A man in a black hat and coat stands on a dark street at night, framed by the somehow ominous light of an upstairs window in the house he is about to enter. It’s a classic image, familiar to movie fans everywhere and instantly recognizable. If it wasn’t so easily recognized, we might mistake it for an image from a film noir; but it is actually a scene from The Exorcist, widely considered to be one of the greatest horror films ever made. Clearly the imagery of noir is not restricted to crime fiction alone.
According to some critics, the noir style had its origins in the horror genre. The term was originally a reference to roman noir ("black story"), a French term used in the 19th century to refer to English Romantic horror novels, and later to the morally ambiguous, violent and bleak style of American hardboiled crime fiction.1
The visual style of film noir also owes a debt to German Expressionism, which produced such early horror classics as Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
The world of noir is already a horrifying place- people are accused of crimes they didn’t commit, but then again they can’t be sure they’re really innocent; the past is an inescapable force that makes choices irrelevant and true freedom impossible; no statement can be taken at face value and love leads almost inevitably to betrayal. In such a world there is no escape and little chance of survival. It could be said that noir is a gothic approach to crime fiction, portraying a "world where it is always night" to quote Brian W. Fairbanks.2
Some writers and filmmakers have taken this concept further, introducing elements of supernatural horror to noir’s grimly romantic world, or placing archetypal noir characters in a horror setting.
In William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel, private investigator Harry Angel is hired by a mysterious client named Louis Cyphre to find a missing crooner named Johnny Favorite. Favorite was involved in black magic and voodoo, and as the case develops Angel is drawn into the same world, including a love affair with Favorite’s daughter Epiphany. The book has a number of elements drawn from noir, including the private detective character, sleazy settings, marginal characters such as drug addicts, occultists and crooked doctors, and a series of murders which are blamed on Angel even though he believes himself to be innocent. This leads into an amnesia theme which finally explains the mystery of Johnny Favorite’s disappearance and Angel’s own forgotten past. It comes as no surprise that Louis Cyphre is Lucifer himself, and that the debt he wants to collect is Harry Angel’s soul.
This book was later made into a movie called Angel Heart, starring Mickey Rourke. Angel Heart has something of a cult following, but it’s rather different from the book. For one thing, Falling Angel takes place entirely in New York City, but Angel Heart relocates part of the action to New Orleans because of the voodoo element. Since New York City has a sizable Haitian population, this isn’t at all necessary. Also, the book draws a clear distinction between Epiphany’s voodoo practices and the Satanism of the rich and powerful sorcerers Angel encounters in his investigation. The movie blurs the line between the two, reinforcing old prejudices against Haitian religion for the sake of sensationalism.
Visually, the movie contains some beautifully filmed scenes with a classic noir feeling about them, especially the opening scene of a dark alley with a corpse in it. However, these elements seem rather self-conscious and deliberate, and the character of Harry Angel comes across like a hardboiled stereotype, as if someone had arbitrarily dropped a sleazier version of Philip Marlowe into a horror movie.
Harry Angel’s name seems to be a reference to the voodoo doctrine of the ti bon ange, or "little good angel," a part of the soul that can be captured and kept in a jar, which is exactly where Angel’s search ultimately leads. The final scene, where Angel is taking an elevator that seems to go down forever (presumably to Hell itself) is particularly effective. If the noir hero is almost always doomed, then this is the logical extension, as Angel is literally damned by past crimes he cannot even remember. In both Falling Angel and Angel Heart, the detective’s search for the truth leads to his own destruction.
The occult is a world of mystery, so it’s only natural that the traditional hardboiled detective should appear in that world. Unlike Harry Angel, who believes he is accepting a legitimate case, Clive Barker’s Harry D’Amour specializes in supernatural mysteries. D’Amour is another Philip Marlowe/Sam Spade clone with a failed marriage, a cluttered office and an alcohol habit. He is a recurring character in several of Barker’s stories, rather than having a series of his own. The result is once again as if a hardboiled stereotype has been parachuted somehow into a horror landscape, but as Barker’s world is as dark as any film noir the result usually works pretty well.
D’Amour is, not surprisingly, a man haunted by the past -- in this case, a failed exorcism.
"When the body count was done, and the surviving priests dispatched, he was left with fear of stairs, and more questions than he’d ever answer this side of the family plot." (The Last Illusion)
D’Amour’s body is covered with magical tattoos designed to protect him from the demonic forces he regularly encounters. In The Last Illusion, these are the beings of the Gulfs, and their target is a stage magician named Swann who sold his soul for the powers of sorcery.
"Nothing the Prince of Lies offers to humankind is of the least value…or it wouldn’t be offered. Swann didn’t know that when he first made his Covenant. But he soon learned. Miracles are useless. Magic is a distraction from the real concerns…Certainly it matters not in the least if water can be made into wine".
But Swann has his revenge:
"By taking hell’s name in vain. By using the magic which it boasted of as a trivial entertainment, degrading the power of the Gulfs by passing off their wonder-working as mere illusion."
Swann is the real hero or anti-hero of this story, not D’Amour. The Last Illusion was the basis for a movie called Lord of Illusions, which bears little resemblance to the story despite the fact that Barker made the movie. Lord of Illusions retains little of the story’s poetic language and concepts. In the story, Swann’s act of defiance is perversely noble, but in the movie he seems weak and directionless and there is no reference to the Gulfs. Instead, Swann’s enemy is a cult leader called Nix or the Puritan, who taught him his magic before Swann killed him and buried him in order to protect his wife Dorothea.
