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Don't Look Now! The compulsions and revelations of Daphne du Maurier's

horror writing

Article  in  Journal of Gender Studies · March 1999

DOI: 10.1080/095892399102797

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Don't Look Now! The compulsions and revelations

of Daphne du Maurier's horror writing

GINA WISKER

To cite this article: GINA WISKER (1999) Don't Look Now! The compulsions and revelations
of Daphne du Maurier's horror writing, Journal of Gender Studies, 8:1, 19-33, DOI:
10.1080/095892399102797

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 Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 19–33, 1999

Don’t Look Now! The compulsions and revelations of Daphne

du Maurier’s horror writing
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GINA WISKER

ABSTRACT Daphne du Maurier is one of the great twentieth century women horror writers. With
the current revival of and women’s interventions in the genre, Daphne du Maurier’s use of psychological
and body horror, her manipulations of and innovations in the genre are seen to lie behind much of the
power of contemporary women’s horror writing. Horror, its roots in the Gothic, can be much more than
‘schlock’. At its best it is politically, socially, sexually and psychologically interventionist, and critical.
Horror enables an exploration and dramatisation of fears and nightmares, bringing them into the pale
light of our consciousness, in order to return them (perhaps) safely to their cofŽns.
Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now and The Birds are the main focus in this paper which
will also refer to the novel Rebecca, and to other short stories in its investigation of how
readers’/viewers’ terrors and fears are dramatised, explored, and, unusually for the genre, only very rarely
laid to rest. Daphne du Maurier’s roots in the Gothic, the horror of Poe and the great nineteenth and
early twentieth century women’s ghost stories will be explored. So will her legacy in confrontational,
oppositional, and carnivalesque contemporary women’s horror which, like much of her writing, provides
an entertaining and provocative vehicle for interrogating gender representations and assumptions, as well
as other conŽgurations of power.

The evil in us comes to the surface. Unless we recognise it in time, accept it,
understand it, we are all destroyed, just as the people in The Birds were
destroyed. (Daphne du Maurier, letter to Maureen Baker-Minton, 4 July 1957)

Daphne du Maurier’s work is undergoing a full scale revival today, as a recent week long
festival and conference in Fowey in Cornwall, UK, testiŽ ed (May 1997). And chief
among the work of this great writer of romantic Ž ctions to undergo such re-examination
is her work in the Gothic and in horror. There is currently an increase in contemporary
women’s writing in the horror genre. We need to ask why horror has such increasing
fascination and why Daphne du Maurier’s work in this genre has been overlooked over
the years. Certainly horror is a transgressive outlet for examination of fears and desires,

0958-9236/99/010019-15 Ó 1999 Carfax Publishing Ltd

 20 Gina Wisker

and it touches us all. Acknowledging the pleasures and terrors of horror’s discoveries of
secret, conŽ ned, threatening places and selves, Stephen King unlocks its universal appeal:
the good horror tale will dance its way to the center of your life and Ž nd the
secret door to the room you believed noone but you knew of. (King, 1987)
Mark Jancovitch establishes its liberating imaginative function:
Throughout its history, horror has been concerned with forces that threaten
individuals, groups, or even ‘life as we know it’. It has been concerned with the
workings of power and repression in relationship to the body, the personality,
or to social life in general. (Jancovitch, 1992, p. 118)
Horror would seem initially to be an unusual genre for women writers. Feminist readers
and audiences, not surprisingly, are likely to Ž nd little that is recognisable or positive
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about women and our potential in a genre replete with stereotypes: victims, hags or
femmes fatales. Women in horror are likely to be Ž gured as either passive and vulnerable
like Fay Wray, semi-clad in the arms of a gigantic King Kong, or femmes fatales,
eternally threatening beneath a guise of beauty or of motherly kindness. Much conven-
tional horror is predicated upon a need to disturb then reinforce a status quo which
privileges the everyday manifestations of patriarchy. Most terrifying is an event which
threatens or breaches the boundaries of the home, the body or property. This latter
includes the partner whose controlled, loyal sexuality and dependability must be taken
as given. Of ultimate terror then is the Ž gure of the transgressive sexually voracious
woman who cannot be contained and the castratrix, a devouring embodiment of the
‘vagina dentata’ myth. In this myth male fears of female power, sexual and otherwise,
are transferred and transmuted into an image of a lovely but ultimately fatal female
Ž gure. Medusa/Eve, this is a snake-haired sensual monster of man’s own creation. Once
she has attracted and overpowered the helpless male, drawn in by the ungovernable lusts
incited in him, she destroys and devours him. Contemporary cinema Ž gures such
monsters in its biggest box ofŽ ce hits: Fatal Attraction (1987), Basic Instinct (1991),
and Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1993). What these characters/caricatures have in
common is their sexuality and the male fears they represent.
Women have always written horror, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein being a very early
case. And women’s contributions to the genre have frequently troubled underlying
bourgeois and patriarchal assumptions. Lisa Tuttle describes being amazed at a
World Fantasy Convention where a panel of men discussed ‘why women don’t write
Horror’. Conventional horror has largely been a male preserve and so:
Women writers tend to be seen either as rare exceptions, or redeŽ ned as
something else—not horror but gothic; not horror but suspense; not horror but
romance, or fantasy, or something unclassiŽ able but different. (Tuttle, 1990,
pp. 2–3)
Horror Ž ctions spring from the Gothic and function in similar ways. They do not merely
entertain and titillate, they embody the hidden fears which threaten the social status quo,
and their enactment, the worst nightmare come true, is ultimately a kind of exorcism.
The typical narrative trajectory of a horror tale proceeds from disturbance and
transgression, to comfortable resolution and closure. Secure that this is Ž ction/Ž lm/
dream, you can go back to sleep and all will be well.
It is claimed that the pleasure offered by the genre is based on the process of
narrative closure in which the horrifying or monstrous is destroyed or con-
tained. The structures of horror narratives are said to set out from a situation
 Don’t Look Now 21

