Paranoiac (1963): Gothic Grisaille

“The strong light which shows the mountains of a landscape in all their greatness, and with all their rugged sharpness, gives them nothing of the interest with which a more gloomy tint would invest their grandeur; dignifying, though it softens, and magnifying, while it obscures.”

—Ann Radcliffe, “On the Supernatural in Poetry”

You’ll rarely find the words “Hammer horror” and “good taste” in the same sentence. On the whole, the studio’s landmark chillers bequeathed such a lurid legacy of eye-popping color and eroticized violence to the film industry that there’s hardly a post-1960s horror film which doesn’t owe a debt to Hammer’s unabashed excess.

However, Paranoiac, directed by master cameraman Freddie Francis, is something of a black sheep in the Hammer family of spooks. The studio did go in for a touch of class every now and then, as with Taste of Fear, and Paranoiac holds up as one of its best psychological horrors. This sleek Hitchcokian thriller eschews Hammer’s signature bombast in favor of disquieting innuendo and the cool splendor of black-and-white widescreen cinematography. Though rather sedate in terms of what it shows, the film mostly leaves the horrors offscreen, preferring to let a number of unpleasant suggestions fester and multiply in our minds, where they can do the most damage.

Eleven years ago, John and Mary Ashby died in a plane crash leaving three children: Eleanor, Simon, and Tony, the last of whom apparently committed suicide in despair shortly afterward. As siblings go, it’s hard to imagine two more different than Eleanor and Simon. Gentle, romantic Eleanor quietly teeters on the brink of sanity, still pining for her lost brother, whereas rakish reprobate Simon boozes it up, trying to figure out new ways to get at Eleanor’s inheritance. Because this is a Hammer film, there’s also a luscious French nurse living at the Ashby estate, supposedly caring for Eleanor. Sinister battleaxe Auntie Harriet serves as the watchdog of the dysfunctional clan’s reputation.

Shortly before the Ashby heirs are about to come into their money, a mysterious man claiming to be Tony Ashby shows up and begins to suspect that someone’s driving Eleanor mad. Faced with a powerful rival, Simon has to act fast to obtain what he wants… and keep his skeletons in the closet.

Loosely adapted from a novel by Josephine Tey and scripted by Jimmy Sangster, Paranoiac revives the tropes of Gothic literature for a new generation. Starting off with a rather conventional family melodrama scenario, the film progressively focuses on the ever-present undertones of incest, morbid mental states, and sadistic acts of cruelty that lurked between the lines in the novels of Walpole and Lewis.

This film capitalizes on its lugubrious settings—craggy cliffs, a maze-like manor house, ancestral gardens—to place the audience in a receptive state of mind. As I watched, I kept thinking that Ann Radcliffe, the 18th to 19th century queen of the florid British Gothic style, would’ve approved of Paranoiac. In her dialogue essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” she praised the type of literature that “seem[s] to perceive a soul in every thing; and thus, in the secret workings of its own characters, and in the combination of its incidents, [keeps] the elements and the local scenery always in unison with them, heightening their effect.”

Though it abandons the supernatural, Paranoiac does a fantastic job of extracting “the soul in every thing,” of wringing its mise-en-scene for every ounce of dread. Even trappings of the modern era, like Simon’s swank E-type Jag, bend to the Gothic agenda. The Jag becomes a harbinger of disaster after Simon crashes it in a flowerbed upon seeing his ostensibly dead brother for the first time in 11 years.

Freddie Francis recycles a trick that he used as cinematographer for The Innocents, cultivating anxiety through the inclusion of frames within frames. The constricted or divided screen spaces contrast with the occasional sweeping outdoor landscape shots, reminding us of the unhealthy, benighted ambiance of the Ashby manor. Tony’s apparition loiters in a doorway or is seen by Eleanor as she looks through the bars of her window, a virtual prisoner to her family’s sordid connivances. As Tony and Eleanor peer into the manor’s spooky music room, we see their faces through a tiny clear spot in a window opaque with dust.

 

As a literary style, the Gothic is particularly tethered to a sense of place. The architectural features that so often crowd the frame in Paranoiac translate that sensibility, adding tension to important “incidents… heightening their effect” to borrow Radcliffe’s words.

On the other hand, Francis also exploits the full potential of widescreen to arrange engrossing compositions and dignified tableaux. Even in the most static scenes, he amps up the drama and tension by balancing the frame with several figures. The eye wants to travel, to take in all of the faces. For instance, I love how many possible points of interest there are in this shot from the scene where the Ashby family lawyer interrogates Tony, who’s apparently risen from the grave.

Tony stands out as the centerpiece of the shot, but we also have the battered profiles of the lawyer and Aunt Harriet, plus angelic, hopeful Eleanor and diabolic, gargoyle-ish Simon in the background. This otherwise bland scene acquires the gravity of a medieval grisaille, as we watch a conflicted man facing an ordeal, allegorically surrounded by forces of good and evil.

The film’s true standout, Oliver Reed slyly capers through the role of Simon, exuding a heady mixture of charm and menace. Before he destroyed his matinee idol face with years of bad behavior, Reed looked and sounded like a cross between young Orson Welles and young Laurence Olivier.

