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Chapter Seven discusses Edgar Ulmer's The Black Cat as the creation of a high modernist European émigré working in a lowbrow American genre, the horror movie. Ulmer portrays a self-destructive generation of Europeans permanently scarred by the horrors of World War I. Into their world, he introduces a young American couple on their honeymoon, who, in their naïveté, are almost destroyed by the mad Europeans, but escape their satanic clutches in the end. Hoping to succeed in his newly adopted homeland, Ulmer seems to turn his back on his European heritage as a dead end, and yet he cannot help suggesting the cultural superiority of his sophisticated European characters. The Black Cat takes its place in a long line of European works critical of American culture, while at the same time raising serious doubts about Europe's future in the 1930s.

Chapter Eight analyzes Edgar Ulmer's classic film noir Detour and its bleak portrait of America as a land of frustrated desires and lost dreams. It explores the affinities between Detour and the Frankfurt School critique of Hollywood as a dream factory. Detour deconstructs the American myth of the West, especially Hollywood, as a land of opportunity. The chapter argues that film noir is not a purely home grown American product, as many have claimed. Like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Ulmer was a European émigré who looked at America from an alien perspective, and found himself alienated even from its landscape. This alienation surfaces in his characters, who drift hopelessly through a world empty of love, family, and companionship. Aspects of America that represent freedom to its citizens—like open roads—look like sources of disorder and chaos to Ulmer's European sensibility.

This chapter argues that rear-screen projection in Edgar Ulmer's Detour (1945) is just as critical to the film's audiovisual economy as voiceover and flashback. Not unlike the radiophonic “theater of the mind” projected by the 1940s noir sound track, rear-screen projection acts as a secondary screen for the protagonist's psyche. In Detour, this oneiric screen, in addition to mobilizing two of the dominant affective modalities of classic noir—claustrophobia and phantasmagoria—operates as a temporal signpost. The result is that even as Al Roberts (Tom Neal), driven by the romance of the open road, strikes out for California, the back-screen projection is a constant reminder that the past can rear up at any moment and dash his dreams.

What happened when the men came home from war? They returned to a world transformed into an alien landscape, something they didn't understand and didn't recognise as home, a place full of new and strange social customs, in which the fabric of prewar society had been torn asunder by massive social, economic, and political change. And a new kind of film was waiting for them, as well; the film noir, or ‘black film,’ which documented better than anything else the realities of this new social order. Boris Ingster's Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) is often cited as one of the first unadulterated film noirs. H. Bruce Humberstone's I Wake Up Screaming (1941) is another tale of big-city dreams shattered by the realities of daily existence. Other post-war film noirs include Edgar G. Ulmer's legendary film Detour (1945), Tay Garnett's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) and Michael Curtiz's Mildred Pierce (1945).