Running Date: 15 Oct - 3 Dec

In modern parlance, the term ‘gaslighting’ has a very specific meaning: deliberately misrepresenting reality to cause someone confusion, distress or worse. But the origin of the term dates back well before the internet made it commonplace. It derives from Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 stage play Gas Light, in which a devious Victorian husband tries to make his wife doubt her own sanity.

The success of both the play and two film adaptations – one made in Britain in 1940, the other in America four years later – gave rise to a cycle of thrillers over the next decade and beyond. Some have period settings, some don’t, but all involve suspense, intrigue and heightened emotion. Film historians have given this group of melodramas a variety of names which suggest their importance as proto-feminist texts: the paranoid woman’s film, the persecuted-wife cycle, female gothic.

Around the same time, other melodramatic traditions came to the fore in both British cinema and Hollywood. While hard-boiled urban mysteries, lit by neon signs and slatted by venetian blinds, provide the dominant image many people have of Forties crime films, there were also many with Victorian, Edwardian or even older settings. Call them ‘gaslight noir’.

In this course, we will be looking at four representative examples of this rich vein of murder melodramas – four films from the 1940s with persecuted female protagonists, viciously patriarchal villains, gorgeous costumes and shadow-filled settings. They may be set in the distant past, but they remain all too relevant to the present.

Season presented in partnership with Sheffield Hallam University. Curated and delivered by Dr Sheldon Hall.