To show, or to suggest: for horror movies, that is the question. New technologies have allowed filmmakers to conjure up all sorts of fantastical creatures and to rub our faces in all manner of blood and gore, but the most effective horror movies remain the ones that do their work by hints and murmurs. Today, the difference between these two aesthetic approaches is evident in the campy special-effects sprees of, say, Stephen Sommers (whose Mummy and Van Helsing movies are too infatuated with digital spectacle to bother teasing out the audience's fears), in contrast to the moody, evocative films of M. Night Shyamalan. But the tug of war between these two styles goes back much further—and Val Lewton, producer of several surprisingly mature horror movies in the 1940s, was an early master of the power of suggestion.

To some extent, this restraint was a necessity. Lewton, a sometime novelist and story editor for Gone with the Wind producer David O. Selznick, was hired by rko to produce low-budget thrillers at a time when the studio was coping with the box-office disappointment of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. "Showmanship, not genius" was the studio's new motto, but in Lewton, the studio got a bit of both. Hoping to emulate the success that Universal Studios had enjoyed with monster movies like the recent hit The Wolf Man, Lewton's new bosses told him to make a film with the title Cat People (1942). The result was a sophisticated tale about a Serbian woman, an immigrant to the United States, who lives under the cloud of an ancestral curse, and is afraid to consummate her marriage lest she turn into a feline beast. While the film hints that such a transformation occurs, the details are never depicted directly. What lingers instead in the viewer's mind is the psychological tension between Irena (Simone Simon), her husband Oliver (Kent Smith), and his co-worker Alice (Jane Randolph), who may be a rival for Oliver's affections; the viewer is also likely to remember the scenes in which Irena seems to stalk Alice, but whether as woman or animal remains, mostly, hidden in the shadows.1

As with Cat People, so with Lewton's later efforts: the studio gave him a title, and he made up a story to go with it, though often not the sort of story the studio expected. His next film, I Walked with a Zombie (1943), is an even more subtle drama about a Canadian nurse who takes a job on the fictitious Caribbean island of St. Sebastian to care for a sugar plantation owner's seemingly comatose wife; often described as "Jane Eyre in the West Indies," the film touches on adultery, euthanasia, and the old legacy of racial injustice. Lewton followed this with The Leopard Man (1943), The Ghost Ship (1943), The Seventh Victim (1943), and The Curse of the Cat People (1944), the last of which was yet another title foisted on Lewton against his will. The studio wanted a sequel to the movie that had put Lewton on the map, so Lewton had the film's three co-stars reprise their characters—but despite the title, the movie has nothing at all to do with cats or even the themes of the earlier film. Instead, it concerns Amy (Ann Reed), the child of Oliver and Alice, and how she finds an imaginary friend in the gentle ghost of the late Irena.

Concerned that Lewton wasn't quite following his horror-movie mandate, rko signed a contract with Boris Karloff, famous for his work in Universal's Frankenstein and Mummy franchises, and compelled Lewton to cast Karloff in his next few films. Much to everyone's surprise, the two men got along famously; Karloff, it turned out, was tired of being typecast, and he relished the opportunity to sink his teeth into the meaty roles that Lewton offered him in Isle of the Dead (1945), The Body Snatcher (1945, adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson's short story) and Bedlam (1946, inspired by William Hogarth's series of engravings The Rake's Progress). Unlike Lewton's earlier films, these stories take place in the past rather than the present day, but like his other films, they probe the tension between reason and faith, or superstition, and they are more concerned with the terrors that lurk in the mind, and in human relationships, than in the ghouls of fantasy. Bedlam, which concerns the infamous St. Mary of Bethlehem lunatic asylum in 18th-century England, is especially intriguing for its depiction of institutional cruelty in the "Age of Reason," and of the opposition to this cruelty that is expressed by a Quaker man (Richard Fraser).

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.

Drawing on rko's publicity materials and Lewton's own novels, Nemerov also traces some interesting connections between Lewton's films and the seedy world of big-city movie theaters and other entertainment venues. It is debatable how intentional any of these links were in Lewton's mind, but he was not without a playful, self-conscious sense of humor.2 In Bedlam, one of the asylum's inmates, a former lawyer (Ian Wolfe)—"the best lawyer in England, aye, the most skilled of them all!" he proclaims—shows a visitor (Harry Harvey) some drawings in the corners of the pages of one of his books, flipping them to produce a rudimentary form of animation. "If I could only get a light behind these pages, I could throw them large as life upon the wall," the inmate tells his visitor. "Aye, that's not a bad idea—one could charge admission!" replies the visitor. "Oh, but you forget," says the insane lawyer. "It's because of these pictures that I'm here."

Peter T. Chattaway lives in Canada and writes about movies.

1. When director Paul Schrader remade Cat People in 1982, he was much more explicit about the sex, violence, and bestial transformations—and the film was much less effective.

2. The fine print in the opening credits for I Walked with a Zombie declares, "Any similarity to actual persons, living, dead or possessed, is purely coincidental" (emphasis in the original).

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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