f Femininity and costume in 1930s horror

This article addresses the repeated use of imagined sartorial archaisms in female costuming in 1930s Hollywood horror films, by both analysing the physical make-up of the dress in question and bringing contemporary and historical outside influences into account. It examines female costuming as both a plot facilitator and one of the true visual symbols of the Gothicism that proliferated in films of the era. The article also focuses on the limited roles for women, particularly in 1930s horror, and the way in which costume reinforces and compounds this. The influx of German Expressionist film-makers to America prior to World War II brought Romanticism into the mainstream. It was accountable for the Gothic subject matter and aesthetic of Hollywood’s ensuing horror films over a period of decades, beginning with Dracula (Browning, 1931). It also marked a new dawn in female costuming for Hollywood, when women were not wearing historical dress, or contemporarily fashionable dress, but an imagined, evocative dress that never existed in history, but simultaneously looked as if it had.