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By Rodrigo Santos Andrade
Taylor Swift’s new video marks her ghostly return to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca
visibility comment0 event October 6, 2026 timer 06:00
Taylor Swift’s ‘Patient Zero’ retells Daphne du Maurier’s classic Gothic novel, giving Rebecca a chance to speak for herself.
In 2020, Taylor Swift told us she read Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, the 1938 bestseller about a young bride haunted by the memory of her husband’s glamorous first wife. Swift described how it inspired her while she was writing Tolerate It for her ninth studio album Evermore, which came out the same year.
The song was about trying hard to impress an older partner and going unappreciated. Swift explained that she’d identified with the book’s narrator, known only as Mrs de Winter (the successor of Maxim de Winter’s late first wife, Rebecca): “She’s trying so hard […] to impress him and he’s just tolerating her.”
Six years later, Swift returns to Manderley – the fictional Cornwall estate in which Rebecca is set – with her new single Patient Zero and its self-directed music video, which was unveiled at the VMAs (the MTV Video Music Awards). It’s the latest entry in the genre of Swift gothic, a strand of her music that takes on doubles, hauntings and darkness. Gothic doubles pop up in the music videos for Anti-Hero and Out of the Woods, for instance.
Swift says her new video was inspired by “gothic ghost stories” and it’s evident that Rebecca is one of them. But this time, rather than playing du Maurier’s insecure new bride, Swift haunts the narrative as Rebecca.
A house, a husband, a ghost
Last year, Swift told interviewer Stephen Colbert that Rebecca has everything she looks for in a novel:
“…an old British mansion covered in moss or ivy … a mysterious relationship … a murder that has happened in the past … the idea of a ghost, or an actual ghost …”
The music video for Patient Zero has almost every trope on that list. Dakota Johnson plays Colin Farrell’s wife, shadowed everywhere by Swift, who wears the same clothes, mirrors her movements, and repeatedly knocks drinks out of her hands as the relationship falls apart. Swift turns out to be the ghost of Farrell’s first wife, who he poisoned.
The haunting in du Maurier’s novel is not so literal, but the second Mrs de Winter is obsessed with “Rebecca, always Rebecca,” seeing evidence of her everywhere she looks. Her jealousy is only deepened by the other characters, who like to tell her how “different” she is from Maxim’s late wife.
When Maxim throws a fancy-dress ball, she gets a costume made and is delighted when she sees herself, “this self that was not me at all”, in the mirror. At the party, she finds her husband horrified because Rebecca wore the very same costume. In trying to escape comparison, she walks right into it.
Patient Zero mirrors this scene when, at a party, Johnson’s character takes a drink and turns to find Swift’s ghost behind her, wearing an identical dress. The shock (and a little poison in her wine) causes her to collapse at the ghost’s feet. In the car home, the husband compares the two women directly: “I thought you were different.” She asks: “Different from whom?”
A rose for Rebecca
In du Maurier’s novel, the second Mrs de Winter fears that she isn’t enough like Rebecca. She projects her envy onto a woman she’s never met, imagining that Rebecca wants Maxim “alone in the house again”.
But Rebecca never gets to speak for herself. We learn about her through the narrator’s insecurity and the mouth of the man who killed her. When Maxim confesses to the murder, the narrator assures him everything will be fine, because “Rebecca can’t speak, can’t bear witness”. She is quick to help him cover up the murder when he tells her that he “never loved Rebecca”, and after this she feels the ghostly presence disappear:
“She would never haunt me again. She would never stand behind me on the stairs, sit beside me in the dining-room…”
Swift seems to ask: what if Rebecca was never a rival at all? Patient Zero imagines the story from the perspective of the dead wife, and through that lens, where the ghost is a protector, Rebecca’s sudden absence reads as horror. The novel’s narrator is left alone with a murderer, believing they’re so in love that she’s in no danger of sharing Rebecca’s fate.
Hitchcock’s 1940 film adaptation flinched from this possibility. Due to the Hays Code — strict guidelines of moral censorship which governed Hollywood’s output from 1934 to 1968 — Rebecca’s death became an accident, silencing her all over again. Swift reinstates the killer husband in her music video, and with it, a new ending: the second wife leaves a rose on the headstone, a thank-you from one victim to another, and walks away unscathed.
With Patient Zero, the woman who once sang about being tolerated returns to make the two Mrs de Winters into unlikely allies and give Rebecca what du Maurier never did: a witness who believes her.
This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.
Emma L. Davies’ PhD is funded by the AHRC South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership.
Tags: Academic Journalism, The Conversation, The Conversation Academic News
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