I can’t top Janine Sakol’s description of this glorious throwback in his prime: “Reed in the living, lusting flesh, actually makes the fiction Gothics seem pale by comparison. He smoulders, a mobile furnace with a low, fierce heat that threatens to explode at any moment.” He carries the movie on his loutish shoulders, transforming what could have been a campy, cardboard loony into a biting portrait of malevolence, a glimpse into the abyss of psychosis.

During an appearance on Parkinson in 1973—back when Reed still did his interviews in a reasonable state of sobriety—he spoke fondly of his Hammer days, claiming that shortly before the making of Paranoiac, Peter Cushing gave him some key advice: “always the understatement.” During his Hammer tutelage, Reed also learned that he didn’t need to overdo it for the camera, since the lenses could accentuate even the smallest gesture. He would later say, instructing another actor how to do villainous parts, “the dangerous man has a great silence about him… Don’t blink… You never see a cobra blink, do you?”

We witness some of that subtle, frozen intensity from our very first glimpse of Simon. The film opens with a church service, where Reverend Exposition recounts the tragedies lowered upon the house of Ashby. As he mentions Eleanor and Aunt Harriet, the camera lights on the solemn pair. However, when the name Simon comes up, we get a cut to sheet music in an organ booth in the church; a plume of smoke billows into the frame from somewhere offscreen. A graceful, sinewy hand reaches into the frame to turn the page of music, and the camera pans to reveal an unmoved Simon, taking a drag on his cigarette and smirking slightly.

Irreverent, secretive, emotionally blunted, and clever: all of these character traits emerge in that single shot, thanks to Francis’s command of camera movement and Reed’s surprisingly inert performance.

Simon’s presence often coincides with a disturbance or some sort of visual eruption. He callously crosses in front of the camera with a snifter of brandy and sardonic quip. Or lounges in the foreground of the frame, intently pulling apart a rose. Or forces the camera to whirl around, as he jabs pub darts towards the audience, threatening to blind a stranger. A poetic underwater shot best conveys his unbalanced psychological state, as he runs his fingers through the current and ripples warp his beautiful face into a grotesquely warped grin.

I really don’t want to include any major spoilers in this post, because I found the film’s circuitous plot tremendously entertaining. Believe me, though, this elegant, aristocratic cousin from the house of Hammer has a few good scares up its tailored sleeves.

This post is part of the Hammer Halloween Blogathon hosted by the Classic Film & TV Café. Go to www.classicfilmtvcafe.com to view the complete blogathon schedule.

The Gothic Note: Graham Greene on The Black Room (1935)

Graham Greene—yes, one of the greatest and most enjoyable writers of the 20^th century—spent a good bit of the 1930s writing about movies. 

And he was the kind of critic who makes me feel unworthy to be a self-appointed critic. His keen powers of observation and unflaggingly sharp ability to zero in on flaws, foibles, and mannerisms could reduce even the most egotistical of entertainment personalities into shuddering piles of fearfulness and remorse. Greene possessed an innate Geiger counter for pretense and commercial tripe. Nothing hindered him from laying into his cinematic victims with a withering British politeness and eloquence.

Which is all the more reason why, when Greene reviews a film favorably, we all ought to pull it off the shelves and give it a fresh look. And, wonder of wonders, when reflecting on the 1935 Karloff vehicle, The Black Room, our emerging novelist remarked in The Spectator:

“I liked this wildly artificial film, in which Karloff acts both a wicked central European count and his virtuous, cultured twin of the Byronic period.”

Phew! We can all heave a sigh of relief. Foremost among Greene’s reasons for liking the film, he points out that The Black Room affords Karloff a role not as an inarticulate monster, but as both a monstrous, yet pithy human being and a good guy. We get a richer sense of his range.

“Mr Boris Karloff has been allowed to act at last… [A]ny actor could have produced the short barks and guttural rumbles, the stiff, stuffed, sawdust gestures, which was all his parts required of him. A Karloff scenario must have made curious reading. Were those grunts phonetically expressed?”

As much as that last rhetorical question provokes the 1930s equivalent of an LOL, I’m going to have to take issue with you, Graham Greene. (Please don’t haunt me! Wait… actually, please do.) Karloff can communicate an extraordinary amount through grunts and jerky motions.

Karloff: double trouble…

Nevertheless, I agree that ‘tis a treat indeed to watch Karloff swing into full-on Richard III mode with his wily, sardonic delivery of Baron Gregor’s lines. I also appreciate the louche physicality which Karloff explores in the part of a libertine, always lounging in a chair kicked back against a wall, his leg swung over the arm of the chair.

Karloff’s Gregor: inventor of “chillin’ like a villain”

As for William Roy Neill’s handling of the script, Greene accorded the interpretation rather high praise… at the expense of another great horror director:

“The direction is good: it has caught, as Mr James Whale never did with Frankenstein, the genuine Gothic note. Mrs. Radcliffe would not have been ashamed of this absurd and exciting film, of the bones in the oubliette…

“…the scene at the altar when the dog leaps and the paralysed arm comes to life in self-defense,

“…of the Count’s wild drive back to the castle, the lashing whip, the rearing horses, the rocketing coach, the strange volley of rocks with its leading cross and neglected Christ, the graveyard with owls and ivy. There is much more historical sense in this film than in any of… the ‘scholarly’ works of Mr Korda. A whole literary period comes to life…”

I am now going to critique this critique. Those of you with faint hearts may leave.

