Venice is Italy's honeymoon city, a lushly romantic floating dream of gently gliding gondolas and quaint traffic-free streets and squares through which to meander. Some writers and film directors, however, have captured another dark, dangerous, and even positively macabre Venice. From Thomas Mann's infected city (Death in Venice) to Daphne du Maurier's haunted site of both past and future loss (Don't Look Now); from Patricia Highsmith's labyrinth in which a deadly cat-and-mouse game is carried out (Those Who Walk Away) to Ian McEwan's setting for erotic menace (The Comfort of Strangers), these books and film adaptations—of all but Highsmith's novel—give us a creepy Venice distinctly at odds with its image as a city for lovers. Let's explore the how and why of this alternative imagining of the Serenissima, Queen of the Adriatic.