This introductory chapter situates Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973) within the landscape of 1970s cinema in general, and 1970s horror cinema in particular. It also establishes the significance of specific kinds of cultural trauma in Don't Look Now as a horror film of that decade. Don't Look Now might be understood in the context of the history of Gothic narratives, exposing and satirising the tropes of that genre and the ways in which the film's characters read or misread those signs. Rather than fear deriving purely from the chase, the threat of a psychotic killer, an unfamiliar environment, or a betrayal of innocence, Don't Look Now's horror finds its source in being wrong, in making mistakes, in seeing or knowing too late. Indeed, whereas the slasher film of the 1970s creates the pleasure of horror in its repetition, in the audience's knowledge that death is to come but remains ‘in the dark’, as it were, only as to when and how it will arrive, Don't Look Now's horror is precisely the horror of not knowing, of not recognising a threat as such, but seeing it as familiar, domestic, and safe.
