Details, Details
The opening title sequence of the film depicts a walk along the beach that never happens in the film. The accompanying music is gorgeous, though.
"And this is Miss Connell, who is beautiful."
Carrefour is not much like any of the zombies in today's walking-dead films. Darby Jones rejiggered his zombie portrayal for the comedy Zombies On Broadway with Bela Lugosi.
Suitably lurid advertising capitalized on the success of the first Lewton film, Cat People. This poster actually shows elements from the film, unlike many others of the era.
Val Lewton
The Internet Movie Database says RKO Pictures is remaking I Walked With A Zombie and gives a date of 2009; that's now! Want to bet that it's really good?
Other Lewton films to look for
The Body Snatcher showcases what is arguably Boris Karloff's finest performance as he holds his own against British actor Henry Daniell in this Lewton version of Robert Louis Stevenson's short story. Bela Lugosi appears as well, for once playing a suitable part and not overacting. Bela's very good in an understated role here, but the movie belongs to Boris Karloff. A must-see.
The 7th Victim is a very strange film which by all rights never should have made it past the censors of the day: not because of nudity or profanity, but because of...suicide, How they managed to get this one out the door is beyond me. It flopped, but it is such an odd movie with its mixture of grimness, psychlogical in-gazing and (yes) bad acting, it's really a film to be watched at least once.
Cat People started it all and it's still a fun film, with its anticipated shocks and atmosphere of sexual repression, although I don't think it's in the same league with Zombie or Body Snatcher. The "sequel" (quotes because whatever you are expecting in the way of a sequel - this ain't it!) to Cat People was Curse Of The Cat People, a remarkable child's fairy tale of a film in spite of its title; I can't imagine what audiences of the day who had seen the first film thought when they saw it. Well worth searching out as long as you rid yourself of the horror motif that the titular "curse" implies.
Exploitation films often had catchy titles, but this one is a doozie.
How could a nearly bankrupt Hollywood studio turn around its entire operation by making exploitation films which ended up being some of the most interesting commercial movies to come from the studio system? And how did one of them in particular manage to become one of the most beautiful films ever made? And yet the mainstream film-goer is unlikely to know this movie.
But first, some background.
The Zombie Genre
Today the zombie movie is more popular than it ever has been; films like 28 Days and Shaun Of The Dead have added recent entries to the genre (including a newer sequel, 28 Days Later), and all of those George Romero-inspired walking-corpse movies have entered into the pop consciousness to a surprising degree. The use of the zombie as a metaphor for whatever is on our mind at the time is fluid and able to change like a shapeshifter (to mix genres, so to speak) to fit whatever seems to be pressing: zombies as mindless consumers (social fears), zombies as crowded modern world inhabitants driven by pandemic to incidents of rage (ecological and social fears in a heady cocktail), zombies as comment on race relations (political fears entering into the mix), and now, with zombies as comical figures doing all of the above, seemingly approaching self-parody.
Zombie movies are not the only ones which manipulate such issues and there is considerable overlap between them and others such as Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, whose McCarthy-era pod people seem little different from zombies functionally. But for simplicity's sake, let's stick to zombies here.
In the beginning was White Zombie. This 1932 Bela Lugosi sorta-classic is a hard one to sit through; to say it is slow moving is to talk too fast. The budget was pitiful and most of the film looks like it, the acting is beyond hammy, and did I mention that the damn thing is just boring? And yet, the film contains one scene that is so genuinely creepy that it continues to influence filmmakers even today and which makes the price of admission worthwhile: Lugosi's character, the zombie master Legendre "employs" the undead in his sugar mill and in one harrowing scene the zombies approach a set of turning blades and throw their sacks into the maw of the machine. One zombie slips and falls into the mouth of the monster with a ghastly thudding sound and while the others continue their repetitive work he is ground up with the sugar cane. No one notices.
Fast forward to World War II, when a real and much larger machine was grinding up millions of people.
Background
RKO Studios had been something of an idiosyncratic studio in Hollywood but by the time Orson Welles was done there it was a shell of itself. The boy genius had produced one of the most famous masterpieces the film world had ever seen, but Citizen Kane had ruined RKO financially. His movie The Magnificent Ambersons was edited heavily to fit what the studio decided the public wanted to see while Welles protested in vain; it did poorly at the box office, and finally the old studio hit bottom. After some management changes (and Welles' departure), RKO settled on a new format: exploitation, or what was then referred to as "programmers". Although RKO made some great film noir in the 40's it was another genre that actually saved the studio.