of order, move through a period of disorder caused by the eruption of

horrifying or monstrous forces, and Ž nally reach a point of closure and
completion in which disruptive, monstrous elements are contained or destroyed
and the original order is re-established. (Jancovitch, 1992, p. 9)
What is terrifying is often that which is most familiar. We fear potential disruption to our
security of self, and of place. Freud’s seminal essay on ‘The Uncanny’ Ž rst published in
1919 (Freud, 1953) explored just these issues. It validated psychoanalytic readings of
fantastic and horror literature because it exposes and enacts dread and apprehension
‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’
(Freud, 1953, p.219). Chie y this concentrates on contradictory experiences of the
homely and familiar such as the family, lover, home, everyday actions—and a revelation
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of what is concealed, alternative versions of self, energies which might burst out and
threaten everyday life. What results is projection of something repressed bodied forth in
a demon spirit, ghost or monster or the woman behind the wallpaper. Laplanche and
Pontalis describe this outward projection as:
qualities feelings, wishes and objects which the subject refuses to recognise or
rejects in himself . . . expelled from the self and located in another person or
thing. (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1985)
Horror embodies what is desired and feared, feared sometimes just because it is desired
and denied. It names and dramatises that which is normally unthinkable, unnameable,
indeŽ nable, repressed. The Gothic also looks at such dualisms and dichotomous
responses, but horror is more likely to dwell ‘on the connections between violence and
sexuality’ (Punter, 1980, p.361, on Hammer horror Ž lms) and on punishing the fatally
atractive; it is ‘closely interlocked with the rather belated spread of Freudian theory’ (p.
348). Equally importantly, horror Ž lms, and Ž ctions, claim their place as a subgenre of
the Gothic because of their investigation not only of sexuality but of the monstrous. As
Punter puts it, looking again at Ž lm (but the point applies equally well to much horror
Ž ction, including Daphne du Maurier’s concentration on the monstrous in terms of birds
in The Birds (1952), murderous dwarves in Don’t Look Now (1971) and dead haunting
wives, in Rebecca (1938)):
One obvious feature which connects many of these Ž lms is their dependence
on Gothic literary sources; but there are other, more important aspects which
justify deŽ ning them as a sub-genre. Firstly, there is the genuine complexity of
their attitudes towards the monstrous. (Punter, 1980, p. 348)
Gendered perspectives inform traditional horror writing. One of the mainstays of
conventional horror, the abject, is frequently a gender related construction or projection.
We might expect women writers of horror to work within the broad framework of
conventional horror motifs and narrative, but to refuse a simplistic conŽ rmation of the
kinds of negative representations of women so often necessary to horror’s closure. Not
only are women unlikely to collude with the representation of their own monstrosity, but
they are unlikely to celebrate the return to a status quo which disempowers them. Often,
indeed, they explore and then exorcise very different con agurations of horror, investing
different spaces, places and relations with the powers of horror.
Territory which to a man is emotionally neutral, may for a woman be mined
with fear, and vice versa. For example: the short walk home from the bus-stop
of an evening. And how to understand the awesome depths of loathing some
men feel for the ordinary (female) human body? We all understand the
 22 Gina Wisker

language of fear, but men and women are raised speaking different dialects of
that language. (Tuttle, 1990, p. 41)
Daphne du Maurier utilises many of the techniques and narrative trajectories of
conventional horror but her greater transgression and her unease trouble the ostensible
closure of her narratives. In The Birds (1952) the people will be destroyed, not rescued.
In Rebecca (1938) the haunting presence of the dead wife only seems to have been burned
and destroyed in the conŽ gration which devoured Manderley: she lives on in her effects
on the second marriage and the second Mrs de Winter. Her legacy permeates contem-
porary horror writing; the unease she leaves us with developed into fully  edged refusals
of closure, and celebratory transgressions. Contemporary women horror writers such as
Angela Carter, Suzy McKee Charnas, Anne Rice, Melanie Tem, and others, also
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concentrate on rewriting horror’s representations of women’s bodies, and on recognising

and reinvesting the domestic setting and the lie of romance with horriŽ c overtones. Like
Daphne du Maurier, they critique conŽ gurations of gender and power and in so doing
reclaim horror’s impetus as a vehicle for insight, imaginative illumination, and social
critique.
Horror writing, like the Gothic and the fantastic, concentrates on fear and dreadful
desires, on split selves, the rejected Other, and dangerous boundaries, divisions and
spaces: castles, dungeons, corridors, vaults, claustrophobic streets, grand houses, and the
domestic family home, all of which have a gendered signiŽ cance. From both the Gothic
and the fantastic, horror derives its concern with sex and power (see Rosemary Jackson,
Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion , 1981). It exposes hidden fears and lurking perversities
derived from disgust at difference, at the body, at the Other, and at the abject, the ‘not
I’, rejected otherness. Kristeva’s deŽ nitions of the abject (Kristeva, 1982) focus on the
rejection of that which is other than ‘I’, which prevents or could prevent the child from
identifying itself as separate and different. The abject is embodied then as both that
which is rejected or ejected from the body, excrement, and that which must be separated
from the body, the body of the mother. The abject is the object of both desire and
disgust, and its embodiment in the body of the mother, and by extension of all women,
encourages responses of attraction and desire, and of repulsion and a need to overcome
and destroy in order to retain or develop identity. Woman is equated with engulfment
and death, the mother with a castrating Ž gure. The abject also involves anything
monstrous and animal like which can take over and destroy.
In terms of its treatment of woman as Other, horror tends to spatialise woman as
absence or lack. However, radical women horror writers critically confront such an
abject script, refusing horror’s conventional closure and the restoration of an order
which, in continuing to conŽ gure woman as Other, returns her to social subordination.
They even celebrate the disorder unleashed, and reinforce the power of what has been
represented as absence and lack. And who lingers on more in our imaginations ostensibly
punished and absent but actually ever present, than du Maurier’s Rebecca herself?

