Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight (1944) | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Caution: potential spoilers ahead for ‘The Girl on the Train’. The recent Netflix release The Girl on the Train is an official adaptation of Paula Hawkins’s novel of the same name. The bestseller revolved around a concept introduced in a play in 1938 that was made widely known by movie adaptations in 1940 and 1944. Patrick Hamilton’s Gas Light gave the English vocabulary a ready shorthand term to describe psychological damage caused by sustained emotional manipulation and deception. The word “gaslighting” is now commonly used to refer to a form of abuse that makes the targets party to their own destruction. Gaslighting is a state especially familiar to women, who are often told by the men in their lives that they don’t know or mean what they say and are being needlessly anxious or paranoid.