From Fantômas to The Black Doll

American author and illustrator Edward Gorey (1925–2000) was open in interviews about the importance of silent cinema for his work, and in particular the films of the prolific French film director Louis Feuillade (1873–1925). Focusing on this underexplored aspect of Gorey’s work, the paper examines how Gorey employs visual, compositional, and narrative elements from Feuillade’s films, as well as their development of uncertainty within the areas of space, narrative, and character and object identity within the genre of nonsense. The influence of Feuillade is traced across such works as La Malle Saignante (The Bleeding Trunk, 1975), a bilingual homage to silent cinema, and Gorey’s silent screenplay The Black Doll (1973), while also identifying possible conventions of nonsense within Feuillade’s own silent films.