MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #68 THE GHOST SHIP 1943 / THE LEOPARD MAN 1943 & THE SEVENTH VICTIM 1943

SPOILER ALERT!

As I continue my exploration of Val Lewton’s remarkable legacy at The Last Drive In, having already written about The Seventh Victim, Curse of the Cat People, and The Ghost Ship, I’ll be working on an upcoming feature that will delve into four more of his atmospheric and thematically rich works: Cat People 1942, I Walked with a Zombie (1943), Isle of the Dead (1945) and Bedlam (1946).

Each of these films, though distinct in setting and subject, showcases Lewton’s unparalleled ability to fuse horror with social commentary, psychological depth, and a painter’s eye for shadow and suggestion.

Val Lewton’s 1943 RKO horror cycle –The Ghost Ship 1943, The Leopard Man 1943, and The Seventh Victim 1943-stands as a masterclass in psychological terror, moodiness, and narrative innovation, each film distinct yet bound by Lewton’s signature sensibility: an insistence on suggestion over spectacle, the power of the unseen, and a fascination with the darkness lurking in the human soul.

As embodied in these three films, Lewton’s legacy is one of transformation: of B-movie budgets alchemized into works of poetic terror, of genre conventions into vehicles for philosophical inquiry. Working with a repertoire of collaborators-directors, Tourneur and Robson, cinematographer Musuraca, composer Roy Webb, and a recurring troupe of actors, Lewton’s productions are marked by their psychological acuity, visual sophistication, and a willingness to leave horror unresolved, lingering in the shadows and the mind.

Val Lewton’s Shadowed Visions: The Haunting Trilogy of 1943:

In The Ghost Ship, The Leopard Man, and The Seventh Victim, Lewton created not just horror films, but meditations on fear, power, and the mysteries that haunt us all.

Lewton’s 1943 films thrive on paradox-constraint breeding innovation, silence screaming louder than spectacle. His collaborators, writers plumbing Freud and fate, cinematographers sculpting light into emotion, elevating pulp into poetry.

Richard Dix’s Captain Stone, Dennis O’Keefe’s everyman guilt, and Jean Brooks’ ethereal despair are not mere characters but vessels for universal fears. These films, though dismissed in their time, now pulse with relevance, their themes of isolation, authoritarian rot, and existential dread resonating in an age of anxiety. Lewton’s legacy is etched in the shadows he so masterfully conjured, proving that true horror lies not in the monster revealed but in the darkness we carry around with us.

In the dimly lit corridors of 1940s cinema, Val Lewton carved a niche where shadows whispered and the unseen terrorized, crafting this trio of films in 1943 –The Ghost Ship, The Leopard Man, and The Seventh Victim– that redefined horror through psychological nuance and atmospheric mastery. These works, though distinct in narrative, are bound by Lewton’s signature alchemy of suggestion, existential dread, and a profound understanding of human fragility. Each film, a chiaroscuro of fear and introspection, reveals Lewton’s genius for transforming B-movie constraints into meditations on power, alienation, and the darkness within.

THE GHOST SHIP 1943

The Ghost Ship, directed by Mark Robson and shot with spectral elegance by Nicholas Musuraca, is a study in authority gone awry and the terror of isolation at sea. Robson’s direction, while perhaps less flamboyant than Tourneur’s in other Lewton productions, is perfectly attuned to the material’s psychological focus.

The film immerses you in the claustrophobic world of the Altair, a merchant vessel helmed by the enigmatic Captain Will Stone (Richard Dix).

The story follows Tom Merriam (Russell Wade), a young idealistic merchant marine officer who joins the crew of the Altair under the seemingly benevolent command of Captain Stone. From the moment young officer Merriam steps aboard, the film tightens like a noose, blending maritime routine with mounting unease.

At first, Stone appears to be a model of paternal authority, imparting philosophical lessons about leadership and camaraderie at sea, and what begins as mentorship soon devolves into tyrannical paranoia as Merriam begins to suspect Stone is dangerously unhinged.

As the voyage progresses, Merriam witnesses a series of increasingly suspicious and fatal incidents: -an impression confirmed by a series of mysterious deaths that the superstitious crew attributes to a curse.

A crewman’s death during a botched medical emergency, another crushed by an anchor chain after crossing the captain, and the general sense of dread that pervades the ship. He becomes convinced that Stone is not only dangerously obsessed with his own authority but may also be a murderer, using the power of his position to eliminate those who threaten his control.

Stone, initially a paternal figure, reveals a philosophy steeped in authoritarian zeal, justifying control through a warped sense of duty. Nicholas Musuraca’s cinematography- a dance of shadows and stark light- transforms the ship’s hull into a labyrinth of moral decay.

The film’s tension is heightened by the crew’s superstitious belief that the ship is cursed, and by the isolation that renders Merriam’s warnings futile, leaving him to fend for himself with his fear and desperation. His attempts to expose Stone’s madness are met with disbelief and hostility, leaving him increasingly alone and vulnerable.

Robson and Lewton, working with a lean script by Donald Henderson Clarke from a story by Leo Mittler, (and with significant input from Lewton himself), craft a suspense drama where the true horror is psychological: Stone’s descent from idealist to tyrant, his authority morphing into a spiritual and existential threat.

A swinging chain becomes a pendulum of doom, its erratic movements mirroring Stone’s unraveling psyche, while the mute Finn’s (Skelton Knaggs) haunting voiceover pierces the silence like a dirge.

The film’s use of single-source lighting, shadow-drenched sets, and the haunting narration of Finn who is mute creates a mood of mounting dread, culminating in a claustrophobic showdown in the darkness of the ship’s hold.

The climax erupts in a brutal struggle in the darkness of Merriam’s cabin, as Stone, knife in hand, finally snaps and attempts to kill the young officer, only to be stopped by Finn, whose own presence and voiceover add a spectral, fatalistic undertone to the film. The Ghost Ship’s terror lies not in specters but in the banality of tyranny, as Stone’s descent into madness culminates in the knife fight drenched in primal desperation. Here, Lewton interrogates the seduction of power, framing the sea as a void where humanity drifts anchorless.

Withdrawn from circulation for decades due to a plagiarism lawsuit, The Ghost Ship has since been recognized for its compact, complex portrait of madness and its almost spiritual take on the dangers of unchecked power.

Richard Dix delivers a chilling and nuanced performance as Captain Will Stone, embodying a man whose authority slowly transforms from a steady anchor to a tightening noose of obsession and madness. At first, Dix’s Stone appears composed and even paternal, eager to mentor the young third officer, but beneath his calm exterior lurks a deep insecurity and a need for absolute control. As the voyage progresses, Dix masterfully lets Stone’s facade slip, revealing flashes of paranoia, rigidity, and an unsettling belief in his own infallibility. His descent is marked by small, tightly controlled gestures and a simmering intensity, never tipping into melodrama, but instead letting the menace build in his silences and cold stares. Dix’s portrayal is that of a man isolated not just by the sea, but by his own delusions, his authority twisted into something both pitiable and terrifying. His performance anchors the film’s psychological tension, making Captain Stone’s madness feel both inevitable and a deeply human study in how power and isolation can corrode the mind.

Some of the key scenes: In the suffocating blackness of the ship’s hold, a newly painted anchor chain hangs like a coiled serpent, gleaming and sinister in the lamplight. When a gale rises, the chain thrashes and lashes against the hull, a living embodiment of chaos barely contained. Captain Stone, unmoving and eerily serene, watches from a lighted window as the crew grapples with the writhing metal-his authority as cold and unyielding as the iron links themselves. The chain becomes a chilling metaphor for Stone’s fractured mind, caught between order and the abyss.

Later, the anchor chain scene takes on a fatal gravity. Stone orchestrates the death of a dissenting sailor named Louie by locking him in with a descending anchor chain, showcasing Dix’s ability to convey both the captain’s chilling calm and his unraveling psyche.