RKO's new head, Charles Koerner, hired an ex-Selznick story editor named Val Lewton to produce a series of cheapie B-grade movies which would appeal to a low common denominator; the idea was to simply make money at this point, but Val Lewton had ideas of his own. Because the films were made with a low budget and Lewton (and Lewton's team) was being paid a paltry sum by Hollywood standards ($250 a week; a lot of money in 1942, but just kindling in Los Angeles), he was given something else as well - artistic control. The studio did not know it, but this would be the salvation of RKO.
Following a formula dictated first by the film's title (over which Lewton had no control), Lewton and his crew wrote and filmed a series of pictures which made an enormous amount of money compared to their penurious budgets, but which somehow managed to exist in a strange and exotic film universe that no one else has ever really been able to reproduce, although an awful lot of people have tried. The first of these, Cat People, was such a box-office smash that the industry took instant notice and imitators began trying to reinvent the horror film, but none of them had Lewton's intelligence or his remarkably sophisticated esthetic sense and the best Lewton films remain sui generis to this day.
However, before Cat People had even been released, for his second film Lewton was handed the title "I Walked With A Zombie". With no idea that Cat People would become a success Lewton was working blind but he trusted his intuition and continued in a vein similar to that which he had mined in Cat People: provide an interesting script about believable people in unsettling circumstances, get the best possible performances from a small group of contract players, reuse existing sets from more expensive films but make them look as different as possible, and always - imply rather than show.
Account after account of I Walked With A Zombie speaks of how it was a retelling of Jane Eyre set in the Caribbean but a more accurate statement is that it is a prequel, a story patterned after the backstory of Rochester in Jamaica before the events in Bronte's book. The film has more in common with Jean Rhys' 1992 Wide Sargasso Sea than it does with Jane Eyre.
The system was such that RKO's focus groups were plied with various titles and what sounded good to the group was approved; salable titles, above all, got two thumbs up. Lewton, saddled originally with only a title he regarded as patently offensive, decided to turn the tables on the studio: he'd use the awful title (which now, ironically, has a sort of kitsch grandeur to it which was absent in 1942) but do it on his own terms. He set the Jane Eyre-inspired story on the island of "Saint Sebastian" in the West Indies, presumably some sort of British colonial holdover, although also clearly patterned on Haiti since the native songs are in Haitian French. This allowed him to include the voodoo and zombies which Ms Bronte somehow left out but which the title implied. As for the raucous title, the first thing the movie does is to defuse it. As the opening credits leave the screen over subdued but unsettling music a young woman's voice says in a conversational manner, "I walked with a zombie. It does seem an odd thing to say. Had anyone said that to me a year ago I'm not sure I would have known what a zombie was. I might have had some notion that they were strange or frightening, even a little funny."
Later in the film, the movie again disarms its own title by referring to the one possible exposure to the word "zombie" most people had had in real life by 1943: without being comic about it Betsy asks the doctor, "Just what is a zombie?"
"A ghost, the living dead. It's also a drink."
"Yes, I tried one once, but there wasn't anything dead about it." The line is light, but not played for laughs. And now, we accept the zombie concept and the lurid title seems to recede.
Synopsis
For readers who have never seen the film here's an abbreviated (and spoiler free) synopsis:
A young Canadian nurse (Betsy Connell, played by Francis Dee) accepts a job in the distant West Indies as the caretaker for the disabled wife (Jessica, played by Christine Gordon) of a plantation owner (Paul Holland, played by Tom Conway). On her arrival she finds that the woman is actually something of an ambulatory vegetable, having "went mindless" after suffering a "tropical fever"; however, Paul's half-brother Wesley Rand (James Ellison) claims Jessica has been cursed and is in a voodoo-induced state of undeath. Betsy also learns that Rand had had an affair with Jessica, an event which the whole island knows about. She falls in love with Paul, but is uneasy for obvious reasons. When she realizes that the local people actually believe the talk about voodoo Betsy decides to take Jessica to the houmfort (the voodoo center) and seek help; this is the "walk" in the title, a classic scene of eerie nighttime beauty. A cadaverous, silent native named Carrefour (Darby Jones) menaces the women (whatever Jessica's zombie status, which the film deliberately clouds, it seems pretty clear that Carrefour is the real thing), and in the end is instrumental in resolving the conflict between Paul, Rand, Jessica and Betsy. Carrefour is really not like any zombies that contemporary film audiences are likely to expect, but let us come back to that later.
