A still wildly effective chiller, The Spiral Staircase is new on Blu from Kino Lorber. With shots and sequences that eerily predict the tropes of the slasher craze still decades away from coming into being at the time of The Spiral Staircase’s release, the film is a deliciously creepy piece of Gothic mystery, anchored by a tremendously sympathetic performance by Dorothy McGuire.
McGuire plays Helen, a mute woman we are introduced to sitting enraptured by a silent film playing in the parlor of a local inn. It’s early yet in the 20th century, and unbeknownst to the crowd of delighted filmgoers, in a room above them another woman is being strangled to death.
Over the course of its runtime, The Spiral Staircase will shift from mystery to melodrama to thriller and back again, but this sequence, as directed by Robert Siodmak, is pure horror. You see the woman select an outfit from her closet, only for the hanging clothes to begin shifting as an unseen force moves behind them. And then the clothes are slowly brushed aside and the force is no longer unseen. There’s a man in that closet, watching her every move until it’s time to strike.
The discovery of the dead woman ends the movie-going. We quickly learn that this is only the latest death in a trend that is terrorizing this small Vermont town. The killer seems exclusively to target women who are “defenseless” i.e. differently abled or deformed in some way. If Helen wasn’t already feeling fretful, the insistence of everyone she knows on reminding her that she is vulnerable to being a target to such a killer can’t help.
And the killer is after her, we know that. In the film’s second standout sequence, Helen hurries through a rainstorm to reach the foreboding mansion where she works as a companion to the wealthy, dying Mrs. Warren (Ethel Barrymore, in an Oscar-nominated turn), only to lose the key to the house in a puddle. As she searches for the dropped item, we see the killer stalking her from behind nearby trees, almost pouncing before reconsidering and backing away. Later, once Helen is in the house, she and the cook Mrs. Oates (Elsa Lanchester) discover one of the windows has been left open, letting in the rain.
Hitchcock famously said that the key to suspense was showing the audience the bomb underneath the table and letting them waaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitttttt for it to go off. Siodmak deploys a similar trick here. We know there’s a killer in that house, and we know he’s waiting for an excuse to pounce, so every trip down a darkened hallway or excursion to the basement during this dark and stormy night is another moment when you wait with bated breath for the other shoe to drop.
Before it does, The Spiral Staircase busies itself with the inner-workings of the Warren house and the strange ecosystem that has sprung up around the old woman in her last days, hangers-on that also double as suspects. There’s Mrs. Warren’s son, Steven (Gordon Oliver), a playboy and a lush; Mrs. Warren’s stepson, the mild-mannered Professor Albert (George Brent); Mr. Oates (Rhys Williams); house secretary (and Steven’s lover) Blanche (Rhonda Fleming); and Mrs. Warren’s much-abused nurse (Sara Allgood).
Also floating in the margins of the story is Helen’s paramour, Dr. Parry (Kent Smith), a relative newcomer to town who is eager to bring Helen to Boston so she might recover her speech.
To be honest, this is where the movie started to lose me a bit. Williams and Lanchester make a fine, chatty comic counterpoint to McGuire’s silence, and Barrymore’s gives good ‘haunted’, but it’s really hard to drum up much interest in the bickering brothers or Smith’s stiff of a doctor. The tension from knowing that at least one of these guys is possibly a killer mitigates it somewhat, but there’s a flatness to how this melodrama plays out that is something of a comedown after the electric opening. Not only that, but all the time spent on the supporting characters detract from McGuire, who is stunning throughout the movie. McGuire has great, silent movie era, eyes that project so much personality and emotion that she doesn’t even need her voice to communicate volumes. But an unfortunate chunk of the movie reduces Helen to a passenger in her own story.
The Spiral Staircase recovers nicely in its last act, when the slasher overlap really becomes noticeable. For God’s sake, there’s a scene where a doomed woman gets startled by an off-screen presence, laughs, and says, “Oh it’s you,” right before getting offed. A final chase through the darkened house while lightning crashes outside is timelessly terrifying, made all the more so by McGuire’s increased vulnerability and the film’s down-to-earth portrayal of a casual psychopath.
The package by Kino Lorber is quite handsome, and it’s hard to imagine the film ever looking much better. The disc also comes with an audio commentary by film historian Imogen Sarah Smith, and a radio broadcast version of the story featuring McGuire and Siodmak.
While it maybe doesn’t stand as one of the classics of its era, The Spiral Staircase is a highly entertaining mystery that bounces ably from genre to genre without fail, buoyed by atmosphere you could cut with a knife. Anyone who has already worked their way through the well-worn works of Hitchcock and Lewton would do well to seek this one out.