Louie, one of the more outspoken sailors, is sent to supervise the chain as it’s stowed in the loading compartment. As he signals for the chain’s descent, the door behind him is quietly locked. The chain begins its ponderous, inexorable drop, the clanking metal drowning out any cries for help. In the dim, claustrophobic space, Louie is buried alive by the relentless weight of the chain, a death as silent and implacable as the captain’s authority. The rest of the crew only finds his lifeless form after the deed is done, the horror of the moment underscored by the cold indifference of steel and shadow.

That anchor chain scene is mesmerizing and deeply unsettling to me- there’s something so striking and shockingly brutal about watching a man slowly, helplessly buried alive by cold, unfeeling metal, all while the rest of the world carries on above, oblivious to his fate—the poor soul.

Another striking moment comes when the ship’s doctor is unable to operate on a crewman with a burst appendix. The young officer Merriam, pressed into action, must take over the surgery himself. The captain’s chilling detachment and insistence on protocol hang over the scene, and his authority is now a palpable threat rather than a source of safety. The sickbay becomes a stage for Stone’s psychological unraveling, every flicker of light and shadow sharpening the sense of nihilism.

Cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca stands as one of the true architects of film noir’s visual identity; his work behind the camera helped define the look and feel of classic film noir. Works that include genre landmarks like Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), The Spiral Staircase (1946), The Locket (1946), Deadline at Dawn (1946), and the quintessential noir, Out of the Past (1947). Not to mention the atmospheric horror of Val Lewton’s Cat People (1942).

Musuraca’s signature style is unmistakable. His cinematography is defined by a masterful use of chiaroscuro, where deep shadows and sharp beams of light carve the frame into stark, expressive compositions alive with both possibility and threat. Musuraca’s cinematography transforms RKO’s standing ship set into a claustrophobic labyrinth of shadow and menace.The film’s use of single-source lighting and shadowy, confined spaces amplifies the sense of entrapment and moral ambiguity, while Roy Webb’s score and the contrasting calypso songs sung by Sir Lancelot on board provide moments of eerie levity amid the gloom.

Throughout, Lewton’s direction and the film’s noir-inspired cinematography use single-source lighting and deep shadows to evoke a world where menace lurks just beyond the reach of reason. The ship itself becomes a floating prison, each corridor and cabin heavy with the weight of unspoken fears, the darkness pressing in as tightly as the captain’s grip on his crew.

These scenes, especially the anchor chain’s deadly descent, capture the film’s unique blend of psychological horror and poetic fatalism, making The Ghost Ship a haunting meditation on authority, madness, and the thin line between protection and destruction.

The Ghost Ship (1943) stands as one of Val Lewton’s most psychologically charged and atmospheric films, a seafaring thriller that eschews the supernatural in favor of a tense, slow-burning study of authority, paranoia, and the darkness that can take root in isolation. The nearly all-male cast and the absence of romantic subplots further intensify the film’s focus on power dynamics, conformity, and the dangers of unchecked power. Parallels to the rise of fascism and the psychological toll of war are unmistakable.

THE LEOPARD MAN 1943

If The Ghost Ship is a tale of authority and the dark psychology from oceanic isolation at sea, The Leopard Man, directed by Jacques Tourneur and adapted by Ardel Wray and Edward Dein from Cornell Woolrich’s novel, Black Alibi is a meditation on fate and the lurking predatory instincts within ordinary life-where fear prowls the shadows of the everyday, and the boundaries between human and beast blur beneath the surface of a seemingly civilized town. The story is transformed from a pulpy premise into a haunting exploration of fear, guilt, and the duality of human nature.

The film transplants Lewton’s signature shadowy anxieties to a sun-baked New Mexico border town, where it unravels as a proto-slasher draped in existential ambiguity.

The story begins with a brash nightclub promoter Jerry Manning (Dennis O’Keefe) who borrows a black leopard to bolster his lover Kiki Walker’s (Jean Brooks) act, hoping to outshine her rival, the fiery dancer Clo-Clo (Margo) and it unleashes chaos when his publicity stunt goes awry. Maria, the fortune teller played by Isabel Jewell, warns Clo-Clo about impending danger (“something black” coming for her). When Clo-Clo startles the leopard with her castanets, the animal flees into the night, setting off a chain of deaths that fracture the town’s fragile peace as the leopard escapes, it ignites a wave of paranoia, coinciding with a series of gruesome deaths and brutal murders that blur the line between animal savagery and human depravity.

The film fractures into glimpses of fragility and moments of defenselessness, each victim-a girl locked out by her mother, and a dancer stalked through barren streets, Consuelo, and a local woman who is trapped inside a cemetery after visiting her father’s grave, another apparent victim of the leopard, etched with tragic intimacy. Tourneur, alongside cinematographer Robert De Grasse, wields sound and shadow like weapons: the echo of claws on cobblestones, the suffocating darkness behind a door, the silent scream of a victim unheard. Dennis O’Keefe’s Jerry Manning, a man haunted by his complicity, becomes a reluctant detective in a world where guilt is as pervasive as fear.

The first victim, Teresa (Margaret Landry), becomes an emblem of the film’s chilling restraint: Tourneur and cinematographer Robert De Grasse use shadows, sound, and off-screen violence to maximum effect, most memorably in the harrowing scene where a young girl, locked out of her home by her mother for forgetting cornmeal, is pursued through the shadowed streets by the sound of claws on cobblestones. Her death occurs off-screen, marked only by a scream and blood seeping beneath a door- killed just beyond her mother’s reach as she listens in horror. It’s a sequence that distills Lewton’s genius for evoking terror through suggestion.

Following the doomed victims in self-contained vignettes, the film’s structure was ahead of its time and is now recognized as a precursor to the American serial killer film.

The film’s brilliance lies in its ambiguity: Are the killings the work of the animal, or a human predator hiding in plain sight? The Leopard Man subverts expectations, its true horror lying not in the beast but in the realization that monstrosity wears a human face—a revelation that would echo through decades of horror to come.

While some contemporary critics found the film uneven, modern reassessment hails its taut pacing, visual inventiveness, and its almost noir-like meditation on fate and fear.

Tourneur and cinematographer Robert De Grasse craft a world where light and darkness duel for dominance. The New Mexico setting, with its adobe walls and arid landscapes, becomes a character in its own right, its sunlit exteriors contrasting with the suffocating gloom of alleyways and cemeteries. The film’s most potent weapon is sound-the click of castanets, the growl of an unseen beast, the eerie silence of a locked gate-each a harbinger of doom. When Clo-Clo, lured by a lost $100 bill, meets her fate in a moonlit arroyo, the camera lingers on her trembling hand, the castanets still clutched in her grip. It’s a moment of poetic brutality, underscoring the film’s theme of fate and the inevitability of violence.

At its core, The Leopard Man is a proto-slasher, structured around sketches of vulnerability. Each victim, their stories intertwining like threads in a morbid tapestry. The killer, revealed to be Dr. Galbraith (James Bell), a curator obsessed with the town’s violent history, embodies the film’s exploration of repressed desires. His confession that Teresa’s mauling awakened a latent bloodlust mirrors Lewton’s fascination with the darkness lurking beneath societal facades. The climax, set against a Catholic procession commemorating a colonial massacre, merges past and present sins, as Galbraith is cornered amid chanting mourners and flickering candles.

Jean Brooks and Dennis O’Keefe anchor the film with understated performances, their guilt and determination reflecting the moral ambiguity of Lewton’s universe. Margo’s Clo-Clo, all smoldering allure and defiant pride, stands out as a symbol of resilience in a world where women are painted as both predators and prey. Yet the true star is the atmosphere– a suffocating blend of noir aesthetics and Gothic melancholy, elevated by Roy Webb’s haunting score.

