Missing Pieces: The Vision of a Killer in The Spiral Staircase

Detours, episode 3
Missing Pieces: The Vision of a Killer in The Spiral Staircase
Stephen Broomer, September 27, 2021

Robert Siodmak's The Spiral Staircase tells the story of a series of stranger-murders happening in a small town in Vermont in 1906. The bulk of the action is set in an old dark house during a storm, where convalescing matriarch Mrs. Warren is tended to by a servant, the protagonist Helen, who cannot speak due to a childhood trauma. In the local village, a killer has struck three times, each time attacking a woman with a disability. In this video essay, Stephen Broomer addresses the role of distorted vision in the film, a literal rendering of Borde and Chaumeton's thesis that the noir aesthetic of deep and unnatural shadows is a criminal’s perspective of the world; as well as the ways in which Siodmak's film anticipates the role of the first person perspective in the thrillers that followed.