Bill Hagen wrote:
> Insofar as noir projects the inner world of morally
problematic characters,
> it seems to me there is some interesection between
good psychological
> horror pieces and hard-boiled noir--especially in
those cases where the
> focus is on the criminal mind.
I've said before -- too often, no doubt -- that hardboiled is
an attitude, not a genre. Noir is a style, and a film style
at that, not a literary style, which you correctly trace to
the German expressionistic silent films of the twenties.
Hitchcock, who spent time in Germany, was influenced.
Directors like Lang and Siodmak, German Jews fleeing Hitler,
brought it to Hollywood. A fair number of noir films could be
described as hardboiled, but very few hardboiled literary
works can also be described as noir, in the same sense that
very few literary works can be described as musical comedies.
We're talking different mediums here.
For that matter, I'm not all that strong on the relationship
between horror and noir. Horror takes place in shadows and
darkness? It's true that noir, as a film style emphasizes
shadows, not to mention blinking neon and glistening wet
asphalt, but noir also tends toward an oblique narrative in
which weak men are victimized by strong evil women, virtually
the opposite of the horror story, in which women are
generally the victims, a legacy of its descent from the
Gothic.
Hardboiled horror is practically an oxymoron. Hardboiled is
objective, horror is subjective. The primary goal of the
horror story is to evoke fear, and it does this by operating
along an emotional spectrum that is scrupulously avoided by
hardboiled writers. To suggest that someone like Lovecraft
has any relationship to hardboiled literature is
preposterous. The idea, as someone mentioned here, that
Matheson's I AM LEGEND is somehow hardboiled makes me wonder
if he even read the book, which is full of purple prose and
emotional excesses that are the precise opposite of the
hardboiled attitude.
Which is not to say that there are no stories that succeed as
both horror and hardboiled. But they are few and far between,
and in nearly all cases, the degree to which they succeed as
one is exactly the degree to which they fail as the other. In
this instance, opposites don't attract, they annihilate each
other, like matter and antimatter.
BobT
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