Nostalgia - The Films of Val Lewton

Halloween is fun no matter what your age. Is it because of the costumes, the parties, or the brief spurts of cardio rewarded with large amounts of sugar? Of course not, it’s because of all the horror movies on TV. Halloween is the one day of the year you are guaranteed to find Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, and Michael Myers somewhere on your cable box. There are dozens of different sub-genres of horror that can be found today. There are slasher flicks, monster movies, and found footage films, but there is one small sliver of scary cinema that is much harder to find these days: Val Lewton’s pictures.

 In 1942 producer Val Lewton found himself with one of the luckiest set of circumstances in Hollywood history. The hugely popular Universal Monster movies were starting to plateau. People were craving horror and were starting to look for it in other forms. Plus, Orson Welles had nearly bankrupt RKO studios with the high cost and low box office performances of Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. In an effort to turn their fortunes around, RKO hired Lewton, a protégé of David O. Selznick, to produce low budget horror movies. In the next four years, Lewton made nine films: Cat People (1942), I Walked With a Zombie (1943), The Leopard Man (1943), The 7^th Victim (1943), The Ghost Ship (1943), The Curse of the Cat People (1944), The Body Snatcher (1945), Isle of the Dead (1945), and Bedlam (1946).

       

            All of these films are proof positive of a simple idea that I first heard from director Nicholas Meyer: Art thrives on restrictions. They were all made with relatively small budgets and Lewton made them look beautiful.  The most frightening things are never shown on screen. One scene in Cat People just shows a woman treading water in an indoor swimming pool. By playing with the lighting, shadows and sound effects, Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur create true terror and we all genuinely fear for the woman’s life. Earlier in that film the same woman is running through Central Park running from a Panther that we never see. Just when it seems like she is done for, a bus pulls up out of nowhere and all of the danger immediately disappears. Any time you see a coed run around a frat house screaming, and she opens a door to an empty room, it is a carbon copy of this moment.

Another interesting aspect of these films is that in many cases the studio would simply give Lewton a title and leave him to figure out the rest. So while I Walked with a Zombie sounds like a modern comedy starring Simon Pegg, Lewton decided to present a cryptic and cerebral story about guilt and human nature.  The Curse of the Cat People is about a small girl struggling to reconcile the difference between reality and childhood fantasy.

Every year hundreds of horror movies are made with even smaller budgets than Val Lewton worked with. Many of them are found footage films like The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity that trade on the fact that they look cheap and “homemade.” What makes Lewton’s work unique is that he refused to settle for generic Halloween schlock and instead made something truly artistic. It makes one wonder if today’s studio system would allow for someone like Val Lewton to take the same risks.