Does the idea of a romantic horror movie seem strange? I can think of three from 1940s Hollywood that fit the bill, though I wouldn’t call any of them truly horrifying. Spooky and unsettling, perhaps frightening, but not gory or gross, and they were all made within a few years of each other.
I Married A Witch (1942)
This is the lightest of the three films, a fun romantic romp with Veronica Lake and Frederic March that nonetheless has some dark underpinnings. Lake plays immortal witch Jennifer, who curses Jonathan Wooley’s descendants after he burns her and her father (played by Robert Benchley) at the stake, ensuring that all of the Wooley men will have unhappy marriages. When a lightning storm frees Jennifer and her father centuries later, she decides that she can make the present-day Wallace Wooley (played by March) far more miserable than his snobbish fiancee will, but of course the love potion Jennifer concocts to induce Wallace to fall in love with her backfires and she finds herself trying to win his heart.
If you’ve seen 1958’s Bell, Book and Candle with Kim Novak, this plot will sound familiar, but I actually prefer this movie. Among other things, there’s no nonsense about the witch losing her powers just because she falls in love. The obstacle is her father’s continuing hatred of the Wooleys, and his threat is to strip her of her powers because of her love for Wallace. Honestly, any variation of “a woman loses all of her power when she falls in love with a man!” just gets on my nerves. Talk about propping up male supremacy …
Anyway.
This is a charming little black-and-white film with Veronica Lake at her sulkily comic best. She refuses to listen to March’s pleas as her love for him wreaks havoc with his life and political career, and he is utterly unable to resist her charms. Jennifer and Wallace succeed in outwitting her father and it ends with amusing glimpse of their married-with-children life. As Jennifer tells her father says, “Love is stronger than witchcraft.”
I Walked With A Zombie (1943)
When producer Val Lewton wanted to convince RKO Pictures to let him make this low-budget “B” picture, he sold it to them as “Jane Eyre in the West Indies.” But he had a secret purpose as well, with the deeper themes of the film revolving around the continuing legacy of slavery and how it damages both the descendants of the former slaves, now residents of the island, and the descendants of the slaveholders. The small-scale tragedy of the Holland family can be viewed as a punishment for their actions both past and present, which is one of the reasons the censors insisted that Lewton remove any connection between his fictional island and the United States. It would never do for American moviegoers of the 1940s to recognize themselves and their own sins in the film.
Still, it’s a little startling to see how much racial criticism the film was able to sneak past the censors. The trappings appear lurid at first — especially the voodoo ceremony — but it’s treated with surprising respect for the time by both the Black and the white characters. Our heroine is at first enchanted by the beautiful tropical island, but soon comes to realize that it was a trap for the slaves who were brought there against their will, and that their descendants are still held captive by the powerful white planter families despite being nominally “free.”
The Jane Eyre part is played by Frances Dee as Betsy, a Canadian nurse who travels to the West Indies to care for Jessica (Christine Gordon), a sugar planter’s wife whose mystery illness has left her catatonic and without a will of her own. Whispers and rumors abound about Jessica’s illness, alternately blaming her husband, Paul (played by Tom Holland), or Jessica’s infidelity with Paul’s half-brother Wesley (the top-billed James Ellison).
The most famous setpiece of the film is when Betsy takes her charge to a voodoo ceremony in the hope of reversing the curse that she has come to believe was placed on Jessica. Betsy has fallen in love with Paul, but she feels it’s her duty to cure Jessica if she can. A revelation at that ceremony only makes it more obvious that the Holland family is responsible for their own damnation, and it’s a relief when Paul is finally freed from his responsibilities so he can leave the island forever with Betsy.
The Uninvited (1944)
This is not one of the recent gory horror movies of the same name, but a classic ghost story that still holds chills today. Brother and sister Roderick and Pamela Fitzgerald (played by Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey) scoff when they are told that their new house is haunted by the ghost of Carmel, the mistress of the previous owner, but footsteps and other invisible occurrences start to make believers of them both, even the skeptical Roderick. Worse, the ghost seems to have a grudge against the beautiful Stella Meredith (Gail Russell) and endangers her every time she visits the house. The mystery of Carmel’s death and why her malevolent ghost lingers in the house must be solved if Stella and Roderick are to find their happy ending together.