Initially dismissed as a B-movie curio, The Leopard Man has been reevaluated as a pioneering work that prefigured the slasher genre and modern horror’s psychological depth. Lewton, ever the alchemist of anxiety, uses the leopard as a metaphor for uncontrollable fear, while Tourneur’s direction, a dance of shadows and silence, transforms budgetary constraints into artistic triumphs. The film’s legacy lies in its refusal to provide easy answers, leaving audiences to grapple with the same question that torments Jerry and Kiki: Is the true monster the beast, the man, or the collective complicity that allows evil to thrive? In Lewton’s world, the most terrifying forces are those we cannot see- and those we dare not confront within ourselves.

THE SEVENTH VICTIM 1943

The Seventh Victim, Mark Robson’s directorial debut, is perhaps the most existential, enigmatic, and nihilistic of Lewton’s 1943 trilogy, which I’m focusing on here.

In The Seventh Victim, Lewton’s gaze turns even more inward, probing the abyss of the human soul. Scripted by Charles O’Neal and DeWitt Bodeen, the film follows Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter, in her first screen role) as she searches for her missing sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks) in a shadowy, labyrinthine occult underbelly of Greenwich Village where her sister Jacqueline languishes under the thrall of the Palladists, a Satanist cult veiled in bourgeois normalcy.

The trail leads her into the orbit of the Palladists, a secret society pledged to nonviolence but committed to driving traitors to suicide. Not unlike Lewton’s other films, The Seventh Victim contains no overt supernatural element; its horror is existential, rooted in despair, alienation, and the seductive pull of death.

Robson and Musuraca drape the film in chiaroscuro gloom, echoing the influence of European expressionism and film noir. The narrative, fragmented by studio cuts, is dreamlike and unsettling, building to a climax that is both ambiguous and devastating: Jacqueline, hounded by the cult and her own death wish, takes her own life off-screen, the film ending with the sound of a chair falling and a neighbor’s whispered longing for “just one more moment of life.” Mimi’s character, played by Lewton regular Elizabeth Russell, is a striking counterpoint to the film’s themes of despair and suicide. While Jacqueline (Jean Brooks) is drawn toward death, Mimi expresses a poignant desire to keep living.

Kim Hunter’s character in The Seventh Victim is Mary Gibson, a sheltered and earnest young woman whose journey drives the film’s emotional core. Fresh out of boarding school, Mary has a gentle, sincere, and quietly determined style that is modest and unassuming, marked by innocence rather than sophistication. Yet beneath that innocence is a quiet resilience; as she searches for her missing sister Jacqueline in the shadowy maze of New York, Mary’s persistence and empathy set her apart. She is driven by a deep longing to reconnect with Jacqueline, hoping to save her from whatever darkness has claimed her life. Mary seeks not just answers, but the possibility of healing and redemption for her sister, even as she’s drawn into a world far more bleak and complex than she ever imagined. The rest of the cast- Tom Conway as Dr. Judd, Isabel Jewell, and Hugh Beaumont- contributes to the film’s sense of haunted community, each character adrift in a world where evil is banal, and hope is fleeting.

Musuraca’s camera paints a world of shadowy melancholy, where rain-slicked alleys and candlelit rituals frame Jacqueline’s existential torment. Her longing for death, poised between a noose and poisoned wine, becomes a silent scream against life’s futility, a theme echoed in the film’s infamous conclusion: the chair’s crash and a neighbor’s wistful sigh.

The Palladists, with their hollow dogma, mirror postwar anxieties of hidden evils, while subtexts of repressed sexuality and identity ripple beneath the surface. Jean Brooks’ performance, a spectral blend of resignation and defiance, anchors the film’s exploration of despair, making The Seventh Victim less a horror tale than a requiem for the lost.

The Seventh Victim unfolds like a shadowy descent into the underworld of despair, its central metaphor-the hangman’s noose suspended in an empty, dimly lit room-looming over the film as both a literal threat and a symbol of the inescapable pull of death. Val Lewton and director Mark Robson craft a cinematic labyrinth where every corridor and clock tick becomes a reminder of time slipping away, and every character seems to wander, ghostlike, through a city that offers neither refuge nor redemption. Jacqueline, the film’s tragic center, drifts through life as if already half-claimed by the grave, her voice rarely heard, her agency stripped away until she becomes less a person than a vessel for existential anguish and the numbing chill of depression.

Lewton’s Greenwich Village is a modern Dantean underworld, a place where the search for a missing sister becomes a spiritual journey through sin, penance, and the hope dashed by no salvation.

The cult of the Palladists, with their pacifist facade and insidious psychological cruelty, externalizes the internal struggle of suicidal ideation: their whispered urgings to Jacqueline to end her life echo the relentless, destructive voices of depression itself. The infamous scene in which a poisoned chalice is pressed upon her, the day’s light shifting as the group takes turns persuading her to drink, becomes a ritualized dramatization of despair, the cult acting as the personification of every dark thought and voice that seeks to erode the will to live.

The film’s final passages are as poetic as they are devastating. Jacqueline’s encounter with her neighbor Mimi – a woman dying of tuberculosis who longs for one more night of laughter and life- serves as a mirror to Jacqueline’s own longing for oblivion.

When Mimi leaves for her last dance, the camera lingers on the empty chair and the noose, and the sound of the chair’s fall is the film’s closing punctuation: a stark, unblinking acknowledgment of the tragedy of self-destruction. As Jacqueline’s voice repeats the line from John Donne-“I run to death, and death meets me as fast / And all my pleasures are like yesterday”– the film crystallizes into a dark, existential fable where death is not a monster but an ever-present shadow, a seductive promise, and, for some, tragically a final act of agency.

In The Seventh Victim, Lewton does not sensationalize horror; instead, he renders it with the quiet, inexorable force of a tide pulling souls into darkness, making the film not just a tale of cults and murder, but a haunting meditation on loneliness, mental health, and the fragile boundary between longing for life and surrendering to death.

#68 down, 82 to go! Your EverLovin’ Joey, formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl!

Postcards from Shadowland Halloween Edition 2020 –

The Unknown Terror (1957)

The Golem (1920)

The Man from Planet X (1951)

Woman in the Moon (1931)

Four Sided Triangle (1953)

Doctor X (1932)

Häxan (1922)

City of the Dead aka Horror Hotel (1960)

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)

Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957)

It Came from Outer Space (1953)

The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)

Not of this Earth (1957)

Terror is a Man (1959)

The Giant Claw (1957)

Nosferatu (1922)

Dracula 1931

Dracula (1931)

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)

Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943)

Left to right: Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Evelyn Ankers, Joan Davis and Richard Carlson in HOLD THAT GHOST (1941), directed by Arthur Lubin.

The Thing from Another World (1951)

The Most Dangerous Game (1932)

Son of Frankenstein (1939)

Corridors of Blood (1958)

The Seventh Victim (1943)

The Queen of Spades (1949)

It Conquered the World (1956)

The Invisible Man Returns (1940)

The Raven (1932)

House of Dracula (1945)

Isle of the Dead (1945)

The Bad Seed (1956)

13 Ghosts (1960)

Horror Island (1941)

The Last Man on Earth (1964)

 

Chapter 4 – Queers and Dykes in the Dark: Classic, Noir & Horror Cinema’s Coded Gay Characters:

CODED CLASSIC HORROR THEORY “The Uncanny & The Other”

“Scenes of excessive brutality and gruesomeness must be cut to an absolute minimum.”