Crew
What makes Zombie so wonderful is the totality of the film; everything comes together in a synergistic way to make something much better than the sum of the parts would have you expect. There is undoubtedly an element of luck in this, but Lewton was working with some very talented people and he had a real feel for what he was doing; synergy from a group of people as good as this one was means a real treat for the viewer. The heart of this movie feels very much like that of another but much better known film that was made just a couple of years later: Cocteau's Beauty And The Beast. And like that film, Zombie is one of the most gorgeous visual events ever to be put on film.
Although I Walked With A Zombie was a team effort, the team had a leader.
Val Lewton put his personality into every one of the RKO horror films he worked on in the short time he was there. He is usually credited as just the producer, but it's apparent that his was the esthetic that determined the style and content of these films, and every one of them has a mood which is quite different from anything else RKO produced; they are unique, even the ones with problems. Lewton often worked as the final scriptwriter, usually uncredited, although he did occasionally take a credit under the name "Carlos Keith". The scripts are surprisingly detailed, often including minutiae which a modern studio would laugh out of the room - dimensions of prints hanging on the walls, meticulous descriptions of odd pieces of furniture or set dressings, and so on.
Lewton was a literate man with a formidable memory; he could apparently read entire books quickly and recall lengthy passages from them verbatim later, a talent which helped him immensely when he worked as a story editor and assistant for David O. Selznick. His penchant for the art of Boecklin and Holbein found its way into his films in the form of frontispieces for various scenes in Bedlam and Isle Of The Dead (the print Isle Of The Dead also appears in Betsy's room in Zombie), and he was fond of using John Donne quotes to open or close the films, certainly not a habit shared by any other Hollywood producer then or now, especially one working in low-budget exploitation programmers. He peppered his films with allusions to classical works; in The 7th Victim the proprietress of the girl's school is named Mrs. Lowewood, a reference to the school in Bronte's Jane Eyre. The 7th Victim ends with a remarkable scene in which a beautiful but consumptive woman named Mimi dresses up and goes out on the town as a prelude to her death, a clear reference to Puccini. As she leaves, the film overlays these lines from Donne's Holy Sonnet VII: "I runne to Death, and Death meets me as fast, and all my pleasures are like yesterday." Not at all what audiences were used to in the forties.
The inevitability of death is a recurring motif in all of Lewton's RKO horror films, and the movies often resolve in ways which do not provide any easy answers for the viewer. This morbid cast was always tempered by the elegant and often languid tone of the films; films in which horror was implied rather than shown directly. Audiences reacted viscerally to these movies in the 1940's despite their clear stylistic opposition to the graphic horrors from Universal Studios like Dracula, Frankenstein or The Mummy, films which had come to dominate the genre but seemed somewhat passé to many viewers by the time of the war. The Wolfman was Universal's lone blockbuster new monster of the forties, although he was a good one. Lewton's RKO horrors pushed entirely different buttons, buttons that people often didn't even realize they had before they saw the films, and the box office return for RKO was stupendous, literally turning its fortune around.
Lewton left RKO after he finished his ninth horror film, Bedlam. He had a heart attack in 1946 but found work at different studios, moving from one to another without finding a home anywhere. He was a sensitive man who found the Hollywood studio system stressful; he had another massive heart attack and died in 1951 at the age of forty six. None of the films he made after he left RKO lived up to the promise of the films he made while he was there; although he disliked the RKO situation he had been in he created some beautiful films while he was there and he seemed to work better under the limitations and peculiar advantages it created than he did at larger studios where the system gave him much less control than he had at RKO.
The movies were so popular and so well known that MGM actually made a film called The Bad And The Beautiful (1952) which included a character loosely modeled on aspects of both Lewton's situation and the RKO turnaround strategy although it certainly was no biography of Val Lewton. Ironically, this was a big production with big names: Vincente Minelli directed Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner, Walter Pidgeon, Dick Powell and Gloria Grahame; it won five Oscars but by then Val Lewton was dead.