Daphne du Maurier’s Horror

Alison Light is to be credited with returning our attention to Daphne du Maurier’s work,
pointing out the limitations of the conventional characterisation of her writing as
conservative, as a ‘romance with the past’ (Light, 1991, p. 156). Although she does not
concentrate on the explorations and transgressions of her horror writing as horror, Light
investigates the dialectic in du Maurier’s work, emphasising her experimental radicalism
 Don’t Look Now 23

both with romantic Ž ctions and the spiritual. This dialectic between the popular and
conservative, the predictable and the transgressive, the ungovernable, haunts her work
and contributed to her lapse in popularity in more conventionally minded times. But the
dialectic which structures the narratives turns our attention now to the fractured spaces
and Ž ssures, the refusal to reward and punish in a satisfying way along conventional lines;
to replace the spectre of unease in its comfortable cofŽ n at the narrative’s end. As Alison
Light points out, it is:
exactly the unruly and the ungovernable, those objects of ofŽ cial distrust and
fear, which she captures with most energy and which dominate her novels,
almost against her better judgement, as it were. (Light, 1991, p. 157)
Du Maurier’s novels persuade and suggest the breaking of boundaries to readers while
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‘urging an acceptance of how things are and clinging, safe, to familiar pieties’ (Light,
1991, p. 158). There is always a dialectic between the safe and explicable, and the
wayward and inexplicable.
Daphne du Maurier’s writing is not powerful because it successfully conveys a
conservative vision but because of the pleasure it takes in undermining its own
beliefs. Du Maurier’s writing suggests that conservatism has its own divisions,
its own buried desires, and that it has its own unconscious, its craving which
cannot be satisŽ ed and its con icts which cannot be resolved. (Light, 1991, p.
158)
Du Maurier wishes both to conŽ rm conventional beliefs and behaviours and to
deconstruct them, testing their limits, questioning received interpretations and securities
whether of behaviour in the natural world, or of the stability of body, time and space.
The strength of what lingers beyond any restoration of order is deeply disturbing, but
attests to the tenuousness of all boundaries and natural laws. Clairvoyance, spirit transfer,
animals and nature unleashing uncontrollable powers, transgressive sexuality in uencing
beyond the grave, these troubling existences refuse the comforting closure of conven-
tional popular Ž ctional narrative forms. The conŽ rmation of Ž ssures in what we consider
trustworthy, stable and ordinary links Daphne du Maurier’s horror very clearly with the
interventions and underminings of the status quo found in contemporary women’s horror
writing.
Her version of the imagination is of ‘an unconscious force locked within the individual’
(Light, 1991, p. 189). She is interested in ESP and time travel, altered states, regression,
ways in which forces of evil and latent power can reach out and in uence people’s minds.
In Daphne du Maurier’s horror we do not get buckets of blood and an invasion of
demons. Hers is a version of horror which builds on the Gothic as critique and
subversion of the conventional and the taken for granted. It develops a dialectic between
the familiar and the transgressive. Its investigation into the powers of the imagination,
the crossing of boundaries between the everyday normal and the destabilised, violent,
troubled, subversive aligns her work at times with that of more contemporary feminists
such as Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson. Much of du Maurier’s work was written
between the wars and just after the Second World War, arguably in a conservative era
and this partially explains why her forms, structures, imagery are less experimental than
those of more contemporary writers. Her exploration of values and resolutions seem to
wish to conŽ rm our need for conventional safety, classic horror closure. Yet her work is
troubling: it leaves us unable to bury the spectre of discomfort which arises from psychic
powers, ‘unnatural’ wild acts by animals, birds and people, surprise murders, unruly
sexuality which it enacts and explores.
 24 Gina Wisker

Her work troubles the conservative reader who does not get quite what they expected.
Through the gaps in conventional readings of romantic Ž ctions, historical romances,
vignettes of everyday relationships, gradually appear events and behaviours which
encourage questionings of women’s roles under patriarchy and, related to this, question-
ings of the stabilities of identity, meaning, time and space, the continuity and solidity of
the body. As in ghost stories and sensation Ž ctions of the late nineteenth, early twentieth
century, new readings open up across the old and familiar, between the lines. Inherent
contradictions are exposed in romantic love. In this, Daphne du Maurier’s work
highlights patterns of domination and hierarchy, patriarchy’s enforcement of all the tame
female values and its rejection of female energies which, unleashed, would trouble the
conventional behaviours of male ownership of women’s bodies, and of heredity. Taking
anything for granted is dangerous.
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The Birds (1952)