“As a cultural index, the pre-Code horror film gave a freer rein to psychic turmoil and social disorientation because it possessed a unique freedom from censorship… the Hays Office admits that under the Code it is powerless to take a stand on the subject of ‘gruesomeness.‘(Thomas Doherty)

Horror films in particular have made for a fascinating case study in the evolving perceptions of queer presence; queer-horror filmmakers and actors were often forced to lean into the trope of the “predatory queer” or the “monstrous queer” to claim some sense of power through visibility and blatant expressions of sexuality.- Essential Queer Horror Films by Jordan Crucciola-2018

Though Hollywood execs refused to show explicit queerness, they were willing to pay for scripts that dealt with characters who were social outcasts and sexually non-normative. The horror genre is perhaps the most iconic coded queer playground, which seems to have an affinity with homosexuality because of its apparatus of ‘otherizing’ and the inherent representation of difference. The horror genre crosses over boundaries that include transgressions between heterosexuality and queerness. The villain, fiend, or monster plays around with a variety of elements that, while usually separate, might merge male and female gender traits.

The horror film, in particular, found its place asserting a queer presence on screen. The narratives often embraced tropes of the “˜predatory queer’ or the “˜monstrous queer’ in order to declare themselves visible while cinematic queers were elbowed out of the way. Filmmakers had to maneuver their vision in imaginative ways to subvert the structure laid out for them by the Code.

As Harry M. Benshoff explains in his book Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality in the Horror Film, “Immediately before and during the years of World War II, Universal Studio’s horror films began to employ a more humanistic depiction of their monsters,” and the films of Val Lewton, like Cat People, reflected “a growing awareness of homosexuality, homosexual communities, and the dynamics of homosexual oppression as it was played out in society and the military.” So even though Hollywood execs refused to show explicit queerness, during the first true horror boom in American cinema, they were willing to pay for stories about social outcasts and sexually nonnormative figures. Horror fans thus found themselves awash in some of the genre’s most iconic queer-coded characters of all time.

On a Greek Island, Boris Karloff plays Gen. Nikolas Pherides in Val Lewton/Mark Robson’s Isle of the Dead, 1945. Driven insane by the belief that Thea (Ellen Drew), who suffers from catalepsy, is the embodiment of an evil vampiric force, is a demon called a vorvolaka. Lewton drew on collective fears, and all his work had an undercurrent of queer panic and a decipherable sign of homophobia.

The Vorvolaka has beset the island with plague. Thea- “Laws can be wrong, and laws can be cruel, and the people who live only by the law are both wrong and cruel.”

The Pre-Code era was exploding with American horror films that reflected the angst, social unrest, and emotional distress that audiences were feeling. Personified in films that used graphic metaphors to act as catharsis, the images were often filled with rage, as Thomas Doherty calls it ‘the quality of gruesomeness, cruelty and vengefulness’. Think of the angry mobs with their flaming torches who hunt down Frankenstein’s monster, eventually crucifying him like a sacrificial embodiment of their fury. James Whale’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 1931 was a smash hit for Universal. Other studios were trying to ride the wave of the awakening genre of the horror picture. Paramount released director Rouben Mamoulian’s adaptation of the novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, published in 1886. The film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which was released in 1931, stars Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins. During the Pre-Code period, many horror films proposed grisly subject matter that would shock and mesmerize the audience. For example, actor/director Irving Pichel’s The Most Dangerous Game (1932) starring Joel McCrea, Leslie Banks, and Fay Wray.

In 1932 Michael Curtiz directed Doctor X starring Lionel Atwill who would become one of the leading mad scientists of the genre.

Michael Curtiz’s macabre horror/fantasy experiment of homosocial ‘men doing science’, crossing over into profane territories and embracing dreadful taboos!

All scenes below are from Dr. X (1932).

Fay Wray is Atwill’s daughter who is the only woman surrounded by a group of scientific nonconformists.

The adaptation of Bram Stoker’s story of the Eastern European incubus was interpreted by Tod Browning in Dracula 1931, immortalized by Hungarian stage actor Bela Lugosi with his iconic cape and mesmerizing stare. While his nightly visitations were blood-driven and cinematically sexual in nature, there is a very homoerotic element to his influence over Renfield (Dwight Frye) and his gaze of gorgeous David Manners as John Harker.

Bela Lugosi looks down upon David Manners in a scene from the film ‘Dracula’, 1931. (Photo by Universal/Getty Images)

Robert Florey directed the macabre Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe. And a film that has no connection to Poe’s story but in the name is one of the most transgressive, disturbing horror films, rampant with vile taboos, such as necrophilia, incest, sadism, satanism, and flaying a man alive, is the unorthodox The Black Cat (1934). The film stars Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, one of four pictures they would do together. A pair of enemies who have a score to settle, ghosts of a past war, and stolen love all take place against the backdrop of a stylish Bauhaus set design and high-contrast lighting.

Paramount released Murders in the Zoo (1933) with Lionel Atwill, a sadistic owner of a zoo who uses wild animals to ravage and kill off any of his wife’s (Kathleen Burke) suitors. Kathleen Burke is well known as the panther girl in Erle C. Kenton’s horrifically disturbing Island of Lost Souls 1932, an adaptation of master fantasy writer H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau. Incidentally, Welles, Laughton, and his wife, Elsa Lanchester, had been good friends earlier on, before the filming of Lost Souls. The film stars Charles Laughton as the unorthodox, depraved scientist who meddles with genetics and nature. He creates gruesome human/animals, torturing them with vivisection in his ‘house of pain.’ The film also stars Richard Arlen, Leila Hyams, and Bela Lugosi as The Sayer of the Law.

In 1933, King Kong showed a giant ape grasping the half-naked object of his affection, with unmentionable connotations of bestiality between the ape and Fay Wray. With scenes of Wray writhing in his gigantic paws, he lusts after her until his desire kills him. It’s almost like fantasy noir: the object of your desire will ultimately kill you!

The 1930s and 1940s Fear the Queer Monsters:

Re-assessing the Hitchcock Touch; by Wieland Schwanebeck -As Rhona Berenstein asserts, the horror genre “provides a primary arena for sexualities and practices that fall outside the purview of patriarchal culture, and the subgeneric tropes of the unseen, the host and the haunted house.”

By the same token, Kendra Bean concludes that Mrs. Danvers is portrayed as “a wraith; a sexual predator who is out to make Mrs. de Winter her next victim.”

Queer characters in horror films during the early period, reveal similarities between Mrs. Danvers and the staging of earlier sapphic characters, such as Gloria Holdens’s well-known portrayal of Countess Marya Zaleska in Dracula’s Daughter 1936. Yet, similar to the self-discipline of Mrs. Danvers, Dracula’s Daughter remains a figure of primacy and pity Ellis Hanson argues Dracula’s Daughter presents “the possibilities of a queer Gothic” early on in Hollywood history, “rich in all the paradox and sexual indeterminacy the word queer and the word Gothic imply.

There was a revival of the horror craze during the period of WWII. The Hollywood studios, both major and ‘Poverty Row” like Monogram and Republic, realized that horror movies were a lucrative business. The studios began to revisit the genre, looking for not only fresh formulas but they resurrected the classic monsters, dropping them into new plots. They also envisioned uniting gangster films with horror films, and this homogenizing led to a ‘queering’ of the two styles that demonstrated phallocentric ( guns, scientific penetration) and homoerotic themes and images into a sub-genre.

Public awareness of homosexuality reached a new height during these years, primarily due to the new set of social conditions wrought by war. Slowly , the love that dare not speak its name was being spoken, albeit in ways almost always obscurantist, punitive and homophobic. The linkage of homosexuality with violence and disease remained strong. Monsters in the Closet -Harry Benshoff

Rhona Berenstein, in her insightful book Attack of the Leading Ladies points out that films featuring the mad scientist trope operate with the homosocial principle, which speaks of the homoeroticism of males working together in consort subverting science together as a group of men who hide behind their objectification -the female object of their gaze, are in fact, figures of objectification themselves. They are simultaneously homosocial, homoerotic, and homophobic in aspect; … potentially possessing an extra-normative commitment between the two men.