Jacques Tourneur directed Zombie. Lewton had worked with him on David Selznick's Tale Of Two Cities at MGM and Tourneur directed the first three Lewton movies: Cat People, Zombie, and The Leopard Man. He was an ideal director for Lewton because his own less-is-more approach dovetailed so neatly with Lewton's; years later Tourneur reportedly complained vehemently about the inclusion of the demon in Curse Of The Demon, his film which explicitly borrowed from the Lewton films' bag of tricks; he argued the film would have been more frightening without the demon. Aside from the Lewton collaborations Tourneur is probably best known for the noir classic Out Of The Past.
Although the screen credit says J. Roy Hunt did the cinematography, several sources also cite Nicholas Musaraca, the man who had produced such outstanding chiaroscuro imagery in the classic Murder, My Sweet and Out Of The Past. He also filmed Cat People, Curse Of The Cat People, The Ghost Ship, and The 7th Victim for Val Lewton. Given the studio system of the time it is even possible that both men worked on the film. Regardless of who photographed it the film noir esthetic was perfect for Lewton's productions both thematically and practically: using the idea of "less is more" the approach made the most of modest sets yet spun shadows of gold on the good sets the team was able to crib from other productions. Zombie seems to have made less use of A-list sets than some of the other Lewton efforts, but it looks very good, indeed; the scene in which Betsy settles in to her new room is probably the absolute apex of venetian blind shadow heaven, and that means a lot in the context of the 1940's, a time when film noir ruled the Earth. (The only possible competition for this honor that comes to mind immediately is the hallucinogenic courtroom scene from Stranger On The Third Floor, also shot by Musaraca, but it got to play with a lot more than venetian blinds.) The famous nighttime "walk" scene through the sugar cane as Betsy accompanies Jessica to the Houmfort acquires a surreal other-worldliness precisely because it was shot on a set and looks like it. Yes, it's a set, but the heavily stylized approach the film takes turns it into an asset, and never would a canefield be this creepy and lovely at once. The initial image of Carrefour waiting in the field for the women is spectacular. There are arresting still compositions such as Ti Misery, the old figurehead from a slave ship now placed in the garden "with arrows stuck in him and a sorrowful, weeping look on his black face." There is the scene in which Jessica, playing the supposed Grace Poole madwoman-from-Jane Eyre's-attic, frightens Betsy in the old tower: an inky swirl of darkness broken by light on the stone stairs and someone we don't understand approaching. The photography is astonishing in this film and it is a real tribute to the technicians who had perfected the style to note that they could crank it out on a regular basis for RKO.
Lewton & Co. went to some lengths researching Haitian music and incorporating it into the film, although the way they used the native songs seems a little polished today, as is typical of soundtracks of this era. However, Roy Webb's soundtrack deserves special mention. Webb was a house composer for RKO for many years and he scored an astounding number of films - 268, according to the IMDB, plus another 161 in various capacities! (An odd bit of triva: he scored the already mentioned Murder, My Sweet and coincidentally some of the cues from it were recycled in the also already mentioned Stranger On The Third Floor.) All of his scores shared one characteristic: they added to the film without taking away from it while still remaining understated, a considerable achievement. His score for Zombie is quite different from what he wrote for typical film noir programmers and he used polychordal planing to great effect in the final beach sequence, producing music that is more like Debussy than Hollywood and certainly not what one would expect in a horror film. He based the orchestral music for the film (which also uses ritual music as well) partly on native motifs: the main theme borrows from the Creole song Ah Marie Congo but it certainly doesn't stop there. His noir scores often manage to create an odd mood somewhere between an elegy and a threnody; Zombie is no exception but the closing climax is simultaneously lush and bold, a fitting accompaniment to the crashing waves which break over the action. (Some of the music from this film and others has been recorded recently and is available now, though it can be hard to find; see the end section for supplemental information.) He remains a composer largely unappreciated by the public, but industry professionals regard him highly.
Zombie's script was based on articles written by Inez Wallace about Haitian voodoo, although the screen credit says "from a story by Inez Wallace". Universal Studios writer Curt Siodmak (The Wolfman, Donovan's Brain and a host of others) and Ardel Wray adapted these underpinnings for screen use, but the script has Lewton's fingerprints all over it. Siodmak's tendency towards the overtly horrific aspects of the subject (an advantage at Universal) was toned down in favor of Lewton's much quieter approach. Regardless of who wrote various portions of the script, Zombie has some fine writing with a few passages that are truly memorable.
