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Not coincidentally, all of these films were produced while the United States was at war; as Alexander Nemerov notes in Icons of Grief: Val Lewton's Home Front Pictures, horror movies were especially popular then, partly because they offered a supernatural experience removed from the mechanical horrors of this world, and also because they helped to inoculate people against their fears. But with the end of the war, rko decided there was no more market for horror movies. Lewton produced only three more movies—all for other studios, none of them horror—before he died in 1951.
Lewton worked with several directors (notably Jacques Tourneur, Mark Robson, and Robert Wise), but the films they made all share certain motifs that bind them together as an expression of Lewton's personal artistic vision. In his book, Nemerov argues that one of the most important recurring motifs is Lewton's use of minor characters who stand still and arrest the flow of the narrative around them—figures that function like the Russian icons that Lewton, who was born in the Crimea, would have known from his childhood. In their own way, these sad, isolated persons offer a striking contrast to the gung-ho optimism and communal spirit that was a staple of Hollywood movies released during the war.
Nemerov focuses on four "icons" in particular. The ghostly Irena of Curse of the Cat People, who is lit like a sculpture and positioned against a flattened landscape typical of classic iconography, represents the presence of death that children can perceive even though the adults around them wish to deny it. The Finn (Skelton Knaggs), a mute sailor who makes the audience privy to his thoughts in voiceover in The Ghost Ship, demonstrates the subversive power of bit players, and their ability to upstage others who play up their own importance. Carre-Four (Darby Jones), the titular undead figure from I Walked with a Zombie, represents both the legacy of slavery and lynchings as well as the imminent rise of African American power both during and after the war. And the Gilded Boy (Glenn Vernon) who dies for the amusement of the social élites in Bedlam prefigures, in Nemerov's view, the commodification of suffering that would become part of the postwar economy.
Some of Nemerov's interpretations are a bit of a stretch, especially when he compares the Gilded Boy to the Oscar (symbolic of the accolades that eluded a B-movie producer like Lewton) and to the victims of the atom bombs (which were dropped on Japan after production on Bedlam had already begun). But many of his insights are fascinating and persuasive, especially when he looks at how Lewton's "icons" differ from the characters that these actors played in other films. For example, the stillness of Jones' zombie is impressive in its own right, but all the more so when it is contrasted with the frantic, gravity-defying moves that Jones displayed in other films at that time.
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