Mad Doctor movies are homosocial in nature. The Mad Doctor movie is a subgenre that, below the surface, glorifies intimate male camaraderie and male homosexuality, and by the close of the picture, society, the prevailing culture, must, in turn, annihilate that which is repressed. However, it is not exclusively a vehicle to express homosexuality through homosocial interactions. There is a component not only of male bonding, but also a world without women; the thrust is a synthesis of misogyny and patriarchal tyranny and oppression of women. Homosocial relationships between men in these science horrors show the man’s desire for connection to other men, even one created by his own hand.

According to Twitchell in his Dreadful Pleasures and Attack of the Leading Ladies, Rona Berenstein, Colin Clive as Dr. Frankenstein in all three Universal pictures, was at least performing bisexuality. Whale’s 1933 Frankenstein might give way to the homosocial realm of the mad scientist trope of ‘homoerotic indulgence’ as these men exclude women from the pursuit of their fulfillment. Twitchell views the scientist’s fluid sexuality in order to examine the concept of a man controlling women’s primacy of giving birth. This might explain Dr. Frankenstein’s venture into unnatural reproduction—a process he wants to divert to himself without women’s exclusive right to motherhood. In the scene where he is as close to giving birth to a full-grown man, he seems to display sexual arousal when his creation comes to life. Henry Frankenstein provokes nature and defies his heterosexuality. As Whale was an openly gay director in Hollywood, it can be pondered whether he knew exactly what he was suggesting. Thesiger’s sexually ambiguous, or okay, not so ambiguous Dr. Pretorius, the mad scientist who pressures Henry Frankenstein to revitalize his experiments and create a mate for the monster. Pretorius is the scientist who insists that Henry continue his creative efforts in Bride of Frankenstein. Vitto Russo called Thesiger, a “man who played the effete sissy”¦ with much verve and wit.”

George Zucco, like Lionel Atwill, often portrayed the unorthodox scientist who flirted with taboos. He plays mad scientist Dr. Alfred Morris in The Mad Ghoul (1943) As a university chemistry professor, he exploits medical student Ted Allison (David Bruce) with his experimental gas that transforms Ted into a malleable, yielding macabre ghoul, whom Morris directs to kill and remove the victim’s hearts using the serum to temporarily bring Ted back from his trance like death state. David Bruce’s character is represented as a ‘queer’ sort of young man. He is not quite masculine and is unable to get his girlfriend, Evelyn Ankers, to fall in love with him. As the Mad Ghoul, he becomes a monstrous queer.

In 1932, director Tod Browning’s Dracula was based on Bram Stoker’s story of a fiendish vampire who, in a sexually implicit way, violates his victims by penetrating them with his fangs. The story pushed the boundaries of storytelling, and there was an inherent subtext of ‘queer’ ravishment when he sucks the blood of Dwight Frye to make him his loyal servant.

In Jonathan Harker’s Journal, the protagonist recounts his impressions of his interaction with the vampire, Dracula “As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me I could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which do what I would, I could not conceal.” For (Noël Carroll) the entry in his diary conveys revulsion by the Count’s closeness and offensive presence, which causes him to become sickened.

But it also could be read that Harker’s ‘shudder’ is not about his revulsion, but rather, an uncontrolled sexual response to the vampire’s looming over him, which could be interpreted not just as hunger for his ‘blood’ but an expression of repressed sexual desire and the fear it causes.

Horror movies have always pushed the boundaries of normalcy, by virtue of the fact that these films are inhabited by ‘monsters’, something ‘queerly’ different. And it is natural to observe two diverging responses to the impact of the horror genre and often, its persecution of what is ‘different’ and the source of what causes our anxiety.

Dracula may appear as the image of a man, but the count is far from human. While monsters in classical horror films are based on systems of maleness, they are split from being actual men. Although there are physical interactions and suggestive contact with the heroine, there isn’t the foundation of heterosexuality, but something quite deviant within their aggressively erotic encounters and/or assaults. The understanding of sexuality and the most narrow identifications that are assigned to varying orientations in a large sense is not translatable for the deeper layers of the monster and their relationship to their victims. In Hollywood, horror films can be seen as heterosexuality being invaded by an abhorrent outside force; inherent in the underlying message could be racism, classism, sexism, and gay panic. Though it can be interpreted as a landscape of heterosexuality that is in the full power of its universal presence, horror films are perfect platforms that can illustrate the collapse of heterosexuality and the subversion of sexuality.

The horror genre is a breeding ground for portrayals of the shattering of heterosexual power. This can be seen in Lambert Hillyer’s Dracula’s Daughter (1936) starring Gloria Holden as the sapphic vampire who lives in a New Village-type artist’s den, which signals her outsider status from domesticity and normalcy.

In White Zombie (1932), Bela Lugosi plays the eerily menacing Legendre. He turns men into lifeless workers who run the sugar mill. Legendre also begins to turn the plantation owner, Charles Beaumont (Robert Frazer), into one of his zombies. His motivation for his control over people is ambiguous, though there seems to be sexual reasoning for both the beautiful Madeline (Madge Bellamy) and Beaumont. In the scene where Beaumont is nearly paralyzed, Legendre’s control over his male victim parallels the sexual entrapment of the movie’s heroine.

MAD LOVE (1935) I have conquered science! Why can’t I conquer love?

Karl Freund’s Grand Guignol Mad Love (1935) shifts from gazing at the female to gazing at the male. Here, the focus is on Peter Lorre in his American screen debut as Dr. Gogol, who has an obsession with Frances Drake as Yvonne Orlac, an actress who works at the Grand Guignol Theatre. To Gogol, she is the typified defenseless heroine whom he tries to lure away from her husband, Stephen (Colin Clive), using his knowledge of scientific alchemy.

Though Gogol tries to become Yvonne’s master, his Galatea, there are critics who read the struggle between the two men as not just a rivalry for Yvonne’s love but Gogol’s desire for Stephen as well. Gogol is responsible for grafting new hands onto Stephen’s mangled body after a train crash. Mad Love could fit the criteria for the subgenre of science/horror films where the male gaze is diverted from the female object toward other men, in this case, what connected the two was the preservation of Stephen’s hands. Why, then, is it not possible that the focus could shift from Gogol’s attraction to Yvonne to the homosocial dynamics between Gogol as a doctor and his subject, Stephen?

Mad Love possesses some of the horror genre’s most tenacious performances of gender play. (Carol Clover) asks us to take a closer look at Freund’s film. It is less about the “suffering experienced by women, but at a deeper, more sustained level, it is dedicated to the unspeakable terrors endured by men.”

In a similar fashion to Waldo Lydecker’s (Laura) and Hardy Cathcart’s (The Dark Corner) pathology of objectifying Laura and Mari, Gogol worships Yvonne – his Galatea, with a measure of scopophilia that lies within his gaze upon the perfection of female beauty. To control and possess it. The pleasure is aroused by the mere indulgence of looking at her.

Gogol pays 75 francs to purchase the wax statue of Galatea. The seller remarks, “There’s queer people on the streets of Montmartre tonight.”

Gogol’s maid, Francoise, talks to the statue, “Whatever made him bring you here. There’s never been any woman in this house except maybe me… “I prefer live ones to dead ones.”

A Time Magazine review of Mad Love in 1933 notes this queer appeal directly, even comparing Lorre’s acting skills to those of another homosexual coded actor: I find the comment about their faces rude and insulting to both Lorre and Laughton, both of whom I am a tremendous fan.

Mad Love’s insane doctor is feminized throughout the film… In fact, the same reporter who noted Gogol’s sadism argues for his feminine demeanor: “Lorre, perfectly cast, uses the technique popularized by Charles Laughton of suggesting the most unspeakable obsessions by the roll of a protuberant eyeball, an almost feminine mildness of tone, an occasional quiver of thick lips set flat in his cretinous ellipsoidal face. This reviewer came closer than any other to articulate the subtext of mad doctor movies. He seems on the verge of noting that Lorre, Like Laughton is an effeminate madman obsessed by unspeakable homosocial desire. Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender Sexuality and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema by Rhona Berenstein.

