Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

2.2.1 The Spiral Staircase (1946) and the Gothic Noir
Directed by Robert Siodmak
Produced by Dore Shary
Written by Ethel Lina White
Starring Dorothy McGuire, George Brent, Ethel Barrymore, Kent Smith, Rhonda
Fleming
Photography by Nicholas Musuraca
Music Score by Roy Webb
Costume Design by Edward Stevenson
Film Editing by Harry W. Gerstad
As noted in the chapter on “The Gothic Romance” in Part II, the influence of horror
films on film noir has been considerable. The Gothic novel of the late eighteenth century
established important roots both for nineteenth-century stage melodrama (a theatre of
sensational events and heightened emotionalism) and also for the melodramatic strand that
continued throughout the twentieth century in both literature and film. The material used in
these Gothic and melodramatic novels would focus on the image of a single, vulnerable
woman, insidiously preyed upon either physically or psychologically, as a way of
appealing to the sympathy of the largely but not exclusively female reader. Such material
need not be, but often was, set in the historical past, but it always accentuated the
sufferings of the woman in distress. The oppressed heroine is nearly always the central
figure of the novel, presented to us as a pensive, lonely, and terrified creature.
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