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‘Thrills and chills’: horror, the woman's film, and the origins of film noir

2009; Routledge; Volume: 7; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17400300902816911

1740-7923

Mark Jancovich,

Crime and Detective Fiction Studies

Abstract This paper examines the use of the terms 'horror film' and 'thriller' in the film reviews of the 1940s and demonstrates that they were not seen as two distinct generic categories but, on the contrary, while these terms were not precisely equivalent, they were often used interchangeably. As a result, many films commonly understood as horror films today were identified as thrillers at the time and many films that are identified as thrillers today were clearly described as horror films. Furthermore, the term 'thriller' was not primarily associated with action or suspense, but rather with the shivers and chills often associated with certain forms of horror. The point here is not to claim that particular films or groups of films 'really' belong to one category or another but rather to explore the ways in which generic categories operated within the 1940s and, in the process, to demonstrate that in the 1940s the films commonly categorized today as examples of the paranoid woman's film and film noir were often seen as part of a larger cycle of horror films within the period. Keywords: horrorthrillerthe woman's filmfilm noir Notes 1. Indeed, Linda Williams has referred to horror as one of the key 'body genres' precisely due to the heavy associations of this genre with this type of bodily response (see Williams Citation1991). 2. See, for example, Spooks Run Wild (1941), Black Dragon (1942), and Ghosts on the Loose (1943). The tagline for Black Dragons even alludes to this ambiguity: 'See him pit his terror against Japan's treacherous agents in the U.S.A.!' 3. See my articles, 'Bluebeard's Wives: Horror, Quality and the Paranoid Woman's Film in the 1940s'; and '"The English Master of Movie Melodrama": Hitchcock, Horror and the Woman's Film'. 4. See my article '"Frighteningly Real": Psychology, Realism and Generic Transformation in the Demise of the 1940s Horror Cycle'.