Fear in the Mirror: In Search of a Clean conscience in Maxwell Shane’s Fear in the Night and Nightmare

Detours, episode 7
Fear in the Mirror: In Search of a Clean Conscience in Maxwell Shane's Fear in the Night and Nightmare
Stephen Broomer, October 31, 2021

Filmmaker Maxwell Shane adapted Cornell Woolrich’s And So To Death twice, as Fear in the Night (1947) and Nightmare (1956). A young man is haunted by a nightmare in which he commits a murder in a mirrored room, surrounded by images of himself committing the crime. In Fear in the Night, the man is a bank teller, with an on-again off-again girlfriend, on the cusp of assuming adult responsibilities but boyish enough to suggest helplessness and naivety; in Nightmare, he’s a jazz musician, square in temperament, fully mature. This video essay addresses the representations of hypnosis in the cinema; the uncanny similarities between Shane’s films and the curious ways in which they differ; and the transit of a major theme, from homosexual panic (1947) to creative frustration (1956).