The ‘Hollywood Gothic’ presents us with a Los Angeles cityscape populated by men and women whose Tinseltown neuroses render them fatally unable to differentiate between reality and fantasy. Amongst their number, we find doomed ingénues, desperate hangers-on and fallen stars unable to accept that their time in the spotlight has come to an end. Here, Hollywood's unhappy denizens are tormented by visions of what once was, and what will never be. As the name suggests, Hollywood Gothic focuses upon the ‘dark side’ of a specific commercial and creative industry. Here, the business which has long played a pivotal role in Southern California's cultural and economic development is invariably associated with madness, violence and death. Key locales include opulent mansions whose grandeur conceals death and decay; the private screening rooms and mahogany-panelled backstage offices in which the real decisions are made (usually by predatory white men); and the shabby houses, motels and apartment buildings inhabited by those who exist on the industry's margins. Hollywood is here depicted as a location that at first worships and then ruthlessly discards its stars; as a place where youth is adored but cruelly exploited; and where success always comes at an unthinkably high cost.

I will begin my discussion of the Hollywood Gothic by briefly outlining the factors behind the location's rapid establishment as the centre of the global movie-making industry. I’ll then consider the reasons why it so rapidly came to encompass both a physical space (the original community which was then absorbed into the wider city of Los Angeles) and a powerful set of ideas which both overlap with and expand upon the California Gothic characteristics outlined in my Introduction. Finally, I will consider the novel which did much to lay the groundwork for the ‘Hollywood Gothic’: Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (1939). The two chapters which follow this one will concentrate upon films which epitomise the two main types of ‘Hollywood Gothic’ narrative which followed in the wake of West's acerbically bleak portrait of the industry during the late 1930s. The first type focuses upon the embittered and unstable fallen star, whilst the second details the desperation of aspiring talents who will sacrifice absolutely anything to succeed.