Good mourning 💀

Are those voices in your head or are they just spooky podcasts helping to fill the void?

Relic Radio has several ongoing podcasts that play vintage episodes of classic radio shows, spanning all genres from comedy to science fiction. Their horror show is a lot of fun, featuring episode titles like “The Screaming Skull,” “Where The Dead Sleep,” and “Vacation With Death.” You’ll even hear actors like Boris Karloff show up from time to time.

Meanwhile NPR’s All Songs Considered has a new episode titled “The most terrifying film scores of all time,” featuring music from The Shining, The Witch, Suspiria, Chernobyl, Halloween, Hereditary, Under the Skin, Smile, Annihilation, and Midsommar.

A brief intermission 🍿

Now watch this 👀

And so our tour through four distinct eras of horror and the legacies they’ve left behind comes to an end. So far all previous films in this series have participated in gaslighting the audience to varying degrees:

• 25 years ago: The Blair Witch Project claims to be actual footage

• 50 years ago: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre claims to be a reenactment of real events

• 60 years ago: Blood and Black Lace plays with audience expectations of who the killer would normally be

But 1944’s Gaslight (a full 80 years ago!) turns the tables and involves the audience in gaslighting the film’s protagonist.

Not only that, the film actually coined the word we’re still using to this very day, when it’s perhaps more relevant than ever. How’s that for a legacy?

For Well+Good, Ashley Couto and Brenna Holland define what “gaslighting” is, what it isn’t, and why misuse of the term is harmful. They explain:

Everyone fights and has disagreements, but gaslighting is manipulative behavior that tries to invalidate a victim’s lived experience. “This dilution of the term minimizes its serious nature and the profound impact it has on victims of emotional abuse,” says [Sandra Kushnir, LMFT].

Gaslight, an American remake of a 1940 British adaptation of a 1938 play, follows Ingrid Bergman as Paula Alquist, who has recently married Charles Boyer’s Gregory Anton after dating for only two weeks. They travel back to London to live in Paula’s late aunt’s old, abandoned townhouse and Paula very quickly starts to doubt every single thing in her life: she forgets things, loses things, even starts stealing things without realizing it — watches go missing, even entire paintings. Most peculiar, she can hear footsteps in the locked attic at odd hours and the home’s gas-lit lamps keep dimming, which no one else seems to notice.

Or at least, that’s what hubby keeps telling her.

Jessica Scott for Inverse:

Boyer weaponizes his legendary charisma to a terrifying degree. It’s easy to see why Paula falls in love with Gregory so quickly and why other people believe his lies about her “condition.” His true self emerges slowly from his charming façade as the audience begins to understand how dangerous he is. Amused smirks play on his lips when he sees his plan working. He undermines Paula’s sense of self so effectively that his voice replaces hers inside her own head. She starts questioning her own memory and sanity without any further prompting from her husband, following the abusive script he set into motion because the man she loves and trusts has systematically cut her off from any reality beyond his own.

For The New York Times, J. Hoberman writes:

Although featuring a major star as the villain, Charles Boyer, cast against type, [George] Cukor’s film differed from previous productions. It strengthened the part of the abused wife — largely overshadowed by actors playing the abusive husband — by giving the role to a great actress: Ingrid Bergman. […] The movie gives Bergman full rein. Girlishly trusting, passionately in love, tragically confused, hysterically terrified and implacably vengeful by turns, she runs a strenuous gamut of emotions to play her final scene as though it were a Shakespearean tragedy.

Lastly, Drew Gillis for AV Club:

Paula and Gregory’s shadows are like characters of their own, too; in one of the film’s most stunning scenes, Cukor’s camera sees its main couple into a bedroom, but it’s Gregory’s shadow that tells Paula’s shadow that she can’t leave the house. From this, two realities emerge: There’s the real world that Paula starts in, where she is a perfectly sane society lady, and the one that Gregory constructs, where he can bend life to his whims and prohibit his wife from leaving her home.

Until next time! 👻