10 Great Paranormal Noir Films of the Classic Era

"In many of these films we see an exploration of psychological themes (in a way, another coming back around to German expressionism, with its own postwar obsessions with madness) that would later find their home in the 1960's and 70's psychological thrillers but were here dramatized extrinsically with the fantastic of supernatural phenomena; psychological disintegration not represented an internal struggle happening in isolation, but by the literal manifestation of their demons as external forces – demons, aliens, cat people. We also see an embrace of the mythology of the parapsychological – the psychologist or psychoanalyst as a recurring figure, a kind of noir priest or witch doctor for the scientific atheist, a male counterpart to the female fortune teller, who is also a recurring figure throughout these films."