Billy Wilder was no stranger to the darker side of humanity. Be it the desperate longing for the past in Sunset Blvd., the morally bankrupt activities of the press in Ace in the Hole, the deep depression of The  Apartment or even the cold-blooded murder which starts off the otherwise comical Some Like it Hot, Wilder’s films tend to be situated in the darker  corners of the American psyche. In his 1945 diatribe on alcoholism, The Lost Weekend, this darkness is similarly present, and in the sequence from which the above frame was taken, the director even delves into the realms of horror.

Don Birnam (Ray Milland) is a full-blown alcoholic, alternating between binges at his local bar and the more solitary time spent drinking alone in his apartment. His girlfriend Helen and brother Wick both attempt to stop Don from drinking, fearful of the damage he is doing to himself and the potential writing talent he is wasting. But Don doesn’t listen to them, craftily hiding bottles around the house and breaking dates to go to the bar in order to feed his addiction. His ‘lost weekend’ actually amounts to a prolonged downward spiral lasting from Thursday through to the following Tuesday. It is on the Monday when the sequence I want to discuss occurs.

After spending the previous day in an alcoholics ward which he manages to escape from, Don spends the Monday at home slowly deteriorating into a drunken stupor which then slips further down into the depths of mental instability as he begins to hallucinate. His apartment, masked by shadow, becomes home to a hellish nightmare when Don notices a mouse burrowing his way into the room through a hole in the wall. Only slightly unsettling to Don, he loses his grip on reality further when he then hallucinates a bat flying around the room as well, nosediving into him again and again as he sits in his chair. (‘We can’t stop here. This is bat country). Suddenly, the bat lands on the mouse and takes it into its fangs, leaving blood trickling down the wall.

This sends Don cascading over the edge, leading to this close-up shot of him screaming in terror at the horror unfolding before his eyes. The sequence itself is played like something from the horror genre, with the gothic creature of the bat, the blood and the expressionistic lighting of the room shaping its truly terrifying tone. In fact the film makes allusions to horror tropes throughout. What is Don’s recognition of the twisted duality of his own character (Don the writer/Don the drunk) but an homage to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?

In this moment, emphasised by the confinement of the close-up on Don’s horrified face, The Lost Weekend breaks ties with its prior grounding in reality, plummeting both Don and the audience into the domain of horror.