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By portraying the fearful and unknown events happening around Paula which inadvertently brings back the event of her aunt’s murder, the film emphasizes Freud’s definition of the uncanny. When Paula is married to Gregory Anton, she is first very happy about her life. However, after she finds a letter in the attic that was sent to her aunt two days before the murder took place, Paula begins to become a kleptomaniac, due to the strange things that occur to her, especially the gaslights in the street dimming and brightening for no apparent reason. Here, we see that the letter is the object that is forgotten and repressed. The discovery of this letter brings back the past of her cherished aunt, and the memories of the murder, which was long-forgotten, begins coming back. When this letter is discovered by the protagonist, the uncanny begins to uncover itself, as Freud mentioned in his essay. All these weird occurrences that happen around her is revealed to have been manipulated by none other than her husband, Gregory Anton, who is actually the man that murdered Paula’s aunt, and seduced Paula so that he could steal the jewelries that he failed to rob on the night of the murder. In Freud’s essay, Freud describes the uncanny as the mark of the return of the repressed. In this particular case, the strange events happening around Paula is the mark of the mistaken self-exposure, or in other words, the uncanny. Gregory Anton tries very hard, and almost succeeds, in convincing that Paula is insane when these strange things happen around her. He goes, perhaps a little too far, to make Paula paranoid so that she can be declared insane by an institution, thereby allowing him to find the jewelries he failed to obtain on the night of the murder. However, it is his manipulation of strange events that bring back the revelation of Paula’s aunt’s murder.