Players
Interestingly, the actors in a Val Lewton film are typically not as important as the technicians who create the movie; Zombie has an adequate cast, even at times a good cast, but the film is much more than the performances. A few very brief notes on some of the actors:
James Ellison was the top-billed actor in the film, although the part is not the lead. When Zombie was made Ellison had appeared in many westerns, often as Hopalong Cassidy's sidekick. I used to think his performance was rather stiff in this film, but then I saw the British horror film The Undying Monster, in which he was the leading man; how Jacques Tourneur got such a good performance out of Ellison in Zombie I'll never know.
Frances Dee was a beautiful woman who had already been in a number of films, many of them with Hollywood's biggest names, when she made Zombie. Her fine, understated performance as Betsy is note-perfect and it is impossible to imagine anyone doing a better job. She later married actor Joel McRea and stayed with him for over 50 years, defying the typical Hollywood stereotype.
Tom Conway was the brother of George Stevens, and was sometimes referred to as "the nice George Stevens". He was a lightweight, smooth player who is usually remembered for his role as the Falcon in RKO's series of detective comedies. A better actor than he is usually credited, he does a good job in Zombie, his rather slick style working well as the somewhat stiff and awkward British aristocrat.
Theresa Harris played the maid Alma. One of the most beautiful actresses of the time, she was severely limited (an understatement) in career moves because she was black. Her Alma is an intelligent, sometimes slightly acerbic portrayal at odds with the usual black servant of the time as noted elsewhere.
Minorities
I Walked With A Zombie shares something with all the other Lewton films which was rare if not actually unique in the 1940's: intelligent black people portrayed in a thoughtful fashion. Many critics have noted Lewton's sympathetic treatment of minority characters; although constrained by Hollywood to supporting roles, black actors at that time usually had to play variations on the "Yus, massah" theme even when the character was ostensibly a positive one. Gone With The Wind's Mammy (Hattie McDaniel) is a good example despite the acclaim the role received.
Early in the film, when Betsy is being driven to Fort Holland the elderly black driver tells her some of the history of Saint Sebastian and how the Holland family had brought slaves over from Africa. Nearing the end of his tale he says:
"And the enormous boat brought the Long Ago Fathers and the Long Ago Mothers of us all, chained to the bottom of the boat."
Betsy, having not a clue as to what to say to that, replies inanely, "They brought you to a beautiful place, didn't they?"
The old man just replies "If you say, miss. If you say." His sorrowful answer is not scornful, he certainly doesn't put Betsy in her place, but the meaning is clear.
At one point Betsy is speaking with Alma (Theresa Harris), the black maid when this exchange occurs:
"It's nice to see people so happy."
"They're not always happy, Miss Betsy."
"I suppose not."
"Things so bad, nobody can help. Not even Dr. Maxwell."
"Doctors and nurses can only do so much, Alma. They can't cure everything."
"Doctors that are people can't cure everything."
"What do you mean, 'doctors that are people'?"
"There are other doctors. Yes? Other doctors. Better doctors."
"Where?"
"At the Houmfort."
"That's nonsense, Alma."
"They even cure nonsense, Miss Betsy."
(Emphasis is in the film.)
This is astonishing dialog from a film released in 1943. Alma, and Bayard (an employee whose exact nature is never specified), Alma's sister and cousins, the coach driver and all of the voodoo participants are shown to be people with their own concerns and opinions, opinions which do not always appreciate the white plantation owners' own attitudes. Beyond treating the black people sympathetically the film is unique in that it also portrays the voodoo religion itself without casting aspersions on it; those people who do make such remarks are shown later to either have been ignorant or just wrong. In Zombie's world voodoo is a religion for people with little other recourse; what's more, it actually works. Although Carrefour (the film's "real" zombie) shuffles slowly and is used for some quick scares the typical zombie-as-forced-labor stereotype from White Zombie never arises and the only actual use of voodoo which the film shows seems to right a wrong whose perpetrator is always left in some doubt. Who is the villain in I Walked With A Zombie? Take your pick; virtually everyone is implicated and the ending, while satisfying in a dramatic sense, is a grim one.
At the beginning of the film, when Betsy is still on the boat to Saint Sebastian, she stands on the deck in the warm moonlight, her thoughts revealed in a voiceover:
We boarded the boat for St. Sebastian. It was all just as I'd imagined it. I looked at those great, glowing stars. I felt the warm wind on my cheek. I breathed deep and every bit of me inside myself said, "How beautiful!"
Paul Holland's voice interrupts her: "It's not beautiful!"
"You read my thoughts, Mr. Holland."
