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.
Horror was thriving so well in the 1980s that movies like Pen Densham’s The Kiss (1988) would understandably get lost in the shuffle, only to then gain their fans later on in life. Even still, this one Canadian-American curio has had a more challenging time than others, as far as contemporary reevaluations go, which is very likely due to the movie’s limited availability—at least as of this write-up.
However, the scarceness of The Kiss, while a bit annoying, makes it like catnip for ‘80s horror completists everywhere. Hopefully, a lot of them will walk away satisfied after watching this hidden gem.
Even though The Kiss was intended as the first of several horror collaborations between Astral Pictures and TriStar, as well as the first feature produced by Densham, Richard B. Lewis and John Watson’s Trilogy Entertainment Group, it ended up being the only one produced from that former union. Once the movie was released, TriStar’s distribution jitters—they opted for a regional rollout—did the $6-million flick no favors. TriStar’s cold feet toward horror releases have been well noted, but The Kiss still did a tad better than Night of the Creeps (1986), another genre outing that flopped due to its regional opening.
Shot in Montreal, but set in Albany, New York, The Kiss—which was still called The Host just a few months before its October premiere—concerns an average middle-class family and their forthcoming situation. The uncanny problem in store for them was, in fact, set in motion some years earlier. As that hot and dusty flashback to the Belgian Congo shows, a familial curse was set upon the two Dunbar sisters well before Meredith Salenger’s teenage character was born.
Meredith Salenger, Nicholas Kilbertus and Mimi Kuzyk in The Kiss
The Kiss, which was based on a story by co-writer Stephen Volk (Ghostwatch) and penned by both Volk and Tom Ropelewski, has the outward appearance of The Stepfather (1987). This movie, though, is anything but a gender-flipped retread of that classic domestic disturber. For starters, The Kiss is far less grounded in reality—that much is clear from its unsettling opening scene. There, a trusting girl (Priscilla Mouzakiotis) is the victim of her own deceptive aunt (Céline Lomez); the movie’s titular act, and the story’s first shock, becomes the means of transferring an ancient evil from one host to another.
In the present day, Salenger’s role of Amy Halloran, a religious schoolgirl, is dealt a harsh blow in life once her mother, Hilary Halloran née Dunbar (Pamela Collyer), suddenly dies in a freak accident. But rather than a complete stranger sweeping the Halloran widower (Nicholas Kilbertus) off his feet some months later, Joanna Pacula’s character is that chosen temptress. Here, Pacula plays the grown-up version of the afflicted girl last seen in the movie’s opener. Since Amy’s mother is insistent about there being no reunion between estranged sisters, and she even contemplates buying a gun shortly before her tragic demise, it’s presumable that Aunt Felice poses a threat to her family.
The Kiss isn’t a movie ever too concerned about its own predictability. The audience is indeed often one step ahead of the story here, but also keep in mind how every one of those steps is loud. Take, for instance, the death of Amy’s mother; the Halloran matriarch goes out in garish, gruesome fashion, as a supernaturally commandeered truck sends Collyer’s character through a store window first, then leaves her one leg short. The directorial enthusiasm truly comes out in horrific moments such as these.
The Kiss is always sure to revel in its characters’ ills and misfortunes. So if the plot doesn’t impress, then its lurid parts should. Amy’s mother’s exit scene was proof of an eager, first-time horror director proving his worth. Then, bestie Heather (Sabrina Boudot) survives to tell the tale of a bizarre escalator mishap that, despite showing relatively less gore, spikes viewers’ empathy meter. The wilder bits of this movie, however, commence with that inevitable hookup between Felice and Amy’s bewitched father; their kitchen coitus is paralleled by Amy’s feverish classroom terror. The outcome there is a disquieting cross-cut of sex magic and a young woman’s menstrual onset plus hallucinations.
Sabrina Boudot in The Kiss
From foam appliances to bladders, that parade of special effects in The Kiss casts its own spell on the audience. Felice’s familiar, a visibly malevolent cat, was realized here with several models, some more articulate than others. Admittedly, the demon cat’s not as convincing as most of the effects here, but accepting that artifice, as opposed to fighting it, will make the whole experience way more enjoyable. As for the makeup used to manifest Felice’s inner villainy, it is more minimal and subtle than one might like; yet the work done to turn Pacula into an antithesis of herself is nonetheless compelling.
The otherworldly perils and dreadful goings-on wouldn’t work half as well as they do in The Kiss without the story’s contrast effect. Finding frights in picturesque, extremely ordinary settings was something that took off in the ‘80s, thanks to that sweeping shift to locales like the suburbs. And Amy’s home, a replica of a real Montreal suburban house, is the ideal battleground for any proper good-versus-evil story. It’s also prime real estate for this movie’s satanic panic-inspired horrors.
Because of their ostensibly similar plots, The Kiss has been compared to The Exorcist (1973). Except in Densham’s movie, the sinister, non-Christian entity targeting a teen girl lies within something less apparent and, perhaps, more devastating upon its exposure. To an outsider, Pacula’s Aunt Felice is too beautiful and unobjectionable to ever suspect of being a monster. More suspicious is how quickly she rips into the fabric of the Halloran home. Felice’s mere presence upsets the “texture of family life,” according to the director.
The demon cat in The Kiss
Taking out Amy’s mother and best friend, and distracting her father, would suggest The Kiss is playing by a different set of rules. It is initially leaving its adolescent target unsupported in a rather grim scenario. In contrast, though, this story offers up a surrogate parent who does her best to fill in the holes of Amy’s eroding home life. Mimi Kuzyk does good work as that family friend and doctor, Brenda, who guides the lost child without also steering her in any one direction; she is naturally skeptical of Amy’s accusations until it’s almost too late to do anything about them. So although The Kiss does an admirable job of undoing the main character’s support system, it never leaves her without a lifeline. This dark movie, in spite of everything that’s transpired, doesn’t deprive itself of light and hope.
The Kiss is a potent mélange of familiar ideas. If not for the director’s surprise flair for horror, though, the movie would have been less effective. What a shame that Pen Densham didn’t continue with the genre. As for Joanna Pacula, she is, too, owed credit as the wicked vixen opposite Meredith Salenger’s pitiable Amy; she never fails to be unsettling in her role. Pacula makes Aunt Felice a sexy yet intimidating character.
For horror that steadily doles out madness and menace, while also delivering a flashy and ghastly conclusion, The Kiss is certain to please. Yes, it’s cheesy all the way, but most favorably, everyone involved plays everything straight. That kind of commitment goes a long way with this movie.
The Kiss
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