How Val Lewton Made Horror Movies Into Fine Art

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

With Halloween around the bend, spooky DVDs are flooding the market, but you do not have to be a fan of the genre to relish the release of the nine B-pictures Val Lewton produced for RKO between 1942 and 1946. A protege of David O. Selznick and prolific pulp fiction writer who immersed himself in the higher frequencies of the arts, Lewton was given a free hand as long as he accepted a few stipulations: small budgets, abbreviated running times, horrific subjects, and titles mandated by the studio before the films were conceived.


So put yourself in his place. You’ve been given your own unit and have just completed an as-yet-unreleased first film (“Cat People”) when the bosses order you to begin work immediately on a second, to be called “I Walked With a Zombie.” What to do? You adapt “Jane Eyre,” of course, and begin with a voice-over by the Jane substitute, Betsy (a fetching, intelligent performance by little-noted Frances Dee), who recalls with a modest giggle, “I walked with a zombie. It does seem an odd thing to say.”


As directed by the inspired Jacques Tourneur from a Curt Siodmak-Ardel Wray script that Lewton vetted, revised, and punched up with elaborate details, the result is an oddly poetic meditation on identity, race, religion, and moral ambiguity – more than two decades before Jean Rhys adapted the same source, setting, and themes in her acclaimed novel, “Wide Sargasso Sea.” When a doctor refers to Betsy’s catatonic patient as a zombie and she asks him to define the term, he tells her of voodoo and adds that it’s also the name of a drink. Lewton’s oeuvre is nothing if not of this world.


Lewton could not ignore the horror component. But he did three things that distinguish his films from the Universal films RKO wanted him to emulate. The monsters are entirely human; violence is almost always suggested rather than portrayed; and the viewpoint is usually that of a woman. His trademark scare tactic, a high point in practically all of his films, is a long, dark, nightmarish walk, where every sound is magnified and every object threatening. In “The Ghost Ship,” that “walk” is transferred to the cabin of the victimized third officer; in “Bedlam,” to the corridor of the insane asylum. It’s a ploy that never fails.


In the early 1930s, the sexual fantasies and fears of male adolescents were dramatized in the immaculate conception of “Frankenstein,” the neck-hickeys of “Dracula,” and the smirking invincibility of “The Invisible Man.” Lewton’s films march to a drumroll of mother-daughter disorders, sisterhood crises, sexual assertion and repression, lesbianism, romance, loneliness, vulnerability, and suicide. Even in those dominated by men, women serve as beacons of sanity. In “The Body Snatcher,” directed by Robert Wise, the Robert Louis Stevenson story is sharpened and enhanced as a fatal match between a surgeon and a body snatcher, each morally compromised and therefore lost (all nine films are haunted by variations on the walking dead). The one character who can see the ignominy and predict the endgame is the “secret” wife of the surgeon, whose fall is set in motion by a little girl’s plea for an operation. In “The Ghost Ship,” which is entirely concerned with male conflict (Richard Dix’s lunatic captain is a prototype for Queeg), a woman shown only in shadow appears in the final shot as the possibility of salvation.


Men are little more than optional accessories in “The Seventh Victim,” directed by Mark Robson. An innocent young woman, Mary (Kim Hunter’s film debut), quits the Lowood girls school (“Jane Eyre” again) in search of her missing sister, a Greenwich Village free spirit who has left her dull husband to take up with Satanists and an apparently libidinous psychiatrist – Lewton’s films wallow in appearances as relationships are rarely spelled out. Mary’s vulnerability and strength are emphasized in a famous shower scene, photographed from her rear, her defenselessness heightened by her shower cap, while an older woman threatens her through the curtain, the shadows turning her hat into hornlike extensions of her head. In Hitchcock’s shower, water changes from a soul cleanser to an agent of perversity, as voyeurism leads to murder and the shower to a flushing toilet. In Lewton, water affords protection – a magic circle, as in the swimming pool in “Cat People” or the ocean in “I Walked With a Zombie.” The closing shot of “The Seventh Victim,” involving a chair and a consumptive neighbor (named Mimi, what else?), is devastating and, even after 60 years, too good to spoil.


