Appearing amidst the decline of the Hollywood studio system in the 1960s, the Grande Dame Guignol cycle of horror films reimagine the history and aesthetics of classical Hollywood through the lens of decadence. Casting some of the most iconic stars of the studio system in roles that self-reflexively engage with their star personae to reimagine their glamor in terms of the grotesque, these works recall similar combinations of beauty, decay, and queer eroticism found throughout the canon of fin-de-siècle decadent literature.

While critical accounts of decadence tend to foreground its relation to literary modernism, this thesis instead applies this term towards cinema. Defining cinematic decadence as an aesthetic sensibility distinct from – although closely related to – its manifestation in fin-de-siècle literature, this term provides a valuable theoretical context to reconsider representations of queerness, temporality, embodiment, history, and misogyny within classical Hollywood cinema. Further, this cinematic decadence suggests a novel way to conceptualize the problematic but distinctly queer presentation of stardom and femininity offered by the monstrous women of the Grande Dame Guignol cycle, through four films: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962); Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Robert Aldrich, 1964); Strait-Jacket (William Castle, 1964); and What’s the Matter With Helen? (Curtis Harrington, 1971).

Like the texts of literary decadence at the turn of the 20th century, these works of cinematic decadence invite queer forms of subjectivity as they undermine the exclusionary, heteronormative discourses of modernity. Ultimately, this project seeks to define the sensibility of decadence as a distinct method of queering dominant culture, and to determine its largely unexplored relationship to the medium of cinema.