Suggested citation: Natale, S. “Specters of the Mind: Ghosts, Illusion, and Exposure in Paul Leni’s The Cat and the Canary.” In: Cinematic Ghosts. Ed. Leeder, Murray. London: Bloomsbury 2015.
Simone Natale
Specters of the Mind: Ghosts, Illusion, and Exposure in Paul Leni’s The Cat and the
Canary
One of the main characteristics of ghosts is that they are able to invite a great variety of interpretations, meanings, and uses. In Shakespeare’s dramas and in ancient religious rituals, in gothic novels and in spiritualist séances, in horror movies and in the New Age spiritual movement, specters have been responsible for popular amusements, irrational fears, experimental inquiries, and acts of devotion. This multiform character also shaped the way ghosts have been represented throughout film history on the cinematic screen. Cinematic specters have appropriated different narrative, symbolic and metaphorical roles – so many that it is perhaps more precise to describe ghost movies as a plurality of genres with a common theme, rather than as an individual genre.
This essay addresses a particular class of ghost movies: those where the existence of the true “protagonist” of these movies, the ghost, is ultimately refused and relegated to the realm of human imagination and trickery. The defining characteristics of these movies is that they tell a ghost story without believing in ghosts; or, to put it in other words, that they propose to the audience an interpretation of the story that denies the status of reality to the world of ghosts and spectres. Most haunted house comedies from
the 1930s to the 1960s – such as The Old Dark House (1932), The Ghost Breakers (1940), Scared Stiff (1953) - follow this basic structure; but this type of films also include movies that play more ambiguously with the borders between hallucination and reality, such as Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961), while finally providing a substantial refusal of the ghostly agency.1 In this chapter, I will focus here on the case of Paul Leni’s 1927 The Cat and the Canary, showing how this film remediated a long tradition of spectacular entertainments based on the rejection of supernaturalism, and how such rejection has important consequences in the narrative frame and in the nature of the gratification invited in their audience.
After providing a brief summary of the plot and the production history of The Cat and the Canary, the essay addresses this movie by referring to aspects from the cultural history of ghosts. Particular emphasis is given to how the film can be framed within the tradition of spiritualist exposés, to the characterization of ghosts as creations of our mind, to the use of superimposition effects, and to the question of sound, which paradoxically plays a quite relevant role despite it being a silent movie. Finally, in the conclusion, I interrogate how works of fiction such as The Cat and the Canary, by relying on the allure of the supernatural but at the same time refusing to accept its claims, point to the apparently contradictory power of our fascination for the occult.
Dissecting the Ghost of The Cat and the Canary
Directed by German expatriate Paul Leni in 1927, The Cat and the Canary was produced by Universal Pictures in the United States. The film adapted a stage melodrama by American playwright John Willard in 1921 and had premiered in New York in the
following year. The plot focuses on the heritance of millionaire Cyrus West, whose relatives aim at his fortune with greed, like cats around a canary. Before dying, West demands that his will be read only twenty years after his death. As twenty years have passed and the day arrives, all the potential heirs meet in West’s old mansion, which has acquired the reputation of being haunted by the ghost of its deceased owner. The will nominates the niece Annabelle West (Laura La Plante) as heiress, but with a condition: at the end of the night, she needs to be judged mentally sane by a psychiatrist. If she fails, the heritance will pass to the second person nominated in the will. During the night her mental sanity is strained by seemingly supernatural events, such as a mysterious hand coming out from the mansion’s walls and the sudden disappearance of the lawyer who read the will – just before he could mention the name of the second personated nominated in it. The “ghost,” however, is finally revealed to be none other than one of West’s nephews, Charles Wilder (Forrest Stanley), the second heir nominated in the will. His plans are finally exposed, and the ghostly apparitions debunked as the result of trickery, of the gloomy atmosphere of the old mansion, and of the overexcited imagination of Annabelle and the other relatives.
The film proved to be a critical and popular success, justifying the employment of Paul Leni, who had accepted Carl Laemmle's invitation to move from Germany to Hollywood and become a director at Universal Studios.2 Leni used some stylistic devices typical of German Expressionism, adapting them to a plot that had already stood the test of the popular theatrical circuit. Particularly noteworthy was his insertion of the Expressionist-style chiaroscuro lightning in an American film, an aspect that would characterize several Universal horror and film noir productions throughout the 1930s and
1940s.3 Rebecca Gordon notes that while Expressionist lighting is typically used to imply character motivations and to bestow upon people and objects a certain ineffable character, Leni uses light and shadow effects to create both dramatic and comic effects.4 The film, in fact, is considered one of the first examples, if not the first, of a film genre that functions through the ambiguity between emotional thrilling and humour: the thriller-chiller comedy.
