A young woman enters a small room which contains nothing but a hangman's noose and a chair. She closes the door behind her. We hear a muted crash, followed by the slow creak of a swinging rope. On the screen, a moment or two later, appears a couplet from John Donne's Holy Sonnet VI:  "I Runne to Death, and Death Meets Me as Fast, And all my Pleasures are like Yesterday."  When I first watched this scene -- the closing moments of the 1943 horror movie The Seventh Victim -- I knew for the first time exactly what people mean when they say "the hairs on the back of my neck stood up", a phrase that, until then, I'd assumed to be either a metaphor or an exaggeration.

    Most people can name their favorite movie actors; a lot of us have our favorite directors, but how many people do you
know who have a favorite producer? In the movie business, the producer is more often than not assumed to be somebody who keeps in the background, who puts the deal together, who signs the contracts and writes the checks -- not someone whose creativity can be recognized in the finished film. But Val Lewton -- my favorite producer -- was much more than a mere businessman. He was also a poet, historian, novelist, screenwriter, and connoisseur of all things creepy and crepuscular.

     This Fall, just in time for Halloween, Warner Brothers is releasing "The Val Lewton Horror Collection", a DVD set of ten horror movies produced by Lewton for RKO, including Cat People (1942), Curse of the Cat People (1944), I Walked With a Zombie (1943), The Body Snatcher (1945), Isle of the Dead (1945), Bedlam (1946), The Leopard Man (1943), The Ghost Ship (1943), The Seventh Victim (1943), and Shadows in the Dark (1943). Not all of these are classics; not all of them are even particularly great movies, but at least five are superbly spooky, and three of them are, in my opinion, just about the most subtle, elegant, and thoughtfully-made horror movies of all time.

     Val Lewton -- originally Vladimir Leventon -- was a Russian emigré who began his career writing potboilers under various pseudonyms, mostly slick crime and porn novels, before landing the job of story editor for David Selznick at RKO. His big break came when he was selected to produce a series of horror films, and allowed to pick his own team for the unit. Many of the writers, directors, editors and actors he chose continued to work with him, on and off, until his untimely death in 1951. Perhaps his three closest and most significant collaborators at RKO were Jacques Tourneur, director of I Walked with a Zombie, Cat People, and The Leopard Man; screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen, author of Cat People, Curse of the Cat People, and The Seventh Victim, and Mark Robson, who began as Orson Welles's editor and went on to edit Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie, and to direct The Seventh Victim, The Ghost Ship, and Bedlam.

     As his work suggests, Lewton was a literate type, very well-read, so he was unhappy to learn that he would be putting
together films to match titles that had already been chosen and proved to appeal to movie audiences of the time. Still, this restriction may have fueled his creativity, since, as if to compensate for being handed schlocky pre-approved titles on a platter, he began turning to high culture for his themes. I Walked with a Zombie is an adaptation of Charlotte Bronte's classic novel Jane Eyre, re-set in the West Indies; The Body Snatcher is based on a story by Robert Louis Stevenson, and the inspiration for Bedlam came from William Hogarth's 1735  painting of the same name, the last phase of his satirical series The Rake's Progress. In fact, however, all Lewton's horror movies are highly  literary, if not in their source material, then in their style and design; their shocks are psychological, their violence implicit, and all are imbued with a deep sense of psychological unease, superstition, and underlying dread. Long after the closing credits, the atmosphere of his movies is hard to shake off.