The Birds is a chilling example of body horror, and disgust at the invasion of the abject.
In The Birds bodily space is invaded by marauding birds whose behaviours we have come
to depend on to be tame and manageable, under our hierarchical, scientiŽ c, bureau-
cratic, logical and organisational powers as chief primates. The horror of the story is
based on the natural world’s potential for unpredictability and violence. The familiar
turns into the monstrous and mankind is powerless.
Much of the story’s power lies in its relentless build up. There is little calm or release
as the abnormal attack develops from the disturbing peckings of small numbers of birds,
to a determined invasion. The doomed, puny human attempts to ward off the birds leave
readers feeling helpless.
The Birds begins with slight unease amidst the normality of winter’s approach and bird
movements. The protagonist, Nat, feels wakeful ‘aware of misgiving without cause’ (p. 9).
The actions of the birds are violent and unusual from the start. Tapping gives way to
‘jabbing’ of a bird’s beak on Nat’s knuckles followed by ‘stabbing’, another deliberately
violent and intrusive act. When he goes to shut and Ž x the window unusually there is ‘not
one bird upon the sill but half a dozen; they  ew straight into his face, attacking him’
(p. 9). The cold chill around the door is threatening, the loosening of the window is
evidence of boundaries being breached. Drafts blow out candles, traditional qualities of
ghost and horror stories. The dark, odd tappings and knockings increase the unease.
In the darkness, normally sleeping birds invade, dive and attack within his own walls
in the children’s room. Disturbingly, the morning light reveals these are small, usually
lone, friendly birds, not crows and other potentially violent larger birds. In horror, power
roles are frequently reversed the animate becoming inanimate, and vice versa. Here the
possibility that intelligent birds might act as an invading force is menacing and
inadequately explained by both Nat and the media as merely the swift descent of a ‘black
winter’. Warlike, massed ranks of gulls ‘in formation’ (p. 16) ride waves off the coast,
awaiting some signal. Wartime, but fatally inadequate precautions are taken. Curfew and
boarded up windows are no match for clouds of massed birds as nature’s power is
unleashed. Our sense of security as readers is disturbed, what we take for granted in the
world of our own, others’ and animal behaviour destabilised. This is a planned attack:
‘They’ve been given the towns’ thought Nat, ‘they know what they have to do.
We don’t matter so much here. The gulls serve for us. The others go to the
towns.’ (p. 22)
 Don’t Look Now 25

As in nightmare, other people seem unable either to comprehend or do anything. They

reject advice, overlooking the obvious. The farmer and family who refuse precautions of
boarding up windows and punily believe they can shoot any irritating birds fatally
underestimate the horrifying extent of the problem. Their ominously empty farmyard is
evidence of the birds’ power and violence. Threat and suspense build up relentlessly for
the reader, and our comfortable beliefs in man’s superior intelligence and gritted
determination are shattered: nothing civilised and rational can stop the birds’ repeated
attacks.
The abject, a key feature of much horror Ž ction, is central to The Birds. In its
embodiment of Otherness, that which is ‘not I’, it produces responses of terror and
disgust. Based as it is on the need to deŽ ne the separate identity of the self, anything
which breaks the boundaries of this self or threatens to overwhelm and disempower it,
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terriŽ es. Engulfment is one of its worst forms, and the notion of being taken over by one’s
own other animal self, by devils from inside or by creatures in some overwhelming shape,
is a recurrent Ž gure in horror (see e.g. Demon Seed, 1977, Rosemary’s Baby , 1968, Wolfen,
1981). In The Birds, wings, feathers and beaks are disgusting qualities of the beast which
overwhelm and engulf, undermining the space of the self, the individual’s sense of
identity and safe normality. The Ž lm of The Birds (Hitchock, 1963) capitalises on the
terror inspired by the familiar turning against us. Flocks of birds around the small
American town lurk and increasingly threaten and destroy, their intense invasive
 uttering in enclosed spaces emphasising the engulfment they threaten. It is a powerful
Ž lm which lurks on in our nightmares, having touched a familiar key of terror there in
the Ž rst place.
However, in gendered terms, there are interesting differences between the story and
the Ž lm which followed it. Hitchcock notably uses a female heroine who rescues small
children in a school. In so doing, he emphasises the maternal power of women, and also
their rather emotional vulnerability. The undermining of the logical, sensible father
Ž gure in the short story, however, cuts much more deeply into the fabric of our sense
of shared security and hence is a deeper critique than the Ž lm.
The story utilises horror tropes of invasion and engulfment. Invasion by foreigners or
aliens, disturbing our spatial and bodily securities, disruption of the body’s system with
illness, and destructive forces whether teeth, blood or chemicals are common in horror.
So too are vampires, werewolves, aliens and other space, body and blood invaders/
destroyers. In The Birds invasion is of both the sacrosanct family home space, and the
body, through pecking and stabbing. The birds enter through cracks in the window and
down the chimneys. They come into the house through boards which they peck, through
glass which they shatter. They also invade bodily space through pecking at hands, and
eyes.
Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’ (Freud, 1953) explains some of the story’s power and
horror, which is essentially based upon both fear of castration, and fear of dismember-
ment and disempowerment through blinding. ‘The Uncanny’ analyses Hoffman’s story
‘The Sandman’ in which the nurse tells of a wicked man who throws sand in the eyes
of children who refuse to go to bed, carries their eyes off in a sack and feeds them to
his monstrous birdlike children who:
sit up there in their nest, and their beaks are hooked like owls’ beaks, and they
use them to peck up naughty boys’ and girls’ eyes with. (Freud, 1953, pp.
348–349)
A deeper feminist reading of the fate of Nat, the family man, and of the comforting
 26 Gina Wisker

controls and sureties of patriarchy emerges with a Freudian reading of The Birds. Freud
recognises the Sandman story as dramatising a fear of castration as ‘anxiety about one’s
eyes . . . is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated’ (Freud, 1953, p.
352). The birds go for people’s eyes; they enter through any crack and cover any space,
blinding in different ways. The disempowering of Nat is an example of the grander,
complete undermining of what we can take for granted as normal, rational and secure.
It threatens patriarchy’s hold upon sanity and order, and it threatens ‘life as we know it’.
The unleashing of Nature’s blind forces in the shape of the marauding birds is in
excess of any everyday reading of the situation. The post-war (1952) contextualised
interpretations of the birds’ abnormal actions as a symptom of poisoning by the dastardly
Russians, with hope of the seventh cavalry rescue by the Americans who, we are told,
have always been our allies, is rather lame. Nat holds onto this possibility because it at
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least would conŽ rm his sense of an understandable unnatural activity, one within the
bounds of our comprehension, politically charged and logical, if dastardly, rather than
one which deŽ es any human control or understanding.
The terror lives on beyond the story. Radio news breakdown is a sign of the birds’
successful takeover, and the end of the world as we know it. Daphne du Maurier refuses
to restore order and normality.

