Tremblay have all written superb stories which inhabit the crossroads between horror and noir, and the upcoming anthology _Supernatural Noir_ edited by Ellen Datlow promises to contain some new interpretations of this intriguing intersection of two genres.
