IN THE SHADOW OF THE ASYLUM: REFLECTIONS ON BEDLAM (1946) Josh Grant-Young 1761 – London. A woman is dragged into the infamous Bedlam asylum, a dark and dreary place where the (purportedly) insane of London are committed. Her madness, confirmed by a court prior to her being committed, is but a pretense to silence her forever. Within the cramped space of the asylum, where many denizens pace the shabby floor, she will find horror. But this horror does not come from the inmates with whom she is locked up, but rather the very society which condemns her to such a fate. The asylum looms large in the history of horror. From Dracula to the more recent television series American Horror Story: Asylum, it is a location which often inspires fear and anxiety in audiences. But why is this the case? According to Troy Rondinone, in his book Nightmare Factories: The Asylum in the American Imagination (2019), audiences of horror still “live in the shadow of the asylum” – a reflection of our “historic and ongoing failure to treat and accept” people of mental difference, rooted in cultural assumptions about what constitutes ‘normal’ and ‘sane’ behaviour. Horror, on this account, has often played on these assumptions to generate chills in audiences through various stigmatizing visions of mental difference. Yet, while the asylum has often been a symbol of this cultural failure, it also presents itself as a contested space, one where social critique is also possible. The asylum has come to set the stage for dramas which explore “utopian reforms, slavery, democracy, and the chaotic market… women’s rights, consumerism, civil rights, fascism and psychiatry” (Rondinone 274). What then might Bedlam (1946), a classic horror film, examine in its time and illuminate in ours? I argue, in this article, that Bedlam presents a historical case of the mistreatment of people of mental difference to reorient how we culturally, in the West, think about mental health. The horror of