Dead men don’t blog back, so I want to clarify that I am in no way deriding Graham Greene. Let’s face it, though, his review does place a major limitation on horror, a limitation which runs the risk of oversimplifying the genre. He’s implying that horror should necessarily be Gothic in tone. At least, it seems that he’s taking a shot at Whale for abandoning the Gothic aesthetic. By contrast, Greene praises Neill and his “good” direction for remaining faithful to the literary tradition of Radcliffe and Lewis. His whole standard of evaluation hinges on a film’s relationship to a specific heritage of terror. I don’t think it should be that simple.

Indeed, I advise you not to read Greene’s review of Bride of Frankenstein if you happen to be squeamish or if you, like me, simply love that movie—the write-up is about as dismissive as Greene gets. He didn’t appreciate any of the camp elements, Whale’s “devil’s advocate” brand of empathy, or the piquant, looming bizarreness which Whale infused into talkie horror. Instead, the budding novelist kept hammering on the fact that the Bride just wasn’t scary in the Gothic sense, when, frankly, I doubt that it was meant to be.

I differ from Greene, because I can’t believe the aesthetics of horror are that clear-cut. Gothic—good. Departure from Gothic—bad. Now, I would argue that good horror may borrow elements from the Gothic, but it doesn’t need to.

And, yet. Always this “and yet…” haunts me, like the specter of a murdered brother!

I have to admit that Greene does make a strong case for the validity of the Gothic mentality as the core of pleasurable horror flicks. Just to be clear, for me, Gothic atmosphere and style revolves around contrivances, like curses, unspeakable secrets, and twin brothers. The esthetic also requires a certain benighted, costume-y feel which Greene beautifully conjures in the quoted description above. Finally, I would argue that this type of horror is joined to a psychological primitivism, a lack of obvious self-consciousness.

If a man starts hitting on you in a graveyard, you may be in a Gothic novel.

Gothic horror relies upon the ghastly for its thrills: churchyards, stabbings, murderous brigands, hidden deformities, and gruesome ironies. One of my favorite such moments in The Black Room (spoiler alert!) has Baron Gregor assume the bearing and manners of the brother he’s just killed while examining himself in the reflective onyx walls of the titular secret chamber.

There’s also something about the Gothic that reminds me of Newton’s Third Law of Motion. Much of the fun of this genre literature (and Jacobean revenge tragedies, for that matter) derives from some kind of prediction, equation, or vow that ends up getting fulfilled, rather creepily and often with a slight plot twist, in the end. As it does in The Black Room, the conclusion of which I won’t disclose, but which you’ll understand if you’ve seen it.

“I begin as I end.” The family coat-of-arms and curse.

Another strength of Gothic horror as a genre resides in what I would describe as a lack of psychologizing. In place of tiresomely nuanced self-doubt, we relish heavy generalizations like Lust, Sin, and Innocence that dwell in the realm of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Like Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Black Room eschews the cumbersome self-analysis that we do get in more “modern” horror flicks, including some good ones, like the 1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Cat People.

That’s not to say that The Black Room lacks elements that lend themselves to psychological analysis, or to interpretation in general. Take the film’s use of mirrors as a means of suggesting moral doubling and division. Then there’s the fact that Anton and Gregor came from the same womb and are destined to end up in the same oubliette. But still, you could plausibly watch this movie and get no sense of anything deeper than a fine little chiller.

It’s entertainment in a rather pure, uncomplicated form, which is something that Greene and I both like and applaud. As someone who’s spent a lot of time studying film, I am refreshed by a film that doesn’t really want you to study or over-intellectualize it. I suspect that Greene disliked Whale’s movies because he found them too up-front and pretentious in their attempts at exploring the ambitious themes of life, death, and man-as-God.

No doubt, The Black Room deserves a place in the pantheon of classic horror, with its smooth, sinister tracking shots and pitch-perfect screen adaptation of Gothic tropes. The film does revive a whole literary era of wedding feasts cut short and specters of guilt and evil returning—without the self-conscious fear of Freud poking at them with his cigar.

But, and here’s where I diverge, The Black Room, despite its stylish qualities, does not herald a new era for horror as a genre, like the 1931 Frankenstein did with its jump cuts, its jarring use of sound, and its masterfully askew cinematography—askew to the point of abstraction at times. It surprises me that Greene, as a man who devoted so much of his time to pondering the fate of man’s soul in the face of modernity, did not appreciate the cruel, nervous, decidedly un-Gothic edge that Whale’s work adds to horror as a genre.

The “genuine Gothic note”: a menaced maiden.

Brave new word: man menaced… by his own creation.

The Black Room is a brilliant relic, though. I cherish it as such, and I strongly recommend that you watch it. So, apparently, did Graham Greene.