Chapter 4: Val Lewton and the English, Towards a More Subtle Horror

Cat People (1942) – Jacques Tourneur

Cat People is my favorite horror film of the 1940s. Producer Val Lewton reinvented horror. Cat People is one of the first psycho-sexual horror films. Irena Dubrovna is a young Seribian woman. She believes she is from a race of people who turn into vicious cats if they are aroused.

Val Lewton was from Russia.  He studied journalism at Columbia University. After writing a couple of successful pulp novels he joined the MGM publicity department as an assistant to Selznick. He worked as an uncredited writer on Gone With the Wind (1939). In 1942 he was named head of the horror department at RKO.

There were three requirements:

1 – Each film had to be budgeted under $150,000.

2 – Each film had to run under 75 minutes.

3 – The higher-up supplied the titles.

His first production was Cat People. Lewton hired Jacques Tourneur to direct. Tourneur was born in Paris. He moved to the States when he was ten. In the twenties he worked as an editor and an assistant director. He met Lewton while working as a second unit director on MGM’s A Tale of Two Cities (1935).

He was dropped by MGM in 1941. Lewton sensed promise and hired Tourneur that same year. Roger Ebert writes that “Cat People is constructed almost entirely out of fear.” There’s something eerie about the movie – an implacable dread that’s just out of your reach. Tourneur is a master of shadows.

The characters always feel surrounded. Ebert describes one very unsettling scene set in a pool, “Alice goes for a plunge in the swimming pool at her residential club, and in a genuinely terrifying sequence she treads water in the deserted pool while … something … growls and paces, and then she screams. Notice how light reflected from the surface of the pool causes unsettling patterns to creep along the walls.”

Cat People is a quiet film. French actress Simone Simon is impressively beguiling in the lead. Everyone else plays the same type of forties fast talkers. Theorist Geoffrey O’Brien says what many Cat People fans think,

“Fans and commentators have sifted every shot and every situation of this seventy-three-minute feature, pondering each line of dialogue and taking note of each editing gimmick and trick of lighting, speculating on the implications of every archetypal motif and psychosexual frisson. Yet a fundamental mysteriousness remains, a slippery unwillingness to submit to final explanation.”

I’ve never been completely sure what Cat People wants to say, if anything, but I do believe that no other film has ever so menacingly probed our primal desires.

Lewton followed Cat People two years later with a sequel The Curse of the Cat People, a very different but similarly unsettling story about a remarkable little girl who may be Irena’s daughter. The sequel was directed by The Haunting’s (1963) Robert Wise and is a very distinctive suburban nightmare.

Curse divided critics just as it divided fans. Variety called it “highly disappointing”, but James Agee an avowed fan of the original wrote that the film captured “the poetry and danger of childhood.” I for one love it. Lewton followed Cat People with I Walked With a Zombie (1943), The Leopard Man (1943), The Seventh Victim (1943), and Ghost Ship (1943). Of those, The Seventh Victim is my favorite.

The story of satanic murders in Greenwich Village, The Seventh Victim leaves some very horrific happenings just off-screen. Lewton wouldn’t have it any other way. Cat People was remade in 1982 by Taxi Driver writer Paul Schrader. The remake is far more explicit in both content and meaning. See them both and decide which you like better! At the very least, the remake features a memorable theme song by David Bowie.

The Uninvited (1944) – Lewis Allen

Uncanny. That’s a great word for The Uninvited. The perfect stiff-upper-lip British horror film. The Uninvited is gorgeous. Cinematographer Charles Lang was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Black and White Cinematography.

The great Edith Head designed the costumes. In the movie, a couple moves into an abandoned seaside house only to find they are not quite alone. The film generates all of its scares through camera work and lighting. There is no gore. There are no jump scenes. There is no amped up sound design. This is the real deal.

The great critic James Agee wrote upon watching the film, “It seems to me harder to get a fright than a laugh, and I experienced thirty-five first-class jolts, not to mention a well-calculated texture of minor frissons.” The Uninvited was Hollywood’s first real ghost story. Every haunted house movie before had a big reveal at the end, to show Scooby Doo-style who was really responsible.

It was always the man behind the curtain, never a real supernatural event. The Uninvited changed that forever.   Ghosts were real, and you never know, they may be lurking in your new house. The film is also scary because it fights so stubbornly against expectations. The music tends to be upbeat, the house is the type of place a person may actually want to live, and it isn’t set on a dark and stormy night, but rather a clear spring day.

 Dead of Night (1945) – Multiple Directors

Dead of Night is the great British horror anthology. It is made up of five different short stories. They are all good. Two are fantastic. The film was developed by Ealing Studios, a production company mostly known for comedies. Any of Ealing’s films starring Alec Guinness need to be seen.

Dead of Night uses a framing device about an architect coming to a dinner. He quickly realizes that that he’s met all the guests before in a dream. At the dinner each guest tells a supernatural tale.

Allow me to describe my two favorite stories. In the first a young girl is at a Christmas party. She’s playing hide and seek with her friends. The girl overhears a conversation about murders that have taken place in the house.

She decides to hide upstairs where she comes across a young boy crying. The boy looks up at her and says, “She hates me, she says she wants to kill me.” The girl comforts him and goes back down to the party. At the party she is told that there is no boy upstairs. Moreover, that very room was where the murder took place. With that, the short ends. No comeuppance. No boo moment. You are left picking up your jaw from the floor.

The other great story is about a ventriloquist and an attempted murder investigation. The ventriloquist tells the police to find Hugo. “He is more to blame for this than I am.” The only problem is Hugo is his dummy. Every dummy/puppet horror film since owes a debt to Dead Of Night. Dead of Night is a true horror, its best stories get under your skin. This may be the first film on the list that is truly scary.