Don’t Look Now (1971)

Nicholas Rance wrongly dismisses Don’t Look Now as vacuous (he also misnames it ‘Don’t
Look Back’) (Rance, 1993, p. 95). It is a tale which employs powerful horror tactics of
compulsion and suspense. In its Ž lm version (Nicholas Roeg, 1973) it can also be read
as an effective feminist reinterpretation of that popular patriarchal fairystory Little Red
Riding Hood.
Throughout the story a clever use of the shifting signiŽ er constantly keeps us and John
the family man protagonist, off balance. Don’t Look Now (1971, p. 7) starts the story,
perhaps only a phrase between the couple visiting Venice to try and learn to live with
the death of their daughter, Christine, or actually hinting at something important and
not to be missed. It is either the pantomime ‘look out behind you!’ or indication of
something too terrible to endure scrutiny. And throughout, the story is structured by
deferrals, questionings, denials, misinterpretations, keeping it tightly knit, and us as
readers constantly uneasy, misdirected, unsure, certain there is something missed out and
misread. The object of ‘don’t look now’ is undeŽ ned and this and similar phrases of
denial or deferral seem always to be wrongly attached to the playful and safe or the
potentially threatening. The shifting signiŽ er leaves us uneasy, suggests a lack, a yawning
gap in interpretation which is threatening to our sense of stability and security. Like John,
we are off-balance, tricked into thinking something is dangerous and evil when it is not
and safe when it is fatal. For the practised horror reader there are hints and misinterpre-
tations enough to weave for us a network of terrifying and unpleasant possibilities hidden
in each person and each event at least as complex and contradictory as the maze-like
streets of Venice, spatialised versions of the twistings of the mind and plot.
The opening text is littered with potentially suspicious, simply explained items and
with a mixture of references to threat and pretence, all of which build up an uneasy,
unbearable tension temporarily but untrustworthily released each time a simple expla-
nation is produced. The explanations might satisfy the man and his wife but not the
reader. The language of pretence and threat overwhelms, suggesting nothing is as it
 Don’t Look Now 27

seems, nothing is trustworthy, everything potentially unŽ xed and dangerous. This is the
prime stuff of horror.
The object of the opening phrase is two old ladies staring at the couple. John jokily
says the women are ‘old girls’, trying to ‘hypnotise’ him. ‘Old girls’ is a familiar, friendly
term but also a paradox. Their actions seem to attempt to remove John’s control through
hypnotism. Laura’s actions are theatrical, artiŽ cial. She is ‘on cue’ her yawning an
‘elaborate pretence’ as though ‘searching for a “non existent” aeroplane’ (p. 7). The
movement is straightforward so that she can stare without being seen and conŽ rm an
understanding interpretation, but it is in ected with references to both the non-existent
and the not-as-it-seems. It is a game. She suppresses her ‘hysteria’ which is really playful
laughter. The descriptions are over-written, suggesting layers of suppressed tension,
making the reader uneasy at the artiŽ ce. Her interpretation ‘they’re male twins in drag’
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(p. 7) clears the air humorously but offers an increasingly unstable deŽ nition of a more
bizarre pretence in this context.
Boundaries are crossed, leaving us uneasy. This is exacerbated by the tension and
excess in tone in the adjectives and adverbs here and at many points in the text. Laura’s
voice breaks ‘ominously’, her laughter about to be ‘uncontrolled’. Something both
releases and threatens explosion suggesting lack of control, chaos. As marauding
shape-shifting murdering twins they increase in pantomime quality but destabilise
conventional readings.
Horror is always about to tip into humour. ‘Good horror is essentially funny, in Ž ction
I mean’ Roald Dahl reminds us.[1] But this horror incorporates and moves beyond the
humorous. There is no uneasy giggling outlet left to us at the end, or outside the text in
response to its worst excesses. Humour is a misreading. It tips into horror.
The sisters, not merely transvestite jewel thieves are ‘murderers deŽ nitely. But why, I
ask myself, have they picked on me?’ (p. 7) References to God and spies, insights and
continued pretence—wigs, costumes, conspiracy, subterfuge heighten the comic while
hinting at deception and misinterpretation. The text is larded with hints of threat and of
Otherness, the inexplicable and potentially terrifying—playfully rendered, never really
laid to rest. ‘[T]he ghost was temporarily laid’ (p. 8) refers to their haunting loss rather
than any real ghost. The ghost which is to continue to haunt them is the spectre of a
terrifying future, misread.
The two old women from the Home Counties are seers, one blind. They comfort
Laura by seeing her daughter safe between the couple. We are all caught off guard
because the object of fear is possibly safe and friendly, but the in ections of pretence,
fear, threat, deception and danger  oat still through the text, attaching to people and
items each of which shifts on proving itself harmless, misread, so increasing our unease
and the story’s tension at each wrong reading. ‘Settling for this . . . brought composure,
but a prickly feeling on his scalp remained, and an odd sensation of unease’ (p. 10). The
sense of doom is in excess of the logical explanations.
The twins were standing there, the blind one still holding on to her sister’s arm,
her sightless eyes Ž xed Ž rmly upon him. He felt himself held, unable to
move,and an impending sense of doom, of tragedy, came upon him. His whole
being sagged, as it were, in apathy, and he thought ‘this is the end, there is no
escape, no future’. (p. 14)
Of course he is right, but noone yet knows why and his apathy is a familiar horror Ž ction
response like being rooted to the spot, immobile and helpless as terror races upon you
in the dream state. We can read the twins as the fates with the thread cutting sister
 28 Gina Wisker