This is considered a classic of the ghost story genre, and for good reason. The special effects are minimal and still hold up well, even in the digital age, and the mystery surrounding the ghost is still satisfyingly difficult to unravel. Milland makes a stalwart hero, and he’s one of my favorite actors of the period, able to move easily between playing heroes and villains. Only two years later, he won an Academy Award for playing an alcoholic in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend.
So there you have it — a witch, a zombie, and a ghost all get their due, and each film has a happy ending for their leads, disparate as they may be. Happy Halloween!
Welcome to Trope Tuesdays, where I’ll tell you about some of the tropes I love (and maybe some of the ones I hate) when it comes to romance.
Today’s trope is one of my all-time favorites, and was a big part of the book that got me hooked on romance: Marriage of Convenience. Historical romance in particular has a dilemma when it comes to putting the lead characters in close physical proximity to each other given the social restrictions of the times. For most of Western history, the easiest way to do that is to force the characters into marrying.
This trope is related to, but not the same as, the Hasty Marriage trope (which is another favorite of mine). A big part of Marriage of Convenience is that the characters have an explicit agreement of some kind that they discuss before both of them agree to the marriage. Hasty Marriage is more that they get caught in some kind of compromising position and have to get married quickly for social or family reasons.
Here are three of my favorite Marriage of Convenience romances in alphabetical order by title:
The Arrangement by Mary Balogh
This is the second book of Mary Balogh’s Survivors’ Club series, and one of my favorites in that series. Blinded while fighting in his first battle during the Napoleonic Wars, Vincent Hunt is tired of his mother and sisters coddling him after his injury. When it reaches the point of them trying to arrange a bride for him, he flees to his childhood home with his valet and arranges his own marriage with Miss Sophia Fry after she is thrown out of her home because she stopped her scheming cousin from trapping Vincent into marriage.
One of the things I like best about this book is how Sophia and Vincent slowly adjust to both marriage and each other. Sophia wins over Vincent’s skeptical family and friends by taking practical steps that allow him to have more independence despite his blindness, even though she fears that doing so will allow him to distance himself from his unwanted wife.
This is also a very gentle book. There are no huge surprises, no threatening villain, and very little melodrama. The “all is lost” moment is Sophia’s fear that Vincent will lose interest in her as he gains independence, but it’s mostly internal. It concentrates very closely on their relationship and how two decent, kind-hearted people feel about each other, including their fears that the other doesn’t feel the same. This is a comfort read for me when I need to feel that life is basically good and we can solve most of our problems by talking to the ones we love.
Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold
This gets listed as a straight science fiction book and is published by a science fiction publishing house, but Hugo and Nebula award-winning author Lois McMaster Bujold is very romance-friendly and has written several books in this series that are basically straight romances. This one is particularly fun because she takes a feckless fan favorite character from earlier books and finally gives him a chance to grow up and be a responsible adult.
Ivan Vorpatril finds himself drawn into protecting refugee noblewoman Tej Arqua from the same people who slaughtered her family in a hostile takeover of their Great House. When Tej thinks the only solution to her dilemma is suicide, Ivan offers marriage instead, promising they can divorce as soon as they return to his home planet of Barrayar. But Ivan soon finds himself wondering how a fellow convinces his own wife that they should stay together when he’s promised to let her go.
This is an especially fun book if you’ve already read the rest of the Vorkosigan Saga (which I highly recommend) because you’ll understand the running gags like Ivan’s family referring to him as an idiot and already know the backstory of his father’s death on the same day as Ivan’s traumatic birth in the middle of a civil war. But I don’t think it’s truly necessary to read the whole series in order to enjoy the romance between Ivan and Tej, who are both people born into powerful positions they never wanted and surrounded by ambitious families who can’t understand their disinterest in that power.
