What is Film Noir?

Film Noir was coined by french critics during the 1940s, first by Nino Frank in 1946 who noticed the trend of how dark and downbeat many American crime / detective films looked. Films such as 'The Maltese Falcon' and 'Double Indemnity' were highlighted. These films reflected real life situations that were going on and also on going tensions, they heavily contrasted with the musicals and comedies that were popular at the time. Fear, mistrust, bleakness, loss of innocence, despair and paranoia are readily evident in noir, reflecting the 'chilly' Cold War period when the threat of nuclear annihilation was ever-present. The criminal, violent, misogynistic, hard-boiled, or greedy perspectives of anti-heroes in film noir were a metaphoric symptom of society's evils, with a strong undercurrent of moral conflict, purposelessness and sense of injustice. There were rarely happy or optimistic endings in noirs.

Primary moods of Noir films were melancholy, alienation, bleakness and so on. Hero's, anti-heros, detectives, good cops, bad cops, gangsters, thugs, and average Joe's were common characters. Storylines were often elliptical, non-linear and twisting. Narratives were frequently complex, maze-like and convoluted, and typically told with foreboding background music, flashbacks (or a series of flashbacks), witty, razor-sharp and acerbic dialogue, and/or reflective and confessional, first-person voice-over narration. Amnesia suffered by the protagonist was a common plot device, as was the downfall of an innocent every man who fell victim to temptation or was framed. Revelations regarding the hero were made to explain/justify the hero's own cynical perspective on life. Noir films were always gloomy, the black and white film enhanced it, but it theatrically showed the dark side of human nature, murder, mystery, doomed love, an opressive atmosphere of menace. It could be seen as visually depressing, long dimly lit alley ways with steam rising, long shadows and detectives in trilby's and overcoats with there hands plunged in their pockets like weights.

'Scarlett Street' was a very popular and definitive noir film of the 40's, it tells the story of a mild mannered painted un-punished murder or an amoral female after she had led him to commit embezzelement, impersonated him to sell his paintings, and had also been deceitful and cruel to him. The idea of film noir could be implemented into my trailer, the whole melancholy setting and bleak outlook in the films plot would work very well for my horror film and I could take a lot of inspiration from films like 'D.O.A' and 'The Lady from Shanghai'.