missing, appearing at the end in the pixie-hooded murderous dwarf. In the Ž lm version
the hood is red, picking up the sickeningly, bloodily horrible image of the spreading red
which affects John’s vision following the drowning of his red clad daughter. This little red
riding hood image is one drawn out of John’s sense of loss, inability to protect, sense of
the endangered existence of his young daughter and by extension all potentially
victimised young girls; a protective paternalism which is his undoing. The sisters walk on,
‘the evil hour had passed’ (p. 16). Words such as ‘magic’ and ‘instinct’ sit uneasily
alongside events which refuse to fulŽ l their promise. Boats moored to ‘slippery steps of
cellar entrances looked like cofŽ ns’ (p. 19). And death haunts the tale. The horror was
actually established at an unbearable level with the daughter’s death from meningitis
before the tale opened. The old ladies, the son’s illness, then the wife’s disappearance set
up a series of false trails as we wait for the tension to break in a Ž nal horror.
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The Ž rst sighting of the ‘little girl’ in the pixie hood is separated from the threatening
cry. John’s own supressed torment at the loss of his daughter transfers into a desire to
see this child safe. We make the same connections as he does ‘it was a child, a little girl’
(p. 19), but an unease at the juxtaposition of the strangling cry and the sure footed child
lingers on. The cofŽ n-like boats and the threatening alleyway are rendered safe by John’s
assurances: ‘I know exactly where we are’ (p. 19). The houses and boats are dead
creatures ‘with the shutters closed each one of them seemed dead’. John’s interpretations
are undependable, we realise, as a rift grows between his familiarising and the defamil-
iarising of the narrative voice. A cry interpreted as coming from a drunk is ‘Less like a
drunk than someone being strangled, and the choking cry suppressed as the grip held
Ž rm’ (p. 19). As for Ian McEwan’s later ill-fated visitors to Venice in The Company of
Strangers (McEwan, 1981) unfamiliar holiday territory causes misreadings of atmospheres
and events. Laura’s ‘I’m off, it’s sinister’ (p. 19) and her sensible response of calling the
police are refused by John who insists that London is the dangerous place, Venice being
necessarily safe because of its holiday nature.
Reassuring ourselves that our reactions of fear are in excess of the situation, caused just
because it is new to us, we can actually be lured into real danger, suggests the horror tale.
Just so in the suburban nightmarish Ž lms (Nightmare on Elm Street , 1984, Halloween , 1978)
of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s potentially threatening sounds of doors banging, opened
gates, and slightly odd events cause fear which is explained away using the terminology
and interpretations of the everyday and normal. The narrative voice or camera eye prove
terror to be the correct reading. Defamiliarisation, fragmentation and chaos rule.
Displaced horror attaches to the presence of the sisters in the restaurant Laura and
John choose, ‘what in the name of hell’ (p. 21) he mutters. John refuses the sister’s
warnings that they should leave Venice, their premonitions and their insistence that he
should depend upon his own psychic powers to guide him. ‘I’m psychic am I, Ž ne’ (p.
25) he mocks. When he later prepares to follow Laura to England where she has  own
to be with their son in his sudden illness, John misreads his psychic sighting of his wife
standing between the old ladies on a vaporetto, as they saw Christine, the daughter
between Laura and John. Ever the realist reader of his own lifestory, he believes they
have kidnapped her and he must locate her. ‘The police had everything in hand, and,
please God, would come up with the solution’ (p. 42) calls on a masculine logic and order
to sort out the problem. However, visits to the police prove futile as do his attempts to
control the situation with logic, tracking, rational explanations. Venice resists mapping,
nothing can be located, it keeps shifting. The undeŽ nable, the nightmarish, the inexplic-
able and the oddly threatening are in excess of any comfortable explanations and closure.
John’s insistence on logic and his denial of his psychic powers are a rejection of his
 Don’t Look Now 29

feminine side, his intuition. The alleyway of interpretation John goes down is a dead end,
literally. As the story gathers momentum we are locked into his misinterpretations with
no narrator’s alternative readings. All our certainties and his are refused and misdirected.
John plays out a patriarchal paternalistic fantasy of control, rescue, restoration of order
(in the Ž lm the fairystory of Little Red Riding Hood is invoked by the red hood), intent on
rescuing the vulnerable little girl in the pixie hood ostensibly  eeing a male attacker.
The thickset woman dwarf who turns, monstrous and grinning, to face him in the Ž nal
shuttered room down the Ž nal alleyway, is the third weird sister, a Ž gure of his fate. The
death throw of her knife is one continuous movement in the sentence, his reaction
following it, enacting the scene.
The creature fumbled in her sleeve, drawing a knife, and as she threw it at him
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with hideous strength, piercing his throat, he stumbled and fell, the sticky mess
covering his protective hands. (p. 55)
A Ž nal false security and misreading: the hands are not protective, he is fatally wounded.
As it all coheres, premonition and death, he thinks: ‘O god . . . what a bloody silly way
to die’ (p. 55).
The Ž gure of patriarchal law is dangerously challenged in his certainties by the weird
elderly sisters who see images of embodied desire—the return of the dead daughter. John
represses the psychic, feminine side of his character to his detriment. His sense of unease
and fear materialises into the monstrous, grinning dwarf who throws a huge knife. She
is a Ž gure of horror reinforcing conventional male fears of the castrating monstrous
woman, the abject, the monstrous creature woman, a Medusa (also a third sister) who
turns round and turns men to stone/literally disempowering and then castrating them.
Here Daphne du Maurier employs a conventional Ž gure, for Medusa, sirens, mermaids
and femmes fatales occupy much male body horror. Freud, recognising male terror and
loathing of the female body and female sexual power (Freud, 1953) locates male fears of
castration by women in the Ž gure of Medusa whose hair of toothed snakes fascinates,
then turns men to stone. Vagina dentata myth embodied, she is the ultimately fearful
thing.
The pixie hooded dwarf is visually the little girl lost, who needs male protection, but
the terror of offering protection and it being rewarded by disempowerment and
castration is played out. This pixiehooded ‘child’ not only needs none of his fatherly
protectiveness, she turns it against him, grinning, empowered, monstrosity in the disguise
of vulnerability with the castrating knife, a single throw to the throat killing him.
A psychological horror tale, Don’t Look Now undermines conventional logic, consistently
disturbs, and transgresses, replaying masculine terrors while insisting on the importance
of recognising the feminine.

