rson Welles' Citizen Kane is now remembered as one of the very best movies ever made, but it and its follow-up The Magnificent Ambersons were financial disasters for RKO Radio Pictures. Faced with the possibility of shutting down, the studio consciously eschewed Art-With-a-Capital-A and began a new policy of pure entertainment, with one of its key strategies the creation of a new unit dedicated to the production of low-budget horror movies, to compete with the Frankenstein and Wolf Man pictures that had proven such money-makers for competitor Universal Pictures.
To this end, they hired a young writer/producer named Val Lewton, who had spent many years working for Darryl F. Zanuck on films that included Gone With the Wind. It was a low-prestige, starting-level job, Lewton's first as a producer, and it came with a condition other artists would have considered crippling: namely, that he'd have to build his films around lurid titles provided by the studio, such as Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, The Leopard Man and The Ghost Ship.
Lewton gave the studio more than they bargained for, producing a series of moody, literate, character-based chillers with no overt on-screen monsters and supernatural elements that were more often suggested than shown. A number are considered classics today. Even the least among them are consistently entertaining, with production values and script sophistication that still stand up even as most other horror films of the era fade in our estimation out of what now seems fakery and camp.
Karloff as more than a monster
Three of the best films in the collection feature horror icon Boris Karloff (seen at right with Anna Lee), best known today as the original face of Universal's Frankenstein's monster. But Karloff had depths, when permitted to deliver dialogue, that are now startling in light of that better-known role. In Bedlam, he embodies smug evil as the ruler of a notorious mental asylum who delights in tormenting his inmates. In The Body Snatcher, he speaks with an insolent, concerned politeness that threatens to erupt into murder at any moment. In Isle of the Dead, he is a weary general trapped in an island villa infected by the plague and exudes the weary pragmatism of a man who has been surrounded by death all his life.
The Cat People is less about a woman who becomes a panther than about a woman who fears that she might. It is miles ahead of its more explicit remake. Its nominal sequel, Curse of the Cat People, features some of the same cast members but is a largely unrelated work about a troubled child. The Ghost Ship, featuring Richard Dix as a sea captain who enjoys arranging fatal accidents for crew members who fail to meet his standards and honestly believes that this is the best way to handle his command, is a tense study of cold, reasonable evil. I Walked With a Zombie is, of all things, a version of Jane Eyre. The Leopard Man, based on a Cornell Woolrich story, includes one of the most artful horror sequences ever filmed: the death of a young girl from what might be the attack of an escaped leopard.
The extras include commentaries by Robert Wise (later a major genre figure himself) and film historians Kim Newman and Stephen Jones. The best of the extras is the full-length documentary "Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Story," essential viewing about the circumstances that surrounded the production of these wonderful films. It turns out that we may owe their very existence to studio misunderstanding of somebody's offhand remark that Lewton was a "horrible" writer! He wasn't, of course, and the luminaries who show up to sing Lewton's praises include Wise, Newman, Richard Matheson, Neil Gaiman and Harlan Ellison.
In short, this is an essential collection, highlighting the life's work of a genre immortal.