    In Cat People, perhaps Lewton's most best-received film, the lovely French actress Simone Simon plays the troubled Irena Dubrovna, a Balkan immigrant with a strange history, who believes herself to be descended from a cursed line of ancient ancestors. Her new husband Oliver (Kent Smith), whom she first meets outside the leopard cage in Central Park Zoo, dismisses her fears as harmless superstitions, but when he realizes Irena is incapable of intimacy, he arranges for her to begin seeing the suave psychiatrist, Dr. Judd (played by Lewton regular Tom Conway). Cat People plays constantly with the ambiguous distinction between madness, superstition, and fear of the past. Is Irena -- as the sympathetic Dr. Judd implies -- simply confused and neurotic, with a phobia of being touched (incidentally, a phobia which Lewton himself shared)? Or is she, as she herself is convinced, the living descendent of a Balkan race, cursed -- when her blood is up -- to take on the attributes of the cat? The mystery makes itself felt in the film's shadowy atmosphere and subtle repetition of cat images and motifs. Some of these are impossible to miss, such as the cats in the Goya reproduction on Irena's mantelpiece, or the cat sculpture on her coffee table, but others are more subtle:  Irena's hair ribbon that gives cat ears to her shadow on the wall; the claw-feet on her bathtub, the tiger lilies in the florist's shop window, the statue of the cat-goddess Bubastis in the museum sequence.
    And even if you miss the nuances of some of these references, you can't help getting the creeps from the film's atmosphere of shady lamplight, odd footsteps behind you, sudden sounds in the night. The mood sneaks up on you, and before you know it, you're all on edge, jumping at shadows, checking you've locked the doors.  Like The Seventh Victim, Cat People ends with a couplet from one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets, summing up the dark forces at play beneath the surface of ordinary life: "But black sin hath betray'd to endless night  My world's both parts, and oh both parts must die."
     The critics responded well to Cat People, but Lewton was most pleased by those reviewers of a more conservative disposition who described the film as "fantastic and unhealthy," "morbid and unconsctructive," and "a horrible idea, unethically treated." He was less delighted when informed that the title of his next picture was to be I Walked With a Zombie; film editor Mark Robson recalls Lewton returning from his meeting with RKO bosses with a "white face," and spending the whole day in an "impossibly gloomy" mood. Again, however, this struggle seems to have given Lewton his best creative impetus. This rather kitschy title led him to dream up the notion of "Jane Eyre in the West Indies" (not such an odd idea -- those who remember the novel may recall that it was in the West Indies that Rochester met and married his first wife); once again, he appointed Jacques Tourneur as director, and Mark Robson as editor.
    Like Cat People, Zombie depends for its power more on mood and atmosphere than violence or scenes of vivid horror. Frances Dee plays Betsy, a lonely nurse who is offered a position on the island of San Sebastian, in the West Indies, to care for Jessica Holland, an invalid who appears to have fallen into some kind of bizarre mental coma. Betsy soon finds herself in the middle of strange family strange secrets and forbidden passions; she is courted by Jessica's alcoholic half-brother Wesley (James Ellison), but falls in love with her patient's husband, Paul (Tom Conway). The film's most frightening scenes come when Betsy, torn by guilt, begins to get involved in the local voodoo church in the hope that she might be able to bring her patient back to life. Apparently, Lewton spend many weeks researching Haitan voodoo to give his film the right feel. His work paid off; Zombie has an eerie, sinister quality; the voodoo rituals are particularly uncanny, especially the scene in which Betsy leads her paralysed patient through the sugar plantations in the middle of the night, led by the startling zombie Carrefour (Darby Jones). Although Paul and Betsy escape together unharmed, neither Jessica nor Wesley survive, and, as in most of Lewton's films, it is the darker side of human nature -- its "black sin and  endless night" -- that gains the upper hand.
    "Black sin" and witchcraft also play major roles in The Seventh Victim (1943), a film made from a script by DeWitt Bodeen, which Lewton chose Mark Robson to direct. In this film, Kim Hunter plays Mary Gibson, an orphan who comes to Greenwich Village to try to find out what has happened to her sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks), who has suddenly dropped out of sight. In her attempt to unearth the secrets of Jacqueline's life, Mary stumbles across the Palladists, a secret devil-worshipping cult of which her sister apparently seems to have been a member (led by Tom Conway as Dr. Louis Judd -- the same sinister psychiatrist he plays in Cat People).
    The Seventh Victim is Lewton's darkest movie by far; when she leaves the safety of the orphanage in which she has spent her entire life, Mary has no idea that the world she is about to enter is an bleak, uncompromising place of menace and  misery. The more entangled she becomes in her sister's life, the more she realizes that the life can be far more unhappy than she ever imagined, that evil is just around the corner, and that, for some people, death is a swift and sweet release. The Seventh Victim is set among the familiar streets of Greenwich Village, but the interiors are shadowy and impressionistic, unrecognizeable, giving the sense of a a veil being lifted on the world we know, uncovering the isolation and despair that lie just beneath the surface.
    Lewton made fourteen films at RKO between 1942 and 1946; not all were horror movies or supernatural thrillers, but this was the genre at which he and his unit clearly excelled. He died in 1951, at only 46; during his life, according to those who know him, he never seemed to feel quite fulfilled. Had he lived, he may have gone on to make more films of the caliber of Cat People and The Seventh Victim; on the other hand, by the end of the 1940s, studio exectives had already begun to dismantle his team, assigning Jacques Tourneur to direct non-Lewton produced movies, for example, on the dubious assumption that, since the two worked so well together, they would work twice as well apart. Lewton apparently always felt abused and disappointed by RKO for continually requiring him to produce pictures assigned to him by the studio bosses. Perhaps he felt that his creativity could never find full expression as long as he was simply a figure behind the scenes. It is a great testament to his individual vision, that even in the role of producer, his best films are touched by the distinct hallmark of an unmistakable personality.