Frances Drake’s heroine masquerades as a wife who deludes herself into believing that her husband is more masculine than he really is. Gogol has a curious empathy with Stephen, whom he touches frequently and prolonged. Although Gogol pursues the heroine, Yvonne, at the theater, forcing a kiss on her, his focus is primarily manipulating Stephen’s body, rejoining his hands and massaging them to stimulate life back into them. When he realizes that Stephen’s hands cannot be grafted back successfully to his wrists, he turns to another man, the hands of a knife thrower who was executed as a notorious murderer. Once Stephen recovers from the surgery, he can no longer continue as a concert pianist, but does develop the desire to throw sharp knives.

On the surface, the plot of Mad Love appears to be a heterosexual obsession; the most unspoken context is the connection between Gogol and Stephen. As is true of Frankenstein’s labor of love in Whale’s first film, Gogol sews men’s body parts together, and the result is a monster of sorts. (Berenstein)

In the film’s climax, Yvonne hides in Gogol’s bedroom and pretends to be the wax statue of Galatea. When Gogol touches the statue, she lets out a scream. In a euphoric daze (as in the original story), he believes that he has the power to bring Galatea’s statue to life. Yvonne begs him to let her go as he tries to strangle her.

Stephen then rushes to his wife and holds her in his arms. With his eyes fixed on the offscreen space in which Gogol’s body lies, he croons: “My darling.” The homosocial desire is destroyed when Stephen murders Gogol who intones, “Each man kills the thing he loves”“” echoing on the soundtrack.

In the film’s closing moments, the secret desire is finally spoken out loud…Has Stephen killed the man he loves? Given that the phrase that Gogol mutters was written originally by Oscar Wilde, whose homosexuality scandalized the British social and legal system in 1895, reading the homosocial desire into Mad Love within the very last moments, we are left to decipher the suspended cues. We are left with Stephen’s gazing at Gogol’s face and his knifed body as he lay dying, he speaks the words, “˜My darling” while the camera frames the two men sharing that moment in the closing scene.

The mad doctor narrative is particularly predisposed to homosocial impulses. “intense male homosocial desire as at once the most compulsory and the most prohibited of social bonds” – Epistemology of the Closet (Sedgwick)

Sedgwick investigated early fantasy/horror novels, Shelley’s Frankenstein 1818, Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 1886, and Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau 1895. At the beginning of the 1930s, these stories centered around mad doctors who delved into unorthodox, profane explorations and were all adapted to the screen. All of these nefarious or scientific, inquisitive men cultivated secret experiments, challenging the laws of nature. What Sedgwick found was that the Gothic literary representations of men performing homosocial collaborations were ‘not socially sanctioned and shunned.’

It was considered a necessary narrative element as well as a monstrous possibility that threatened to subvert the status quo. The combination of these two attitudes is expressed in homosocial narratives- male bonding is both horrifying and guaranteed, entailing the simultaneous introjection and expulsion of femininity. (Sedgwick)

“My darling”…

James Whale was a gay auteur who often imbued his work intentionally or with the ‘intentional fallacy’ of a ‘queer’ sense of dark humor. This comical, campy absurdity was always on the edge of his vision of horror and subtle profanity. His picture, The Invisible Man (1933), adapted from H.G. Wells’s story and starring Claude Rains, was classified as a horror film by the Code.

Dr. Jack Griffin (Rains), the antihero, is a frenzied scientist addicted to his formula as he seeks the ability to make himself invisible. His sanity begins to ‘vanish’ as his hunger for power, delusions of grandeur, and bursts of megalomania grow out of control. He plans on assassinating government officials, and he becomes more belligerent the longer he turns invisible. The idea that he displays radical ideas and runs around in the nude didn’t seem to arouse the censors; in 1933, a letter from James Wingate to Hays states, “highly fantastic and exotic [sic] vein, and presents no particular censorship difficulties.”

What’s interesting about the presentation of the story is that the coded gay leitmotifs were paraded out, right under the Code’s noses, and didn’t stir any indignation for its ‘queer’ humor.

Gloria Stuart and Claude Rains in James Whale’s The Invisible Man 1933

The Invisible Man perpetrates campy assaults on all the ‘normal’ people in his way, with intervals of sardonic cackles and golden wit and, at the same time, a menacing reflection of light and shadow. Claude Rains is a concealed jester who makes folly of his victims.

“An invisible man can rule the world. Nobody will see him come, nobody will see him go. He can hear every secret. He can rob, and wreck, and kill.” –Dr. Jack Griffin (The Invisible Man)

Claude Rains plays Dr. Jack Griffin, an outsider (a favorite of James Whale’s characters) who discovers the secret of invisibility, which changes him from a mild yet arrogant scientist into a maniacal killer. The film bears much of Whale’s campy sense of humor, with Griffin’s comic shenanigans abound until things turn dark and he becomes uncontrollably violent. “We’ll begin with a reign of terror, a few murders here and there, Murders of great men, Murders of little men, just to show we make no distinction. I might even wreck a train or two… just these fingers around a signalman’s throat, that’s all.”

According to Gary Morris (Bright Lights Film Journal), ‘The film demands crypto-faggot reading in poignant scenes such as the one where he reassures his ex-girlfriend, who begs him to hide from the authorities: “the whole world’s my hiding place. I can stand out there amongst them in the day or night and laugh at them.”

Though Griffin’s (Claude Rains) character is unseen at times, there are potent moments when he is animated as he skips to the tune, “Here we go gathering nuts in May,” flitting around like a fairy.

It is suggested that The Invisible Man is a metaphor for the way homosexuals are seen/not seen by society – as “effeminate, dangerous when naked, seeking a male partner in “crime,” tending to idolize his fiance rather than love her, and becoming ‘visible’ only when shot by the police…monitored by doctors, and heard regretting his sin against God (i.e., made into a statistic by the three primary forces oppressing queers: the law, the medical establishment, and religious orthodoxy” (Sedgwick)

The Invisble Man [undressing] “They’ve asked for it, the country bumpkins. This will give them a bit of a shock, something to write home about. A nice bedtime story for the kids, too, if they want it”

Continue reading “Chapter 4 – Queers and Dykes in the Dark: Classic, Noir & Horror Cinema’s Coded Gay Characters:”

A Symphony of Dark Patches- The Val Lewton Legacy 1943

This post is a feature…As part of the CLASSIC MOVIE HISTORY PROJECT BLOGATHON hosted by the fantastic gang over at- Movies Silently, Silver Screenings & Once Upon a Screen– Visit these wonderful blogs during this historic event and fill your head with a collection of fascinating movie memories.

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From Dreams of Darkness-Fantasy and the films of Val Lewton by J.P. Telotte:
“{The audience} will populate the darkness with more horrors than all the horror writers in Hollywood could think of… if you make the screen dark enough, the mind’s eye will read anything into it you want. We’re great ones for dark patches.” – Val Lewton

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Jane Randolph as Alice Moore in Val Lewton’s Cat People 1942 directed by Jacques Tourneur.
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A scene from Bedlam (1946) directed by Mark Robson.

During the 1940s Val Lewton and his ‘Lewton Unit’ used the essential vision of fantastic darkness to recreate a very unique style of horror/fantasy genre, one which challenged Hollywood’s notion of the tangible monsters Universal studios had been manufacturing. Lewton, while working at RKO Studios, produced an exquisite, remarkable and limited collection of films that came face to face with a ‘nightworld.’ Lewton used our most deepest darkest psychological and innate fears that dwell within the lattice of shadows of our dreams and secret wish-fulfillment.

