The Ninth Gate is a 1999 horror film

Horror film

Horror films seek to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the audience's most primal fears. They often feature scenes that startle the viewer through the means of macabre and the supernatural, thus frequently overlapping with the fantasy and science fiction genres...

 directed, produced, and co-written by Roman Polanski

Roman Polanski

Roman Polanski is a French-Polish film director, producer, writer and actor. Having made films in Poland, Britain, France and the USA, he is considered one of the few "truly international filmmakers."...

. It is a neo-noir

Neo-noir

Neo-noir is a style often seen in modern motion pictures and other forms that prominently utilize elements of film noir, but with updated themes, content, style, visual elements or media that were absent in films noir of the 1940s and 1950s.-History:The term Film Noir was coined by...

, occult mystery

Mystery film

Mystery film is a sub-genre of the more general category of crime film and at times the thriller genre. It focuses on the efforts of the detective, private investigator or amateur sleuth to solve the mysterious circumstances of a crime by means of clues, investigation, and clever deduction.The...

 thriller involving the rare book business, wherein rare-book dealer Dean Corso (Johnny Depp

Johnny Depp

John Christopher "Johnny" Depp II is an American actor, producer and musician. He has won the Golden Globe Award and Screen Actors Guild award for Best Actor. Depp rose to prominence on the 1980s television series 21 Jump Street, becoming a teen idol...

) is hired by bibliophile

Book collecting

Book collecting is the collecting of books, including seeking, locating, acquiring, organizing, cataloging, displaying, storing, and maintaining whatever books are of interest to a given individual collector. The love of books is bibliophilia, and someone who loves to read, admire, and collect...

 Boris Balkan (Frank Langella

Frank Langella

-Early life:Langella, an Italian American, was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, the son of Angelina and Frank A. Langella Sr., a business executive who was the president of the Bayonne Barrel and Drum Company. Langella attended Washington Elementary School and Bayonne High School in Bayonne...

) to validate a seventeenth-century copy of The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows, by Aristide Torchia

Aristide Torchia

Aristide Torchia is a fictional character from The Club Dumas, a 1993 novel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. The events of the novel take place hundreds of years after Torchia's death, and he is referenced only as a historical figure. He is also mentioned in the film The Ninth Gate, which is based on the...

, and what he encounters en route. The Nine Gates is an imaginary book, but is heavily inspired by the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili , called in English Poliphilo's Strife of Love in a Dream, is a romance said to be by Francesco Colonna and a famous example of early printing...

.

The film, based upon Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Arturo Pérez-Reverte Gutiérrez is a Spanish novelist and journalist. He worked as a war correspondent for twenty-one years . His first novel, El húsar, set in the Napoleonic Wars, was released in 1986. He is well known outside Spain for his "Alatriste" series of novels...

's 1993 novel El Club Dumas, comprises three genres, and was co-written by director Roman Polanski.