Halfway through the book, Bujold adds a really fun caper story where she has a chance to revel in some of the engineering details of the future she’s created. One of the things I like most about Bujold’s books is that they’re not yet another dystopian future. For the most part, the future she envisions works. There are millions of ordinary people who live and love and work normal jobs in the background while our leads deal with issues that are dangerous for themselves and their families … and sometimes their planets.
Never Less Than A Lady by Mary Jo Putney
(I know I have this darn book on my shelf, but I had to make do with a downloaded cover image because I can’t find the physical book. Sorry!)
Mary Jo Putney is one of my all-time favorite romance authors, along with Mary Balogh. I’ve been reading both of them since they wrote Signet Regency Romances back in the 1980s and 1990s.
One of the things I love about Putney is that she works real-world issues into her romances and looks at them through a historical lens. In this one, the heroine was in a terribly abusive marriage and is terrified of getting into a new relationship, but circumstances force her into an arranged marriage with the army officer who saves her life. They both agree that any physical intimacy is up to her, but she is startled to find that she is far more attracted to her new husband than she realized before she agreed to marry him.
This is the second book in Putney’s popular Lost Lords series, and one of my favorites from that series. It’s lovely to watch Julia and Alexander slowly put aside their wariness and come together, both emotionally and physically. What makes this a great Marriage of Convenience book is that they both realize that they never would have been able to form a relationship without being married first — they both would have been too guarded to be able to come together any other way. The forced proximity of marriage is what allows them to fall in love, and that’s what the Marriage of Convenience trope is all about.
That’s it for today — stay tuned for a new post on Thursday for #ThrowbackThursday, where I’ll pull one of my classic romances off the shelf to talk about it.
When I was in 10th grade, Judith McNaught’s Whitney, My Love took my high school by storm. Even girls who didn’t normally read romance novels felt compelled to pick it up, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a few boys tried to find the “good parts” in their sisters’ copies.
But, honestly, the book kind of left me cold. And the book pictured above is the reason why.
I discovered it thanks to my best friend’s mother. She had a whole collection of romance novels stashed away from where the little ones could find them, and she didn’t mind me reading or borrowing them. This book — this one — kind of blew my mind for reasons my little 14-year-old mind could not have articulated, and I read it again and again. I bought the copy pictured above online, but it’s a pretty accurate representation of what my copy looked like.
“But, Alexa,” I hear you say. “If this book is so darn good, why have I never heard of this author?”
Dear reader, if you enjoy Regency or Victorian romances, I guarantee that you have heard of her. This was one of her early pseudonyms, but she eventually traded that in for her real name and became a bestselling author. I even have a copy of this book that was republished (and probably slightly edited) under her better-known name: Candace Camp.
Now, I cannot wholeheartedly recommend this book. It’s a very early 1980s romance novel, which means it’s all kinds of problematic. Among other things, I know that some of my friends will hear that it’s set on a plantation before the American Revolution and has several characters who are slaves and be like, “Nope, not reading that.” I’m not going to defend it — those parts have not aged well, and it’s probably one of the reasons it’s out of print.
And yet … two enslaved characters are the secondary romance in the book, which was pretty unusual for this sub-genre at the time. Not only that, the author fully acknowledges that it’s a big damn problem that the main characters own slaves and that the entire system is brutal, and comes up with a way for the hero and heroine to free all of them, in a book set in the Carolinas around the 1760s or 1770s, though the year is never specified.
The other major thing that sets this apart from other books of the time is that there is the then-obligatory scene where the hero is driven mad with desire and has an opportunity to rape the heroine and … he doesn’t. He pulls away and berates himself for what he almost did, which is the final thing that makes her realize that he could never hurt her and is not the one trying to kill her. (I told you it was a very 1980s book.) When McNaught came to a similar point in her book, the hero went through with it.
All of the elements that I love in the romance genre are gathered together in this one book: an interesting historical setting with a stubborn heroine, a rakish hero who secretly longs to be reformed, and an inclusive cast of characters that gives additional insight into the story and the historical period. It wasn’t until recently that I realized that this one book really set the template for me when it comes to historical romance. Despite its flaws — and there are even more than the ones I mentioned above — it still speaks to me as what romance can and should be.
Is this thing on?
… testing …. testing … 1 … 2 … 3 …