Lewton’s films, like certain books, ought to be experienced in childhood so that they can be returned to later in life, the indelible moments now cast amid subtler evocations and themes. Only on a second viewing, for example, is one likely to realize that the first shot of “I Walked With a Zombie” depicts Betsy strolling by the sunlit sea with the film’s (apparently) genuine zombie, and appreciate its post-story rapprochement between Christianity and voodoo, whites and blacks, real and imagined. A second look is especially warranted by Tourneur’s “The Leopard Man,” which has turned out to be Lewton’s most influential film, though both men dismissed it at the time as cheaply violent.


In the 1940s, Lewton was admired for his understatement – the use of light and sound that forces the viewer’s imagination to supply the fear. In “The Bad and the Beautiful,” Vincente Minnelli pays homage to “Cat People” as a low-budget solution to the absence of a monster suit. “The Leopard Man” similarly keeps violence off-screen but cruelly focuses on the plight of its victims. In effect, it is the first slasher film, though we never see any slashing. Yet the murders are more disturbing than those in “Halloween” and its imitators, in which death is reserved for the sexually aggressive: “The Leopard Man” dispatches two virgins and one (apparent) hooker, and not when we expect. Twice we follow the wonderfully haughty dancer Clo-Clo (played by Margo), whose castanets augment Roy Webb’s superb score, on menacing walks. Each time she escapes while we are sidelined to young women she passes in the street. No one who has seen the puddle beneath the door can forget it.


“The Leopard Man” concerns shared guilt – the hero and heroine who solve the crime are responsible for the chain of terror, and the audience is complicit in the voyeurism. The police are impotent bystanders; indeed, their presence is unusual for a Lewton film. As with dreams, his stories are largely devoid of police and other social guardians. He prefers the horrors of daily life, which must be battled by front-line civilians, usually without success. Nothing can save Simone Simon’s cat woman, who confuses Eros with death, and yet her ghost frees the troubled little girl and her uncomprehending father in “The Curse of the Cat People,” an ingenious children’s fantasy that deepens the meaning of the earlier film. A ghost’s help is about the best you can expect.


Lewton’s brief autonomy, which ended with the war, depended on a first-class team and his knack for finding actors memorable in their ordinariness. He had at his disposal elaborate RKO sets, including the archway from “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and the grand staircase from “The Magnificent Ambersons”; composer Roy Webb; photographers Nicholas Musuraca and Robert de Grasse; superior dialogue writers; and three directors, two of them novices, who shone for him – the stylish Tourneur, the wily Wise, and the more conventional but clearly stimulated Robson.


Among the actors, his most important collaborator was Boris Karloff, whose participation Lewton initially fought, not wanting to echo the boogeymen at Universal. But Karloff, one of the most inventive and stereotyped actors of the studio era, was desperate for respectable work, and he raised three of Lewton’s films to levels they could not otherwise have attained. His very presence, looming and tragic, rescues “Isle of the Dead” from talky incoherence. He brings a comical undercurrent to the sadistic poetaster Sims in the marvelous “Bedlam,” waddling on bowed legs while readjusting his wig, obsequiously taking the measure of his masters, accommodating the idiocies of a slatternly niece, and putting the screws to the film’s moral and heroic center, as played by Anna Lee, before ending up like the fool in “The Cask of Amontillado.”


Karloff’s pinnacle, however, is “The Body Snatcher,” a masterly film heightened by his curiously modern performance, the character completely subsuming the actor. No less than Brando at his peak, he charges his every scene with coiled energy and watchful wit. His face-offs with the equally engaged Henry Daniell may constitute the best acting ever in an American horror film. Daniell’s surgeon is by turns haughty, fervent, desperate, and self-involved; his barroom analysis of an apparently unsuccessful operation has the flavor of distracted candor. By contrast, Karloff’s Cabman Gray, the grave-robber and murderer whose only pleasure lies in making Daniell hop to his whims, is always in control. With no inner life left to explore, he survives as a malevolent if unmistakably human observer.


Lewton worked on a few other projects after RKO dismissed him, but he never regained the magic of those five years. He died of a heart attack in 1951, at 46, nearly a decade before “Psycho” and Italian giallos replaced his trademark shadows, literary epigrams, Hogarth etchings, Chopin etudes, Calypso commentaries, and nightmarish atmospherics with jets of blood and heaving silicone.



Mr. Giddins’s column appears every other Tuesday.


The New York Sun

© 2025 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

or
By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use