Vampires and blinding

About fifteen minutes into THE LODGER, there is a close-up of a light in the Buntings’ lodging house growing dim: money needs to be inserted in the meter. This theatrical device – as William Rothman points out, like lowering the house lights (Rothman 1982: 14) – is in fact to cue Ivor Novello's star entrance. When he appears on the doorstep, wearing a hat and with a scarf over his mouth, he is intended to look like descriptions of the Avenger. But there is another association, missed by Rothman, though since noted by Richard Allen (1999: 223). With his pale face and darkened eye sockets, Novello also evokes Max Schreck's eponymous vampire in NOSFERATU (F.W. Murnau, 1921), an association reinforced when he reacts nervously to the brightening of the lights as a coin is inserted. Nor was this the first time that Novello's star image had been linked to Dracula: in THE MAN WITHOUT DESIRE (Adrian Brunel, 1923), his character spends two hundred years in a state of suspended animation in a tomb. This is an early example of one of Hitchcock's most complex and elusive motifs: the symbolic use of light/lights, which occurs in many of his films, but nearly always allusively.

JAMAICA INN indicates how allusively. First, as Mary approaches the inn in a coach, the driver's refusal to stop at such a cursed place is another oblique reference to NOSFERATU. Second, the wreckers, who operate at night, cause the shipwrecks by removing the cliff-top beacon, thereby consigning the sailors to a darkness which kills them. As in NOSFERATU, the evil spreads out over the terrain, extending to the beaches where any sailors who survive the wrecks are promptly murdered. Eliminating the light thus leads to mass murder; what Mary is required to do in the climactic scene is restore the light and thereby save the sailors’ lives.

JAMAICA INN also preserves one of the most significant features of the Dracula myth: the fear of daylight. Neither Joss, the leader of the wreckers, nor Sir Humphrey, the mastermind behind them, is ever seen outside during the day, and nightfall arrives abruptly at one point in order to sustain this.