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

house, as I will discuss later, is emphasised through shots, for example, at low angles to
include ceilings, carved mouldings with angled surfaces, all given depth and mass by
chiaroscuro lighting.
2.2.1.1 Voyeurism and Entrapment
The themes of voyeurism and entrapment are reinforced by those numerous closeups
in which we see a malevolently glaring hidden eye watching Helen from the darkness.
It was, apparently, Siodmak himself, as Dorothy McGuire revealed during an interview:
“That was his eye. He was that vain!” In this regard, one can see that film producer Val
Lewton 88 and director Siodmak were both influenced by Hitchcock, who had a penchant as
well for this kind of suspense and the telling insertion of his own directorial presence (his
well-known and ingenious cameo appearances in his own films).
The camerawork is conspicuous from the very opening scenes, in which a carriage
pulls up just in front of the hotel, and the camera rises up to a room where a crippled girl is
being watched as she undresses. This first murder, accomplished as the girl pulls her dress
over her head, introduces a note of Expressionism in terms of the power to “see”. For the
sake of conveying the young girl’s inner feelings, reality seems to be distorted; hence the
only vision that we get is the eye (fig. 83) and it is through it that we perceive the internal
emotions of the girl being attacked. This scene, photographed in gradually darkening light
by Nicholas Musuraca, contains a strange erotic charge composed of fear and
possessiveness which is later emphasised also through the way that Musuraca stages
lighting effects to induce visual and aural hallucinations in Helen and Albert Warren, the
elder son of the house in the film.
88
See p. 128 for the films produced by Val Lewton, such as 1943’s I Walked Like a Zombie and 1944’s Cat
People.
310