The following contains spoilers for The Pale Blue Eye, now streaming on Netflix, and a discussion on suicide.

Netflix's new period mystery, The Pale Blue Eye, is drenched in an older kind of Gothic: the literary tradition from which the more modern style evolved. The original period helped define both the mystery genre and supernatural horror as it evolved, rooted in stories like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the works of the Brontë sisters. Those novels emphasize visual elements to reflect the characters' emotional states, as well as the way past events linger in the present. That makes it a natural fulcrum for horror and ghost stories, which The Pale Blue Eye understands implicitly.

The Pale Blue Eye commits itself completely to presenting classic Gothic tropes in visual terms, sticking to the literary works that spawned the genre as closely as it can for much of its running time. That's in keeping with the movie's setting (upstate New York in the mid-1800s, when Gothic literature was growing) and in its cast of characters. This includes Edgar Allan Poe and the film fits his real-life background into its fictional story. It's a small wonder that the visuals evoke the same mood.

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The Pale Blue Eye's Setting Makes for an Ideal Gothic Atmosphere

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The title refers to a line from Poe's story "The Telltale Heart," in which the narrator murders an old man owing to his "pale blue eye" which troubles him every time it settles on him. The movie itself concerns the murder of a West Point cadet, and the efforts of retired police detective Augustus Landor (played by Christian Bale) to find the killer. He recruits Poe -- also a cadet -- to assist, which forms a direct connection to the literature that inspired the film.

The Pale Blue Eye is set during 1830, in the run-up to the publication of many seminal works of Gothic fiction. That includes not only Poe's collection of stories and poems, but the likes of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and her sister Emily's Wuthering Heights, both published in 1847, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein published in 1818. Perhaps the most telling example is Washington Irving's short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," which shares the same Hudson Valley setting as The Pale Blue Eye and was first published about a decade before the events of the film.

Indeed, many of the film's most striking visuals come in the setting itself. It takes place during wintertime, with snow on the ground and the hills full of dead trees typical of upstate New York. Characters often wear black, standing out starkly amid their white surroundings. The bleak atmosphere also aptly matches their inner lives. Landor, for example, is a widower and drinks in excess to dull the panic of his loss. Similarly, the coroner who tends to the victim's body has a daughter suffering from seizures, and one character commits suicide by flinging themselves off of a cliff. The setting also stresses formality among the characters, which the movie enhances by often shooting them as lone, isolated figures. The military academy setting and commitment to historic detail also gives them a cold, clipped demeanor, which fits the emotional bleakness of their surroundings.

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The Pale Blue Eye Uses Visuals to Tell Its Story

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The film makes similar choices to help increase the suspense when danger is afoot. The Pale Blue Eye stresses natural lighting, which often leaves characters surrounded by pools of darkness where the killer may lurk. The violence is surprisingly clinical, punctuated not so much by its gruesomeness, but by a kind of silent finality that lingers in the mind. The dead are dead, and nothing will bring them back. The Place Blue Eye regularly emphasizes such cold truths in the handling of its atmosphere.

Placing Poe in the middle of it simply brings it all full circle, implying that the gloomy landscapes and morbid events of his stories sprung from the "real" events of the film. Not only does it provide The Pale Blue Eye with some of its bigger twists, but it links the imagery onscreen with his creative musings. It's an easy leap to see the same settings and tone used for any one of his actual stories.

The Gothic genre has been overtaken by movies, television, and music to become a tone and a style all its own. The Pale Blue Eye seeks to return it to the literary roots where it formally began, not only in its grisly murders and odd circumstances, but in the way its stark visuals echo the works that inspired it. To do otherwise would defeat what makes the project stand out, turning its singular murder story into just another dull bit of fiction. In this case, to ignore the look is almost to miss the point.

The Pale Blue Eye is currently streaming on Netflix.