‘Anything can happen in the dark…’
Robert Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase is the perfect example of a film that has been robbed of its visceral power purely because it has been so influential. Fans of slasher movies will recognise the POV shots of the killer stalking his victims, women in peril and the whodunit setup. This makes The Spiral Staircase an important film but a tame one by modern-day standards…
In 1916, a vicious killer is on the loose targeting women with an ‘affliction’ of some kind. Local girl Helen (Dorothy McGuire) enters into a deadly game of cat-and-mouse in a gothic mansion with a spiral staircase.
Notable for being one of the first examples of a film that combines elements of film noir and gothic horror, The Spiral Staircase takes its cues from Hitchcock in terms of building suspense and dark themes, but Siodmak injects a healthy dollop of melodrama often missing from Hitch’s more grounded tales of the macabre. It helps that The Spiral Staircase has a lovely Halloween season vibe to it. All flickering candles and wood panel doors. Having said that, while this definitely looks like a horror film, it wasn’t marketed as one and real scares are few and far between (although one nightmare-cum-dream sequence is particularly menacing).
The Spiral Staircase is an important step on the evolution of horror ladder but it also comes across as old-fashioned now, even in comparison to other films released during the same era. Still, at 83 minutes, fans of old horror movies should probably add this one to their lists.
