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

Warren, making either of them the potential serial killer on the loose and targeting young
women who have a physical disability.
The Spiral Staircase is part of a set of noir films by Siodmak that follow the same
path, that of expressionist nightmare, persecution mania and psychological irrationality,
especially traceable in films such as The Phantom Lady, The Killers, The Dark Mirror, and
Criss Cross. With these, Siodmak creates a body of films notable for their sense of
psychological and physical corruption in a time when Freudian psychology was reaching
the peak of its popularity. With The Dark Mirror, for example, Siodmak portrays an
irrational world hypnotised by its own reflection and uses his own version of
psychoanalysis to come up with explanations for his characters’ delusions. The film, in
fact, deals with the expressionist Doppelgänger motif (see p. 89) – Olivia de Havilland
plays a dual role of identical twin sisters, Ruth and Terry Collins, whose personality traits
are antithetical. Here too, the topic of voyeurism is very much related to the tropes of
mirrors as both direct the viewer to logically think about diverse psychoanalytic theories of
spectatorship, a subject dealt with in several films by Siodmak, and most notably in the
opening sequence of The Spiral Staircase. Screenwriter Nunnally Johnson carefully
Figure 84. The Dark Mirror
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