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“Our formula is simple. A love story, three scenes of suggested horror and one of actual violence. Fade out” -Val Lewton

Lewton worked at MGM between 1926 and 1932 and then served eight years under David Selznick. He had published nine novels and a number of short stories. In addition he produced regular radio show versions of MGM films. He also had ties in the industry as his aunt was the very influential silent actress Alla Nazimova.

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the great stage and silent screen actress Alla Nazimova-Val Lewton’s very influential aunt…

But Lewton had left his mark with Selznick and in 1940 rival company RKO was interested in hiring him..It was actually Selznick who negotiated Lewton’s contract.

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“My task is to initiate a programme of horror pictures to be made at the comparatively low cost of 125,000 each. Which should compete successfully with Universal horror films. Which cost anywhere from 300,000 to a million dollars. I feel I can do this quite easily and the Universal people spend a lot of money on their horror product. But not much on brains or imagination.”-Val Lewton

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Lewton put together a team of collaborators with whom he would work closely. He chose Mark Robson to edit. Robert Wise and Lewton worked together on Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. DeWitt Bodeen had worked with him during his time with David O’ Selznick was to write the first screenplay for Cat People. His old friend Jacques Tourneur whom he became friends with while working on A Tale of Two Cities. was brought on board to direct. He chose Nicholas Musuraca as his director of photography and Roy Webb to compose the musical scores. They all worked on countless RKO films. It was Lewton’s intention to create quality pictures though he was constrained by a low budget. Jacques Tourneur had said that Lewton was an idealist who had his head up in the clouds and would come up with impossible ideas. However for Tourneur, his feet were planted firmly on the ground, yet somehow they complemented each other perfectly, Tourneur claims it was a very happy time in his life, and that Lewton’s gift to him was the filmic poetry that he was able to carry with him forever.

Jacques Tourneur is perhaps one of my favorite directors, with his use of shadow and all together dreamy lens of the world, he’s responsible for one of THE best classic horror films Curse of the Demon & film noir tour de force Out of the Past.

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Jacques Tourneur directs Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer in Out of the Past 1947.
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Jacques Tourneur’s moody horror with Niall MacGinnis and cat Curse of the Demon 1957.
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Part of the Lewton Unit- image from the documentary The Man in the Shadows from top left Roy Webb composer, Val Lewton, Nicholas Musuraca Cinematographer, Mark Robson editing/directing, DeWitt Bodeen writing, and Robert Wise-director.

“Horror is created in the mind of the spectator. It’s necessary to suggest things. In all my films you never saw what caused the horror. I saw people screaming in the theater when there was a young girl in a swimming pool, but you never saw the black leopard. The lights blaze up at the end. And there’s Simone Simon. Something has definitely happened. -Jacques Tourneur

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Jacques Tourneur looking over the film sketches.
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Jacques Tourneur on location for Berlin Express 1948.

“Lewton gave us something quite different than what’s known as Hollywood craftsmanship you can say that he presented us with a parallel world in which everything feels both real and a little unreal-familiar but strange. The characters and the viewer slip into a mysterious, troubling gray zone. Where real life and dream life come face to face. And where beauty and destruction merge. Lewton and Tourneur really created a new kind of cinematic beauty”-from The Man in the Shadows Val Lewton documentary

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the golden boy from Bedlam

Learning from his last employer Selznick he made sure to supervise absolutely every aspect of the film’s production, from casting, set design, costumes, direction, and editing. He even rewrote every script himself without taking credit or under a pseudonym. In this way he developed his own visual style of storytelling, having prepared each detail before shooting.

“My feelings are generated, however by more than my gratitude for that first opportunity. They come from the warm and highly stimulating creative experience I had working with Val. He taught me so much about directing and filmmaking in general…Val Lewton was one of that fairly rare species, a truly creative producer. As such, he was able to achieve an outstanding reputation for the high quality, unusual and interesting “B” pictures he produced at RKO Studios starting in the early 1940s” Robert Wise, March 1994

Robert Wise behind the camera
Robert Wise behind the camera
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Robert Wise, Mark Robson & Val Lewton

“I remember him staying up until all hours of the night working on screenplays. He enjoyed having his hand in the writing. I used to that that he went out of his way to pick inept writers so that he’d have to redo their work. He used to write on a Royal typewriter;he used only two fingers but he was very fast. He’d talk out the different parts as he wrote them and, since my bed was just on the other side of the wall, I’d fall asleep listening.”Nina Lewton Druckman from the Reality of Terror by Joel Siegel

Robert Wise was part of the Lewton Unit, one of my favorite directors who would go on to direct some of the most outstanding films in a variety of genres, from musicals like West Side Story 1961, and Sound of Music 1965, to Lewton’s Curse of The Cat People 1944 and The Body Snatcher 1945, noir masterpieces, Born To Kill 1947, The Set Up 1949 and The House of Telegraph Hill 1950, I Want to Live! 1958, Odds Against Tomorrow 1959, to sci-fi and Gothic ghost story masterpieces Day the Earth Stood Still 1951, The Haunting 1963, and The Andromeda Strain 1971.

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Michael Rennie and Gort in Robert Wise’s Sci-Fi masterpiece The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
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Robert Wise’s boxing noir The Set-Up 1949

Lewton drove himself very hard trying to achieve something beautiful and of high quality. He and his team were given a very small budget, a cast of veritable unknowns, and evocative titles that were sensationalist and lurid in nature and did not truly represent an accurate account of the narrative. There were no gruesome fiends nor even evidence of malevolent forces at work in his ordinary everyday environments. Yet RKO’s studio head Charles Koerner dictated such titles as Cat People 1942, Curse of the Cat People 1944, Bedlam 1946, Isle of the Dead 1946, The Body Snatcher 1945, I Walked With A Zombie, The Ghost Ship, and The Leopard Man in 1943 and The Seventh Victim.

“If you want to get out now, Lewton told Bodeen, I won’t hold it against you.”

Continue reading “A Symphony of Dark Patches- The Val Lewton Legacy 1943”

Heroines & Scream Queens of Classic Horror: the 1940s! A very special Drive In Hall–ween treat!

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THE WOMEN OF CLASSIC HORROR: THE 1940S!

You could say that Evelyn Ankers is still the reigning queen of classical 1940s horror fare turned out by studios like RKO, Universal, and Monogram. But there was a host of femme scream tales that populated the silver screen with their unique beauty, quirky style, and/or set of lungs ready to wail, faint, or generally add some great tone and tinge to the eerie atmosphere whenever the mad scientist or monster was afoot. Some were even monstrous themselves…

For this upcoming Halloween, I thought I’d show just a little love to those fabulous ladies who forged a little niche for themselves as the earliest scream queens & screen icons.

ELSA LANCHESTER 1902-1986

I’m including Elsa Lanchester because any time I can talk about this deliriously delightful actress I’m gonna do it. Now I know she was the screaming hissing undead bride in the 30s but consider this… in the 40s she co-starred in two seminal thrillers that bordered on shear horror as Mrs. Oates in The Spiral Staircase 1945 and a favorite of mine as one of Ida Lupino’s batty sisters Emily Creed in Ladies in Retirement 1941

I plan on venturing back to the pre-code thirties soon, so I’ll talk about The Bride of Frankenstein, as well as Gloria Holden (Dracula’s Daughter, Frances Dade (Dracula) and Kathleen Burke (Island of Lost Souls) Gloria Stuart and Fay Wray and so many more wonderful actresses of that golden era…

Elsa Lanchester in The Spiral Staircase
Elsa Lanchester as Mrs.Oates in director Robert Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase 1945
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The Sister Creed in Ladies in Retirement 1941 starring Elsa Lanchester, Ida Lupino, and the wonderful Edith Barrett (right)

ANNE NAGEL  1915-1956

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the playfully pretty Anne Nagel.
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Anne Nagel & Lon Chaney Jr in a promo shot for Man Made Monster
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Anne Nagel was strapped to the slab and at the mercy of the ever-mad Lionel Atwill. Here comes the glowing Lon Chaney Jr! in his electric rubber suit in Man Made Monster!

