Film noir is born..

In 1940 the first acclaimed film that started off the film noir genre was "stranger on the third floor".Its a story of an innocent reporter that witnesses a brutal murder in a dinner which makes him a key witness, yet when the same style murder is carried out on his neighbour, suspicion is raised against the reporter and hes arrested and it is left to his beautiful fiancee to clear his name.

This a typical Film Noir style as with the plot there is murder, innocent people being dragged into a criminal world. The way it has been filmed with the dramatic difference between the lights and dark, the use of shadows as seen in the black and white picture above,It creates suspense and drama and the shadows are exaggerating the characters movement that create a ghostly like figure which its intentions are to scare the audience.