Welcome back, goblins and ghouls, to the fourth annual installment of SpookyJawn! Each October, our love of horror fully rises from its slumber and takes over the MovieJawn website for all things spooky! This year, we are looking at ghosts, goblins, ghouls, goths, and grotesqueries, week by week they will march over the falling leaves to leave you with chills, frights, and spooky delights! Read all of the articles here!

by Shayna Davis, Staff Writer

The “First Wife” trope in Gothic storytelling is an especially haunting one. The trope usually follows a newly coupled man and woman, with the woman being the main protagonist. Things start off happily but slowly descend into turmoil as it’s revealed that she has not been the first woman the man has been married to. In some way or another, this “First Wife’” casts a shadow over the relationship. This shadow may or may not lead the couple to a disastrous end (spoiler: it probably will). Gothic fiction as a literary genre has been around since roughly the mid-1700s and found new life and popularity with the invention of cinema. Over all these centuries, filmmakers have been able to twist the typical notes of Gothic stories in new, interesting ways, and the “First Wife” has gotten a compelling treatment among them.   

Two of the most famous and classic examples are Rebecca, originally published in 1938 by Daphne Maurier, and Jane Eyre, originally published in 1847 by Charlotte Brontë. Mirroring each other in many ways, the two stories, written just shy of 100 years apart, both feature lower-class female protagonists who get swept into the upper-class worlds of commanding and mysterious male love interests. True to the trope, both women live in the shadow of a former wife. Rebecca’s Mrs. de Winter is made acutely aware of this presence not long after meeting her man, whereas Jane is kept in the dark for most of her story until the worst possible moment. Both first wives, Rebecca and Bertha, respectively, exist as inner demons for the men they married. A catalyst for self-loathing and a blockage standing in the way of allowing their newfound marriages to work. 

The two best (in my opinion) film adaptations of the novels are Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) and Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre (2011). Both convey the terror these women feel in different but effective ways: Hitchcock by leaning more into the noir while adding some psychosexual elements and Fukunaga by sprinkling classic horror moments amongst the romance. For most of the film’s runtime, Jane (Mia Wasikowska) encounters her predecessor basically as a ghost. Bertha exists as an unnamed presence until her reveal, someone Jane never sees but hears scurrying around at night, giggling behind closed doors, and causing violent chaos. Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine) never sees Rebecca either, but she is made real by all of her belongings remaining in the house and the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) convincing Mrs. de Winter that she’ll never be the woman Rebecca was (for a more in-depth look at Rebecca, check out Melissa Strong’s previous SpookyJawn article). The two films serve as perfect and very spooky references for the “First Wife.”

Another literature-to-film adaptation is Roger Corman’s Tomb of Ligeia (1964). Based on the story Ligeia by Goth King himself, Edgar Allen Poe, Tomb of Ligeia falls in line with Rebecca by giving its female protagonist immediate awareness of who came before her. In one of the first scenes of the film, our main girl Rowena (Elizabeth Shephard) happens upon the grave of Lord Verdon Fell’s late wife Ligeia. Though Rowena is taken with Lord Fell (Vincent Price) right away, she is curious about Ligeia and pokes at her new husband's (they get married immediately) odd behavior over the subject. In the original short story by Poe, Rowena mysteriously dies but comes back to life in the body of Ligeia, and the story ends there. Corman decided that wasn’t enough, and his adaptation ends with Rowena discovering Lord Fell has been keeping Ligeia’s body inside the manor and insisting her spirit has been hypnotizing him, causing him to do some unspeakable things. In a state of violent madness, he confuses Rowena with Ligeia. Rowena escapes the manor, and Lord Fell burns to death inside with Ligeia’s body. Surprisingly, I think this wild combination of Gothic romance and American International Pictures’ B-movie flair sends a stronger message about death and obsession than Poe’s original ending. 

Stepping into more modern Gothic, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street gives a fresh new spin on the “First Wife." Originally written as a penny dreadful in 1846, the story of Sweeney Todd focused only on the titular barber and his partner in crime, Mrs. Lovett. In 1970, the tale was adapted into a stage play and then the musical we are most familiar with today. This 1970s adaptation saw the addition of a wife for Sweeney Todd, Lucy Barker, who was taken from Todd by a villainous judge and presumed to have died from poisoning herself. It’s a great new take on the trope because it is Todd’s new companion, Mrs. Lovett, who keeps his wife’s survival a secret from him. Similar to Bertha in Jane Eyre, Lucy is shunned due to mental illness. She roams the streets unrecognizable as a beggar woman. She and Todd cross paths all too frequently, only for Mrs. Lovett to usher her away, out of sight, lest Todd will realize who she really is. Her character’s existence serves to reveal Mrs. Lovett for the twisted woman she is (as if everything else in the musical weren’t enough) and also to show the extent to which Todd’s desire for revenge has morphed him into someone who can no longer recognize the people he once loved. Tim Burton’s 2007 film adaptation is currently the only major studio film to capture the story portrayed in the musical with almost no changes to its source material. Though some musical theater fans chastise it for Burton’s stylistic choices, it certainly gives Lucy Barker the sickly screen time she deserves. 

Gothic romance is no longer as popular as it once was. Rarely these days do we get films that tote a tale that is not an adaptation of a pre-20th century novel. That’s why Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak (2015) was, and still is, such a treat. Pulling inspiration from all of the previously mentioned source materials, Crimson Peak is a fantastic example of many Gothic tropes, but it brings the “First Wife” to a new level of horror. In the film, aspiring author Edith (Mia Wasikowsa, again) is swept away by the charming, de-fortuned inventor Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) to live in his isolated, dilapidated mansion with his sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain). Lucille acts as a Mrs. Danvers in this story, constantly wedging herself between Edith and Thomas. Not long after moving into the mansion, Edith discovers it’s full of terrifying ghosts. The ghosts of ALL of Thomas’ past wives! That’s right, we’re not dealing with a “First Wife”, we’re dealing with “First Wives”! Though horrible and threatening to Edith at first, the ghosts of marriages past aid Edith in uncovering the sinister motives of the Sharpe siblings. Unlike its predecessors, Crimson Peak doesn’t utilize the “First Wife” as a metaphorical or hypothetical ghost but as literal ghosts who want nothing more than to keep Edith from joining their extremely sad club. 

So, what is there to learn from Gothic cinema’s “First Wife”? Comparison is the thief of joy? If a man shows any red flags, don’t immediately marry him? All apt advice, but there isn’t one clean lesson all of these women represent. More so, they are used in their deaths as warning signs against the men they are chained to for eternity and the emotions that plague them. The ill feelings that also threaten to infect our protagonists if they don’t take charge of their lives. Self-loathing, entrapment, obsession, revenge. Hopefully our “Second Wives” got the message.