Now that 31 Days of Horror is officially over we can now move on to Noirvember. That’s an amalgamation of Film Noir + November. Film Noir is a cinematic genre without a solid definition. When filmmakers were making film noirs during what is now considered the classic period (the 1940s and 1950s) the term wasn’t widely known. It was coined by a French critic in 1947 but was not widely used until the 1970s. Noir is the French word for black and even though the films are usually shot in stark black and white he was talking about the character’s dark night of the soul.

The fims are usually, but not always, crime dramas. They usually, but not always, follow a police detective or a private detective as they solve a case, or just as often they follow the criminal. There is often (but not always) a love interest, and if that’s a woman, she is usually a femme fatale. The criminal is often a bit of a schmuck. They are always cynical and hard-boiled.

Many of the plots come from the hard-boiled literary school of authors like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Jams M. Cain. Classics of the genre are Double Indemnity (1944), The Third Man, Mildred Pierce (1945), and The Maltese Falcon (1941).

I love a good film noir, probably even more than I love a good horror movie. I’ve participated in Noirvember for the past several years and just like my 31 Days of Horror list I made a Letterboxd list of films I’d like to watch this month. This year I tried to include a lot of relatively obscure films in the list. I’ve seen most of the classics and I want to broaden my knowledge base of the genre. I know I won’t watch all of these films, and I will watch many other films that aren’t on this list. But it is a good place to start.

I will be writing about many of the movies I watch for this theme. I’ll try not to bomb you with quite as many reviews as I did last month. But I can’t really make a promise about that.