The movie touches on a number of noir themes without ever really exploring them. Dorothea is at first treated as a mysterious and beautiful woman with uncertain motives, a possible femme fatale, but this is never really followed up. D’Amour is shown in his office, disheveled and drinking, with a gun in a shoulder holster, as if to say to the audience that This Is a Private Eye. Swann and a number of other characters are haunted by their past history with Nix (who turns out not to be quite as dead as he should be) but the movie never establishes a feeling of approaching doom, relying instead on the standard Hollywood special effects. Nevertheless, Barker’s imagination is vivid enough to make the movie worth watching, even though it could have been much more interesting than it is.
D’Amour also appears in Barker’s The Great and Secret Show as a minor character, with a larger role in its sequel Everville. Supposedly, a future story will feature a confrontation between D’Amour and the popular horror character Pinhead.
Writer and editor Christopher Mills (who used to publish Noir Magazine) has started a website called Supernatural Crime, featuring "two-fisted tales of twisted terror" in the fictional city of Port Nocturne. This site primarily consists of web comics about a female hardboiled detective named Femme Noir. The stories seem to be largely tongue-in-cheek. Characters like Dahlia Blue, Brother Grim (an undead mob enforcer turned crime fighter!) and Simeon Link give a Saturday morning cartoon feeling to the series. The site also includes a few stories and comics about another occult detective called Nightmark, who battles vampires and assorted monsters in his trench coat and fedora. In one story Nightmark is hired by the classic dame-who-turns-out-to-be-trouble, in this case by being a vampire. Supernatural Crime has an infectious enthusiasm about it and is a lot of fun to read, but there is no real feeling of horror about the stories despite the supernatural elements.
The most successful occult detective series yet is the John Constantine: Hellblazer series of comics from Vertigo/DC. He is, of course, haunted by memories of an unsuccessful exorcism and by the increasing number of friends and associates who die because of their connection to him. He is described as a "mystic" rather than a detective, but his trench coat, cigarette and alcohol habits, cynical attitude and history of trying to save people who get in trouble mark him as another "shopworn Galahad" in the Marlowe tradition. The difference here is that he is a fully developed character rather than a cliché, and the dark mood of the series is pervasive rather than layered on for effect.
"The thin Sunday afternoon drizzle greases the tired streets. Ignoring the queasiness which quakes my stomach like an uneasy swamp… I turn up my collar against the toothless gnawing of the early November wind… and merge into the welcome anonymity of the city." (Original Sins)
Constantine trusts neither Heaven nor Hell, and maneuvers constantly to maintain an uneasy independence from both. The Devil, however, has other plans for him:
"One day soon he’ll catch up with me. And pay what he owes me. And then… just before I die… I’ll hear the Devil’s confession too." (Tainted Love)
The setting for these stories is mostly London, and there’s a political subtext to the series. In one of the early stories, a local Yuppie couple turn out to be demons working for Hell’s stock market -- buying up the souls of ambitious mortals in anticipation of Margaret Thatcher’s election victory. Constantine finds a way to crash the market, although he can’t stop Thatcher from actually winning- apparently the right wing is a more unstoppable force of evil than Hell is!
A different type of noir horror tale can be found in Ed Gorman’s Cage of Night, which manages to be genuinely chilling even though the horror is essentially an illusion. In this story there is no detective or urban setting, only a young man named Nick Morrow and a very memorable femme fatale named Cindy Brasher. Nick is rather naively in love with Cindy, who believes that an old well in the forest contains a trapped alien visitor. Nick is convinced that Cindy just needs to be rescued, even while the murders around Cindy keep piling up. It’s unclear whether or not there really is an alien outside of Cindy’s mind, but the demonic combination of the well and her charms is still fatal.
The small-town setting is reminiscent of Jim Thompson, but many of Thompson’s narrators are hitmen, sociopaths or con-artists, viewing the small-town world through their own twisted mindset. Nick Morrow is basically a boy-scout, and the world he lives in is one of keg parties and high school crushes, which makes Cindy’s underlying eeriness even creepier by contrast. Nick’s innocent and likable personality is only pitiable in the world of noir, and in the end he is as morally compromised and trapped as any anti-hero.
These are just a few examples of the borderland between noir and horror. This borderland dates back to the beginning of the noir style, especially if you accept Cat People as a film noir as well as a horror movie, as some critics have suggested. Despite this history of overlap between the styles, this borderland has only just begun to be explored. Noir’s no-escape mindset would seem to be an ideal match for the darkness of horror fiction. There’s a lot more exploration to be done.
1-http://www.cl.uh.edu/itc/scripts/litr/4533/filmnoir.htm Liz-Anne Bawden, ed. The Oxford Companion to Film. NY: Oxford UP, 1976.)
2-http://www.angelfire.com/oh2/writer/Shadows5.html
Copyright© 2003 C. S. Thompson
***
C.S.
THOMPSON is the President of the Cateran Society, an organization
devoted to researching and practicing the historic Gaelic martial arts. He is a
poet and translator, and an author of crime fiction, horror, dark fantasy, and a
manual on the use of the Highland broadsword. He is a board member of the
Fellowship for Celtic Tradition LLC, and a member of the Celtic Martial Arts
Research Society. He is 31 years old, and lives in Portland, Maine.
Contact C.S. Thompson
Read an extract from C.S. Thompson's A Season Of Strange Dreams