Editorials
The Man Behind the Shadows: The Horrors of Val Lewton
It’s easy to cite dozens upon dozens of directors, icons, and even writers that shaped the genre over the decades when looking back at the evolution of horror cinema and its history. But very few producers manage to achieve horror stardom in quite the same way, save for a notable handful of pioneers whose vital work in the genre became too vast to go unnoticed. That’s the case with Val Lewton, a legendary producer who developed a reputation for creating A-movie horror on a B-movie budget by leaning into implied and suggestive horror amidst heavily shadowed landscapes.
The Russian-born father of low budget horror started as a writer at MGM’s publicity office before becoming the right-hand man to famed Hollywood mogul David O. Selznick (Rebecca, King Kong). In 1942, Lewton was hired by RKO Pictures to run a unit dedicated to horror; the studio needed money fast after the commercial failure of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and hoped to emulate Universal Pictures’ success with their monster movies. Assembling a group of filmmakers that he’d worked with before, Lewton was given a fraction of Universal’s budget to achieve similar success. That suited Lewton just fine as he felt imagination was the key. He built his films around dread, unsettling atmosphere, and fear of the unseen.
Lewton guided every facet of the movies he made, no matter the director. It was his vision on screen, and he wrote a shooting script for every feature, often using a pen name or working in an uncredited capacity. Lewton guided his directors behind the scenes on ways to build suspense. All of which is why he’s credited for creating the blueprint for the modern jump scare referred to as the Lewton Bus (from Cat People), and known for transforming minuscule budgets into high-art horror. During Lewton’s reign, RKO’s output delivered psychological-based terror, haunting ambiance, progressive commentaries, sexual menace or tension, and, of course, stunning use of darkness and shadows.
When RKO head and Lewton supporter Charles Koerner died in 1946, it put the studio through an upheaval that resulted in Lewton’s ousting. It marked the decline in Lewton’s health; he suffered a minor heart attack shortly after. Through his connections and the merits of a screenplay he wrote, Lewton did find subsequent work at Paramount, where he produced a couple of non-genre features, but the filmmaker suffered an additional series of heart attacks that cut his life short at the age of 46.
In his time at RKO, Lewton produced eleven features- nine of them horror- over just four years. That insane workload, especially with how incredibly hands-on he was with each movie, no doubt attributed to his heart health. A tragic end to a crucial pioneer in the early advent of horror in the sound-era of film, Lewton left an indelible mark.
While any of Lewton’s horror films are worth checking out, here are four movies to get you started.
Cat People
The most well-known of Lewton’s films happens to be the first horror film produced for RKO. It’s also the best entry point. RKO gave Lewton a budget of $150,000 and gave him creative control to handle the rest. He enlisted Jacques Tourneur to direct and Mark Robson to edit. The plot sees Serbian-born fashion illustrator Irena (Simone Simon) struggling with repressed sexuality once she falls for handsome engineer Oliver (Kent Reed). They meet-cute then get married, but Irena refuses to consummate their marriage as she fears physical intimacy will transform her into a predatory cat of Serbian legend. A betrayal and jealousy may indeed trigger the curse anyway. With such a small budget, Tourneur couldn’t precisely create a cat person, so he relied on cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca and stylish lighting to create suspense and fear from implied menace lurking in the shadows. The scene in which Irena stalks her rival Alice (Jane Randolph) on the darkened empty street birthed the Lewton Bus jump scare, but the iconic pool scene that sees Alice tormented by a predator in the dark also stands out.
I Walked with a Zombie
For Lewton’s next production, RKO provided him with a title; I Walked with a Zombie. He instructed his writers to research Haitian voodoo practices and look to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre for structure purposes. Tourneur and Robson both carried over in director and editor capacity, respectively. In the film, Young Canadian nurse Betsy (Frances Dee) relays how she once walked with a zombie, recounting the tale of her job caring for the wife of a sugar plantation owner on a Caribbean island. The wife, naturally, has been acting very strangely. Voodoo zombies factor into this atmospheric gem in a big way, of course. There’s a dreamlike quality about I Walked with a Zombie, and it was progressive for its time for the somber portrayal of slaves.
The Seventh Victim
The Seventh Victim isn’t as overtly rooted in horror as Lewton’s other films, but it is one of his absolute best. Director Mark Robson begins this noir film like a classic dark mystery; a young woman learns her older sister has gone missing and hasn’t paid her tuition in months. She departs her boarding school and begins her search, meeting several characters along the way that’ll aid and hinder her investigation. Robson weaves in horror ever so slowly, building toward a nihilistic finish as the older sister is revealed to have gotten mixed up in a Satanic cult. This is the film that sparked criticism from a studio exec unhappy that Lewton’s films lacked a message, and Lewton famously retorted, “I’m sorry, but we do have a message, and our message is that death is good.” Outside of its reputation for blending noir and horror and its bleak ending, The Seventh Victim also boldly introduced a Satanic cult among the city’s social elite, way ahead of Rosemary’s Baby.
The Body Snatcher
Loosely based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Body Snatcher” short story, Lewton helped adapt for the screen under the pen name Carlos Keith. Set in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1831, a ruthless doctor and his young prize student find themselves continually harassed by their murderous supplier of illegal cadavers. Directed by Robert Wise (The Haunting, The Curse of the Cat People), The Body Snatcher stars Universal Studios’ horror icons, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. It turns the tale of famous Scotland serial killers William Burke and William Hare into a fictional account of graverobbing and grisly murder with its own distinct set of characters. The Body Snatcher continues the streak of elevating a meager budget to deliver something haunting and gorgeous. Still, it’s most notable for being the first of three collaborations between Karloff and Lewton. It’s also the best, in terms of Karloff’s masterful performances.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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