Introduction

Summary

From 1942–1946, Val Lewton produced nine low-budget horror films for RKO Pictures. To varying degrees they achieved commercial success and favorable critical notice. In subsequent decades, they came to enjoy a positive reputation among scholars, critics, filmmakers, and fans of the horror genre disproportionate to their modest means, earning for Lewton the rare status of auteur producer.

Taken as a whole, the Lewton horror films rub against the grain of the horror genre by banishing explicit monsters and exploring the anxieties and potentials for violence that dwell inside relatable people in familiar contemporary settings. The unseen would serve as the source of horror in these films, prompting a new and much studied visual style emphasizing shadows and absences.

The paragraph above summarizes the conclusions of the sixth chapter of the first comprehensive history of horror films, Carlos Clarens's 1967 An Illustrated History of Horror Film. Clarens's few pages on Lewton's films did much to codify the scholarly reception of Lewton's output as his tone is rapturous. His metaphors for Lewton's films begin and end with music and just a splash of water in between.

Taken in their original context – the Hollywood of the early forties – the movies of Val Lewton stand out as chamber music against the seedy bombast of the claw-and-fang epics of the day. Brief, precisely constructed, and neatly executed, they continue to generate an effective secret music of their own. Lewton swimming against the current, could not hope to turn the tide; he was a modest, lone virtuoso in a period which thrived on marching songs, maudlin themes, and the worn-out misteriosi of a genre already too tired to pick up its coffin and go.

The most recent book on Lewton, Alexander Nemerov's Icons of Grief: Val Lewton's Home Front Pictures, rehearses a more precise litany of Lewton’s contribution to the horror genre in equal measures weary and wary.

By now an ironclad set of accounts explains [Lewton’s] work: he made the most of small budgets; he emphasized the unconscious motivations of human beings; he favored darkness and the unseen generally so his audiences could imagine horror rather than see it. None of this is wrong; the trouble at this point is that it is too correct.