Beginning in the immediate postwar and coincident with the Paramount antitrust decree, writers of both fiction and screenplays began to insist on the ownership of the works they produced. While flesh-and-blood authors conceived of themselves as corporate bundles of properties, the studios began to behave more like artists, investigating the possibilities of movies geared to specialized audiences. The literariness of these new pictures should be understood as the expression of a new conception of authorship pervading the industry. Many movies now considered noir, including In a Lonely Place (1950) and Sunset Boulevard (1950), manifest the industry’s shifting attitudes toward source material, original screenplays, and, ultimately, the idea of the Hollywood movie as a kind of literary expression. This chapter concludes with an analysis of All About Eve (1950). In its narrative of accommodation and uneasy coherence in the face of a common threat, Eve, unlike In a Lonely Place and Sunset Boulevard, strikes a balance between the conflicting intentions of its director (the self-consciously literary Joseph Mankiewicz) and its studio (Twentieth Century-Fox), giving legible shape to both.

This chapter deals with two long-form narratives that can be considered forerunners of the graphic novel: Milt Gross’s He Done Her Wrong (1930) and Drake Waller, Matt Baker, and Ray Osrin’s It Rhymes with Lust (1950). It stresses the originality of these proto-graphic novels and offers a close reading of both works, while reexamining their connections with other visual forms, namely, slapstick comedy, the woodcut novel, and film noir. To propel his dynamic story forward, Gross developed new ways of experimenting with the shape of panels, their size (as defined by the frames that delimit them), and their site (their particular placement within the space of the page). The chapter also addresses issues of gender and studies the critical treatment of male and female stereotypes. Finally, it studies the representation of graphic violence, reading It Rhymes with Lust as an example of “soft noir.”

Don DeLillo, this chapter argues, has created innovative narratives from the typecast materials of popular genre fiction. It demonstrates that genre novels and films, from spy thrillers and noir to mafia stories and horror, have often served DeLillo as, counterintuitively, a blank canvas – not as a narrowing template or pre-determined plot but as grounds for subversion, especially of the ideologies popular genres tend to encode, including the myths of individual agency with which DeLillo’s characters often strongly (and wrongheadedly) identify. DeLillo has remained interested in responding to generic narratives throughout his nearly fifty-year career because genres’ tired conventions and predictable endings often act as foils to his far more distinctive explorations of violence and death, that real-world ending, particularly in his late-career invocations of horror. The chapter examines primarily examples from Running Dog, Players, Libra, Underworld, The Body Artist, and Point Omega.

This chapter challenges the notion that the period is framed by two cinematic moments: the release of Dracula (1931) and The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). In contrast, it demonstrates that the former film emerged out of trends established in the 1920s and that, even in the 1930s, Universal was not the only game in town, and that other models of the Gothic cinema existed alongside it. It then moves on to explore developments in the 1940s, when many Gothic horror films pursued respectability through both the use of psychological materials and an association with female viewers. Finally, the chapter moves on to examine how the science fiction horror films of the 1950s sought to legitimise their monsters through scientific rather than supernatural explanations. The chapter also explores the ways in which these films provided a context for the making of The Curse of Frankenstein, even as they were countered by an alternative tradition of psychological horror that developed out of the success of the art house hit, Les Diaboliques (1955), and of the television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–65).