"It's easy enough to read the thoughts of a newcomer. Everything seems beautiful because you don't understand. Those flying fish - they're not leaping for joy. They're jumping in terror. Bigger fish want to eat them. That luminous water - it takes its gleam from millions of tiny dead bodies: the glitter of putrescence. There's no beauty here. Only death and decay."
"You can't really believe that."
(A meteorite burns across the night sky.)
"Everything good dies here...even the stars."
It's a pessimistic outlook, but it's phrased so beautifully. That may be the ultimate summation of Val Lewton's opinion of Hollywood, or maybe even life; it's typical that he said it with such elegance.
Further Resources
Music
The Curse of the Cat People: The Film Music of Roy Webb (Audio CD - 1998) - Silva Screen (label) This one must be out of print now because Amazon is listing it as "3 used and new from $39.99". I haven't heard it but apparently it is a collection of remastered original recordings from the 40's.
Cat People, Marco Polo (label) issued 2000. Contains music from several of Lewton's RKO horror films. Recorded by a modern orchestra, the sound quality is very good and the performances are for the most part very faithful to the originals. This also appears to be difficult to obtain, but it is well worth it.
There is an excellent review on Amazon here.
DVD
The Val Lewton Horror Collection, Warner Video (currently available)
Contains Cat People, Curse Of The Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie, The Body Snatcher, Isle Of The Dead, Bedlam, The Leopard Man, The Ghost Ship, The 7th Victim, and a very good documentary called Shadows In The Dark: The Val Lewton Story.
This is a great collection of all of the Lewton RKO horror films. At $39.99 it is very reasonably priced. The print quality is variable; none of it is awful, some is ordinary and some is very good. All of the films have commentaries, including excerpts from interviews with director/editor Robert Wise, actress Simone Simon and assorted modern Lewtonophiles.
Netflix users can order the disks individually (two films to a disk).
Books
There are not many books about Val Lewton available, and only one of them is really useful for those who want to learn much about the man himself. Here are three which I was able to find, although it took interlibrary loans to do it:
Icons of Grief: Val Lewton's Home Front Pictures, Alexander Nemerov
This is a volume of academic criticism with little to offer on the films themselves but a lot to say about the author. Nemerov makes arguable assertions ("Lewton's films are usually not very scary" might be true today but it certainly was not when the films were made) and pretentious error-based interpretations: "When the black maid, Alma, instructs Betsy on how to get to their destination, her description of Carrefour as a 'god' sounds almost like 'guard', and the two words combine not only to define his voodoo role, guardian of the crossroads, but to assert the importance of his triviality; like the doorman at an actual club, he is a guard who holds absolute power.' In this case, the script and the actress's pronunciation are both clear that the word in question is "guard", not "god"; as for the critical interpretation, it should speak for itself.
Dreams of Darkness: Fantasy and the Films of Val Lewton, JP Telotte
Another academic exercise in displaying the author's intellect while commiting factual errors. "There's no beauty here, only death and putrescence," quotes the book, badly mixing and mangling the film's best lines. Inexplicably, the book refers to Fort Holland as "Fort Hudson" several times. Much of the book is devoted to explaining the author's personal attraction to Lewton's films rather than talking about the films themselves. One truly irritating item here is that the author explicitly coins a word, uses it throughout the book without defining it, and then finally, in an appendix, tells the reader what it means. For those who simply must know, "vesperal" is a word which means (in abbreviated definition) "Lewtonesque", but when he tells the pre-appendix reader that a scene in one of Lewton's films is "vesperal" the term is confusing and meaningless. Avoid this book and skip directly to the next one on the list.
Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror, Joel E. Siegal
(Apparently Val Lewton inspires colons in titles.) This is much more of a biography than the previous two works and its tone is not nearly as precious, while the author seems more interested in writing about Lewton than himself. There is considerable information on Lewton's films as well, including the two non-horror films he made at RKO, Mademoiselle Fifi and Youth Runs Wild. Val Lewton was a fascinating man and readers who are interested in learning more about him would do well to seek this book out.
Hollywood Horror From Gothic To Cosmic, Mark A. Vieira
This book contains only a chapter on Lewton, but it's such a great reference it really needs to get a mention here. The writing is good, the photographs are great and the reproduction quality is top-notch. It's a little expensive, but interested readers may be able to get it through a library.
The Web
Here is a nice Val Lewton mini-biography.
