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 Sam Christian, Staff Writer

Vinyl Pairing: Bauhaus, In the Flat Field (1980)

Secret Beyond the Door (Fritz Lang, 1947) is a retelling of the Bluebeard folktale, where a wealthy man marries a woman and gives her access to his entire sprawling home, except for one room where she is forbidden to go. Curiosity gets the best of her, and she opens the door to the room to discover the victims of her husband.  In Lang’s version, Celia (Joan Bennet) is an heiress to a large fortune. While on vacation in Mexico, she meets Mark (Michael Redgrave). They meet in a truly ghoulish meet-cute, in which mark notices Celia enraptured by a spontaneous deadly knife fight happening in the middle of the street. They lock eyes and spend the night talking. Love at first sight. They elope, and during their honeymoon we find out that Mark is an architect with an interest in rooms and how they relate and sometimes dictate human emotions. He mentions how the church they were married in was designed “so only joy can be experienced here,” and describes their honeymoon Hacienda as being designed to evoke “romance distilled.”

Mark also owns an architecture magazine where he publishes his theories on architecture and also a collector of “felicitous rooms” which are in his mansion back in New York. Throughout the film, Mark acts cagey around his new wife. They move into the mansion, and Celia is introduced to Marks hobby of collecting exact replicas of rooms where famous murders occurred. All the rooms are unlocked, except for one room which Mark forbids anyone to enter. Predictably, Celia enters the room and discovers that the room is an exact replica of her own, and she puts together that mark is planning to kill her.

The movie ends in a rather farfetched way. After running away, Celia returns to Mark to try to get to the bottom of why he wants to murder her. Mark has a pathological hatred of his mother, and when Celia would do something that would remind him of his mother, it would subconsciously send him into a murderous psychosis. After they had their Freudian psychoanalysis session, Mark believes himself cured.

One thing that Mark and Celia have in common is that they are both secret goths–or at least have a penchant for the macabre. Murder excites them both, which is how they met in the first place. This continues when Celia when finds out that Mark’s rooms aren’t happy rooms—Celia’s interpretation of felicitous--but instead “apt” rooms she isn’t horrified, she doesn’t even seem fazed. This lays the groundwork for their reunion towards the end of the film. In today’s world, we would call Mark a murderabilia enthusiast–someone who collects objects that have something to do with violent crimes, (mostly serial killers), like John Wayne Gacy’s paintings. Celia is attracted to Mark because of his darkness, not in spite of it.

One other aspect of the movie that I loved was the atmosphere that Lang created. Although Lang was known for expressionism, he continued to make genre pictures in more of an American style. The use of expressionism remains in the production design, playing with shadows and heightened sets in an otherwise more realistic movie. Instead of utilizing huge, complicated sets like his earlier works like Metropolis (1927), he focused more on the natural darkness of a huge empty house, giving the house a sense of haunting.