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To show, or to suggest: for horror movies, that is the question. New technologies have allowed filmmakers to conjure up all sorts of fantastical creatures and to rub our faces in all manner of blood and gore, but the most effective horror movies remain the ones that do their work by hints and murmurs. Today, the difference between these two aesthetic approaches is evident in the campy special-effects sprees of, say, Stephen Sommers (whose Mummy and Van Helsing movies are too infatuated with digital spectacle to bother teasing out the audience's fears), in contrast to the moody, evocative films of M. Night Shyamalan. But the tug of war between these two styles goes back much further—and Val Lewton, producer of several surprisingly mature horror movies in the 1940s, was an early master of the power of suggestion.
Icons of Grief: Val Lewton's Home Front Pictures
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To some extent, this restraint was a necessity. Lewton, a sometime novelist and story editor for Gone with the Wind producer David O. Selznick, was hired by rko to produce low-budget thrillers at a time when the studio was coping with the box-office disappointment of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. "Showmanship, not genius" was the studio's new motto, but in Lewton, the studio got a bit of both. Hoping to emulate the success that Universal Studios had enjoyed with monster movies like the recent hit The Wolf Man, Lewton's new bosses told him to make a film with the title Cat People (1942). The result was a sophisticated tale about a Serbian woman, an immigrant to the United States, who lives under the cloud of an ancestral curse, and is afraid to consummate her marriage lest she turn into a feline beast. While the film hints that such a transformation occurs, the details are never depicted directly. What lingers instead in the viewer's mind is the psychological tension between Irena (Simone Simon), her husband Oliver (Kent Smith), and his co-worker Alice (Jane Randolph), who may be a rival for Oliver's affections; the viewer is also likely to remember the scenes in which Irena seems to stalk Alice, but whether as woman or animal remains, mostly, hidden in the shadows.1
As with Cat People, so with Lewton's later efforts: the studio gave him a title, and he made up a story to go with it, though often not the sort of story the studio expected. His next film, I Walked with a Zombie (1943), is an even more subtle drama about a Canadian nurse who takes a job on the fictitious Caribbean island of St. Sebastian to care for a sugar plantation owner's seemingly comatose wife; often described as "Jane Eyre in the West Indies," the film touches on adultery, euthanasia, and the old legacy of racial injustice. Lewton followed this with The Leopard Man (1943), The Ghost Ship (1943), The Seventh Victim (1943), and The Curse of the Cat People (1944), the last of which was yet another title foisted on Lewton against his will. The studio wanted a sequel to the movie that had put Lewton on the map, so Lewton had the film's three co-stars reprise their characters—but despite the title, the movie has nothing at all to do with cats or even the themes of the earlier film. Instead, it concerns Amy (Ann Reed), the child of Oliver and Alice, and how she finds an imaginary friend in the gentle ghost of the late Irena.
The Val Lewton Horror Collection
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Concerned that Lewton wasn't quite following his horror-movie mandate, rko signed a contract with Boris Karloff, famous for his work in Universal's Frankenstein and Mummy franchises, and compelled Lewton to cast Karloff in his next few films. Much to everyone's surprise, the two men got along famously; Karloff, it turned out, was tired of being typecast, and he relished the opportunity to sink his teeth into the meaty roles that Lewton offered him in Isle of the Dead (1945), The Body Snatcher (1945, adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson's short story) and Bedlam (1946, inspired by William Hogarth's series of engravings The Rake's Progress). Unlike Lewton's earlier films, these stories take place in the past rather than the present day, but like his other films, they probe the tension between reason and faith, or superstition, and they are more concerned with the terrors that lurk in the mind, and in human relationships, than in the ghouls of fantasy. Bedlam, which concerns the infamous St. Mary of Bethlehem lunatic asylum in 18th-century England, is especially intriguing for its depiction of institutional cruelty in the "Age of Reason," and of the opposition to this cruelty that is expressed by a Quaker man (Richard Fraser).
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