While Leni’s The Cat and the Canary certainly helped secure the ghost as a relevant trope of cinematic fiction, it is only by looking beyond the temporal and contextual boundaries of film history per se that one might comprehend how the theme and the figures of the ghost acquires and conveys meaning on the cinematic screen. Film history and criticism demand what Lynda Nead calls “an integrated approach to visual media,” a perspective that focus on the connections and spaces across different media and practices.5 Tackled from a similar perspective, movies that challenge the existence of ghosts – such as The Cat and the Canary – relate to a larger tradition that goes beyond the boundaries of film history to embrace literary and theatrical works, but also popular scientific lectures and magic shows that attempted to expose the deceitfulness of ghostly apparitions.
From Spiritualist Exposés to Cinematic Ghosts
In an essay on the intermedial character of early cinema, André Gaudreault suggests that film historians should adopt “a retrospective, rather than a progressive, point of view”, addressing cinema in reference to earlier media and practices, rather than to its later evolutions.6 A similar approach is fruitful not only for the study of early cinema, but in
the analysis of other aspects of film history as well. In the specific case of The Cat and the Canary, it is by looking at the cultural history of spiritualism and beliefs in ghosts throughout the 19th and early 20th century that one may gain insights for the interpretation of the film.
(...)
This text is only an extract. The full version with the following sections of the chapter is available in the collection Cinematic Ghosts, edited by Murray Leeder and published by Bloomsbury in 2015:
http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/cinematic-ghosts-9781628922134/
Acknowledgements
A first draft of this paper was presented at a screening of The Cat and the Canary organized for the presentation of the Exhibition “Diversamente vivi: Zombie, fantasmi, mummie, vampiri,” National Museum of Cinema, Turin, Italy, in October 2010. I would like to thank Sarah Pesenti Campagnoni and the Mario Gromo Library of the National Museum of Cinema for contributing to the organization of this event, as well as the curators of the Exhibition, Giulia Carluccio and Peppino Ortoleva.
Illustration captions
Fig. 1. An illustration portraying the exposure of the celebrated spiritualist medium Eusapia Palladino, performed during a séance organized in New York in 1910 by Dickinson S. Miller, a professor at Columbia University in New York. Note the person under the table who is reaching for Palladino’s feet, to prove that she is using them for
producing the moving the séance table and producing other “spirit” phenomena. From: Joseph Jastrow. “The Unmasking of Palladino: An Actual Observation of the Complete Machinery of the Famous Italian Medium.” Collier’s Weekly 45, no. 8 (1910): 21-22. Fig. 2. “Jacoby im Reiche seiner Geister: Sogenannte Geister-Photographier” (“Jacoby in the Realm of his Spirits: So-Called Spirit Photography”). From: Willmann, Carl. Moderne Wunder: Natürliche Erklärung der älteren wie neueren Geheimnisse der Spiritisten und Antispiritisten, Geisterritierer, Hellseher, Gedankenleser, Heilmedien, Mnemotechniker und Rechenkünstler. Leipzig: Otto Spamer, 1886, p. 212.
Fig. 3. “A Spirit Photograph: The Wraith of Mr. Maskelyne Appearing to Dr. Weatherly”. From: Weatherly, Lionel A. The Supernatural? Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1891 (frontispiece).
1 Following Tzvetan Todorov’s categorization of the fantastic, the uncanny, and the marvelous,
these movies would pertain to the genre of the uncanny, i.e. to those works of fiction were the hesitation between a natural and a supernatural explanation is finally resolved in a decision for the former. See Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975).
2 Kevin Brownlow, "Annus Mirabilis: The Film in 1927," Film History: An International Journal
17, no. 2 (2005): 168-78.
3 Jan-Christopher Horak, "Sauerkraut & Sausages with a Little Goulash: Germans in Hollywood,
1927," Film History: An International Journal 17, no. 2 (2005): 241-60.
4 Rebecca M. Gordon, "Between Thought and Feeling: Affect, Audience, and Critical Film History"
(Indiana University, 2007).
5 Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film C.1900 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2007), 2.
6 André Gaudreault, "The Diversity of Cinematographic Connections in the Intermedial Context of
the Turn of the 20th Century," in Visual Delights: Essays on the Popular and Projected Image in the 19th Century, ed. Simon Popple and Vanessa Toulmin (Trowbridge, Wiltshire, England: Flicks Books, 2000), 10.