Rebecca (1938)
The fatal attractiveness of the ostensibly innocent and lovely but treacherously danger-
ous, castrating women is explored more fully in Rebecca. Rebecca plays out male terrors of
vulnerability where it most hurts. Rebecca is the dead Ž rst wife of Maxim de Winter,
owner of a palatial home with sweeping drive who has swept his mousey second wife off
her feet ‘taking her away from all this’ into what has always been read as an ideal
romantic scenario, to be mistress of the grand house. However, the Ž rst wife cannot be
exorcised to enable the second wife to develop any sense of identity or power, for a
number of reasons, all of which trouble the romantic Ž ction formulae, reveal rifts in the
 30 Gina Wisker

genre itself and the social behaviours which it conŽ ms, and leave us troubled as
conventional readers, just as troubled in many ways as the second, nameless wife.
Rebecca’s beauty renders Maxim and other men vulnerable, her relentless predatory
behaviour in adulterous affairs with other men undermines patriarchal structures, both
the ownership of property and hereditary lineage, and the ownership of women. Like
Othello, Max realises he cannot own the appetites of his ‘creature’ and must kill her to
manage her. But her ghost will not lie down and even when Manderley is burned to the
ground her presence haunts the compromise of his second marriage.
In Rebecca, the second wife creates an image of a sexually attractive and sexually
autonomous woman who is both feared and desired. Rebecca’s sexual behaviour ‘was
literally “unspeakable” ’ (Light, 1991 p. 178). Although not actually talking of du
Maurier’s horror writing itself, Alison Light pinpoints the mixed attraction and repulsion
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in Rebecca when she identiŽ es the novel’s characteristics:

It is the same boundary-line between the abhorrent and the desirable that is
explored in her most powerful creation, a female character who has substance
only in the fantasies of others, Rebecca. (Light, 1991 p. 157)
The narrator, the second Mrs de Winter, remains nameless, her everyday goodness
overshadowed by Rebecca’s haunting presence. But she is fascinated by that Other
Woman, product of male fantasy and horror, the fatally attractive woman who disem-
powers by adultery and rejection. Rebecca is everything the second wife is not, the
overwhelming myth of her sexual power and perfection perpetuated by Mrs Danvers, the
housekeeper, rather than Maxim. She it is who has a fascination with the sadistic and
cruel side of Rebecca as much as her dominant, stunning beauty and spirit, against
which the younger, poorer woman pales.
‘She did what she liked, she lived as she liked’ (p. 254), ‘fearless, wild and immoral,
the epitome of female licentiousness’, ‘vicious, damnable, rotten through and through’ (p.
283) and ‘But Rebecca would never grow old. Rebecca would always be the same. And
her I could not Ž ght. She was too strong for me’ (p. 244). The paradox for reader and
author as much as for the second wife, is the fascination Rebecca holds for us however
‘incapable of love, of tenderness, of decency’ (p. 283) she might be. Her transgressive
potential lives beyond her, and well after Manderley has burned, and the novel has been
closed. Her selŽ shness and beauty enthral. She ‘did what she liked’ and ‘lived as she
liked’, ‘cared for nothing and no one’, ‘Rebecca was incapable of love, of tenderness, of
decency. She was not even normal.’ (p. 283). But her attraction, beyond this repulsive
image, lives on as: ‘Rebecca seizing life with her two hands; Rebecca triumphant, leaning
down from the minstrel’s gallery with a smile on her lips’ (p. 284).
Rebecca, a re-write of Jane Eyre, ostensibly and lingeringly a romantic Ž ction, is also
Gothic text. It questions the status quo, the stability of relationships and the curtailing
of women’s power and sexuality. Patriarchal punishment of women’s powerful disruptive
sexuality would provide a traditional closure to the novel, with the second wife and
Maxim enjoying a comfortable and loving partnership freed from the monstrosity of the
scarlet woman. But the disturbances Rebecca and her power brings into their world and
into the narrative trouble any neat ending. Rebecca’s fascination lingers on for us as
readers as it does the second wife, although she herself has been absent throughout. The
second Mrs de Winter herself creates a version of Rebecca and her narrative and
although collusive in the (Ž gurative) burying of Rebecca and guilt over her death, can
neither close the tale nor lay to rest the fascination. Rebecca is a liberated, licentious
woman, an alter ego explored more deeply in du Maurier’s later psychological novel
 Don’t Look Now 31

than in its relatively conformist antecedent Jane Eyre where, as Rochester’s mad wife in
the attic, the heroine’s alter ego has to be disposed of in a con agration of her own
making before husband and wife can be united (with no lingering bad memories, it
seems). Vampiric, the young second wife feeds off Rebecca’s memory. When she appears
at the grand party she (accidentally) visually represents and replicates Rebecca, to
Maxim’s guilty horror, misread as a rejection of her shortcomings. Preparing for the
party, it is as if she is literally inheriting Rebecca’s shoes and clothes: ‘if she sat there I
should see her re ection in the glass and she would see me too, standing like this by the
door’ (p. 221). In the concluding episode as Manderley, symbol of eroticism and power,
burns, she dreams:
I got up and went to the looking glass. A face stared back at me that was not
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my own . . . and then I saw that she was sitting on a chair before the dressing
table in her bedroom, and Maxim was brushing her hair. He held her hair in
his hands, and as he brushed it he wound it slowly into a thick rope. It twisted
like a snake, and he took hold of it with both hands and smiled at Rebecca and
put it round his neck. (p. 396).
Rebecca’s Medusa-like qualities are compelling, indicative of her castrating power which
fascinated Maxim, but led both to murder and possible retribution. Her in uence and
the arguments she represents are excitingly contradictory. On the one hand for the
heroine, Rebecca holds a fatal, life draining and enervating fascination. On the other
hand, however, her holding power on the wife and readership, beyond the grave, is one
of fascination at the liberating possibilities she represents, and an indictment of the
popular (and popular Ž ctional) drive to repress questionings of patriarchy’s powers. The
horror of the story emerges in its intertextual references to vampirism, to Medusa. The
referencing is potentially merely conventional, but the story is given a twist by being
located in the experience of the second wife so that in Rebecca we see women’s horror of
the invasion by another. Horror also leaks out in the deception underlying the lie of a
romantic escape and fulŽ lment, offered and maintained by a murderer, Max de Winter.
There is horror in the concealed murder, in the power which has concealed it and lived
on/lives on the couple’s collusion, and there is horror in the haunting and invasion of
the self image and future sense of identity of the second wife, by the Ž rst.
There is horror in the death of Rebecca and the silence that both produces and
maintains her ghostly presence. But the story is not merely Jane Eyre with the sexual
transgression’s compulsive attraction more fully explored, it is also ‘Bluebeard’ re-written,
with the second wife triumphing. Her collusion of silence springs from the power of
knowledge. She has unlocked the chamber (outhouse, sunken boat, hidden past) of her
predecessor’s death and lived on with the knowledge, colluding by remaining in the
marriage, but avoiding any retribution for this dangerous knowledge.
The horror of domestic entrapment, and more particularly the Bluebeard story lying
behind Rebecca reappear in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (Carter, 1981) (and
notably, the explosive results of domestic entrapment emerge in Carter’s The Fall River
Axe Murders, 1986). The Bloody Chamber explores the sado masochistic and erotic attraction
of the powerful older man for the younger, poorer woman. His dominant patriarchal
power, located in his shut, terrible room, is undermined not only by the wife’s
transgressive investigation (as Rebecca transgresses, as the second wife explores), but
through the rescue by her unconventional, heroic mother. While patriarchal and
paternalistic power are undercut or shown as essentially  awed, unable to keep out the
dark and dangerous in du Maurier’s The Birds and Don’t Look Now they are themselves
 32 Gina Wisker

Ž gured as dangerous lies depended on, believed in at her loss by a dependent, romantic
woman in Rebecca, and as an erotically charged, dangerously attractive con, as it also is
in Angela Carter’s story. Contemporary women horror writers’ concentration on body
horror, Otherness, the abject and engulfment, found in The Bird appear for example in
Hantu Hantu (Goring, 1990) where a romantic deception by a golden prince (actually a
monster, a cockroach in disguise) leads to an embrace and a long kiss in which showers
of cockroaches invade the beloved/victim’s body (a truly disgusting story!). Numerous
tales of werewolf lovers (for example, Cheri Scotch, The Werewolf’s Kiss 1992) further
explore the theme and concern over animal invasion or engulfment, the monstrous
within us. In contemporary women’s horror Ž ction, however, the Otherness is often
recognised within the self, and/or embraced. Women in The Company of Wolves (Carter,
1981) and Boobs (McKee Charnas, 1990) are happy to embrace werewolf status as they
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recognise their maturity and feel comfortable with their (werewolf) bodies.
Daphne du Maurier established a woman’s form of psychological horror which only
fully  ourishes since the 1970s. Her work represents continued fascination with transgres-
sions deŽ ned as demonic by patriarchy. We do not have to like and emulate Rebecca but
we are deeply interested in her as we are in the questioned and altered states of the short
stories, and wish to explore what is curtailed, what damned, what possible.
Horror writing, like fantasy, transforms what is considered ‘real’ through exposing
what is feared and hidden. Many contemporary women horror writers refuse the
pornography of more conventional horror and its narrative return to conventionality and
instead celebrate women’s sexuality. They expose and critique male produced ‘body
horror’ which constantly represents woman’s body as terrifying. They assault sexual and
social power structures dramatised in men’s sexualised horror Ž ctions. Like Daphne du
Maurier’s Rebecca they (Angela Carter, Suzy McKee Charnas and others) explore the
fascination of female horror Ž gures springing from male terrors at women’s sexuality and
power, and even if these Ž gures are depicted as monstrous, and punished, their
compulsive fascination endures, a psychologically both troubling and liberating force for
women.
Daphne du Maurier’s horror Ž ctions frequently utilise the familiar horror formulae of
entrapment, engulfment, invasion, altered states to investigate and question our comfort-
able complacency about relationships, identity and everyday life. Boundaries are crossed,
divisions, questions, Ž xities of time, space and being troubed. If there is any return to
normality at the Ž ction’s end, and this is rare, nothing is the same again. Like
contemporary women writers of horror, many of whom she has in uenced, du Maurier’s
horror Ž ctions might contain conservatism and nostalgia, might critique and punish
transgressions, but in the embodiment and exploration of these transgressions there is
vitality, questioning, and a compulsive attraction which goes deeper and beyond any
narrative closure. Our fascination with Rebecca lasts as it does for the second wife, way
beyond the grave, and it tells us more about ourselves perhaps than we would like to
recognise.

NOTES
[1] Roald Dahl interviewed in Twilight Zone (January–February 1983).

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 Don’t Look Now 33

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