The depraved mad scientist Lionel Atwill working with electro biology pins gorgeous red-headed Anne Nagel playing June Lawrence, to his operating slab in Man Made Monster 1941. Lon Chaney Jr. comes hulking in all aglow as the ‘Electrical Man’ which was his debut for Universal. He carries Anne Nagel through the countryside all lit up like a lightning bug in rubber armor. Man Made Monster isn’t the only horror shocker that she displayed her tresses & distresses. She also played a night club singer named Sunny Rogers also co-starring our other 40’s horror heroine icon Anne Gwynne in the Karloff/Lugosi pairing Black Friday in 1940.

She played the weeping Mrs.William Saunders, the wife of Lionel Atwill’s first victim in Mad Doctor of Market Street 1942. And then of course she played mad scientist Dr Lorenzo Cameron’s (George Zucco’s) daughter Lenora in The Mad Monster 1942. Dr. Cameron has succeeded with his serum in turning men into hairy wolf-like Neanderthal monsters whom he unleashes on the men who ruined his career.

Anne Nagel and Lionel Atwill Mad Doctor of Market Street
Anne Nagel and Lionel Atwill Mad Doctor of Market Street.

Poor Anne had a very tragic life… Considered that sad girl who was always hysterical. Once Universal dropped her she fell into the Poverty Row limbo of bit parts. Her brief marriage to Ross Alexander ended when he shot himself in the barn in 1937, and Anne became a quiet alcoholic until her death from cancer in 1966.

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Lon Chaney Jr and Anne Nagel Man Made Monster

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Dr. Cameron’s daughter Lenora (Anne Nagel) discovers the wolf-like man in his laboratory in The Mad Monster.
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Glenn Strange as Petro the Hairy man in The Mad Monster 1942.

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the sultry Anne Nagel and Bela Lugosi in Black Friday 1940 photo courtesy Dr. Macro.

MARTHA VICKERS- 1925-1971

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the beauty of Martha Vickers.

Martha was in noir favorites The Big Sleep 1946 & Alimony 1949. This beauty played an uncredited Margareta ‘Vazec’s Daughter’along side Ilona Massey as Baroness Elsa Frankenstein and the marvelous older beauty Maria Ouspenskaya as Maleva the gypsy! in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man 1943. Then she played heroine Dorothy Coleman in Captive Wild Woman 1943 and Miss McLean in The Mummy’s Ghost 1944.

Originally Martha MacVickar she started modeling for photographer William Mortenson. David O Selznick contracted the starlet but Universal took over and put in her bit parts as the victim in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and in other ‘B’ guilty pleasures like Captive Wild Woman & The Mummy’s Ghost. She was also the pin-up girl for WWII magazines.

Martha also starred in other noir features such as Ruthless 1948 and The Big Bluff 1955. She was Mickey Rooney’s third wife.

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Martha Vickers and Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep photo courtesy of Dr. Macro.
Martha Vickers and Lon Chaney in Frankenstein Meets the wolf man
Martha Vickers and Lon Chaney in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.
Martha Vickers and John Carradine in Captive Wild Woman
Martha Vickers and John Carradine in Captive Wild Woman
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I just can’t resist Vicker’s sex appeal here she is again… Wow!

JANICE LOGAN 1915-1965

Though Logan made very few films including Opened By Mistake 1940, her contribution to women who kick-ass in horror films and don’t shrink like violets when there’s a big bald baddie coming after you with a net and a bottle of chloroform, makes you a pretty fierce contender even if you are only 7 inches tall! As Dr. Mary Robinson (Janice Logan), Logan held it all together while the men were scattering like mice from the menacing google eyed Dr. Cyclops played superbly by Albert Dekker.

FAY HELM  1909-2003

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Fay Helm as Nurse Strand with John Carradine in Captive Wild Woman.

Fay Helm played Ann Terry in one of my favorite unsung noir/thriller gems Phantom Lady 1944 where it was all about the ‘hat’ and she co-starred as Nurse Strand alongside John Carradine in Captive Wild Woman. Fay played Mrs. Duval in the Inner Sanctum mystery Calling Dr. Death with Lon Chaney Jr. 1943

Ella Raines and Fay Helm in Phantom Lady
Ella Raines and Fay Helm in Phantom Lady.

Fay Helm plays Jenny Williams in Curt Siodmak’s timeless story directed by George Waggner for Universal and starring son of a thousand faces Lon Chaney Jr in his most iconic role Larry Talbot as The Wolf Man 1941

Fay as Jenny Williams: “Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.”

Fay was in Night Monster 1942. Directed by Ford Beebe the film starred Bela Lugosi as a butler to Lionel Atwill a pompous doctor who falls prey to frightening nocturnal visitations. I particularly love the atmosphere of this little chiller with its swampy surroundings and its metaphysical storyline.

Dr. Lynn Harper (Irene Hervey- Play Misty For Me 1971) a psychologist is called to the mysterious Ingston Mansion, to evaluate the sanity of Margaret Ingston, played by our horror heroine Fay Helm daughter of Kurt Ingston (Ralph Morgan) a recluse who invites the doctors to his eerie mansion who left him in a wheelchair.

Fay gives a terrific performance surrounded by all the ghoulish goings on! She went on to co-star with Bela Lugosi and Jack Haley in the screwball scary comedy One Body Too Many (1944).

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Irene Hervey as Dr. Lynn Harper –Night Monster 1942.

Night Monster
Fay Helm in Night Monster.
Fay Helm with Bela the gypsy in The Wolf Man
Fay Helm with Bela the gypsy in The Wolf Man.

LOUISE CURRIE 1913-2013

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Ape Man Bela and Louise Currie

Ape Man and Louise stairs

Bela Lugosi as half ape half man really needed a shave badly in The Ape Man 1943, and Louise Currie and her wonder whip might have been the gorgeous blonde dish to make him go for the Barbasol. One of the most delicious parts of the film was its racy climax as Emil Van Horn in a spectacle of a gorilla suit rankles the cage bars longing for Currie’s character, Billie Mason the tall blonde beauty. As Bela skulks around the laboratory and Currie snaps her whip in those high heels. The film’s heroine was a classy dame referred to as Monogram’s own Katharine Hepburn! She had a great affection for fellow actor Bela Lugosi and said that she enjoyed making Poverty Row films more than her bit part in Citizen Kane! And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that she appeared in several serials, from both Universal & Republic like The Green Hornet and Captain Marvel.

Tom Weaver in his book Poverty Row HORRORS! described The Ape Man as “a Golden Turkey of the most beloved kind.”

Louise Currie followed up with another sensational title for Monogram as Stella Saunders in Voodoo Man 1944 which again features Lugosi as Dr. Richard Marlowe who blends voodoo with hypnosis in an attempt to bring back his dead wife. The film also co-stars George Zucco as a voodoo high priest and the ubiquitous John Carradine as Toby a bongo-playing half-wit “Don’t hurt her Grego, she’s a pretty one!”

Voodoo Man
Pat McKee as Grego, Louise Currie, John Carradine, and Bela Lugosi in Monogram’s Voodoo Man 1944.
Voodoo Man
the outrageous Voodoo Man 1944

Continue reading “Heroines & Scream Queens of Classic Horror: the 1940s! A very special Drive In Hall–ween treat!”

Postcards from Shadowland No. 8

Ace in The Hole 1951
Billy Wilder’s Ace in The Hole (1951) Starring Kirk Douglas and Jan Sterling
Brute Force
Jules Dassin’s prison noir masterpiece-Brute Force 1947 starring Burt Lancaster, Hume Cronyn, and Charles Bickford
citizen kane-
Orson Welles- Citizen Kane (1941) also starring Joseph Cotten
devil and daniel webster
William Dieterle’s The Devil and Daniel Webster 1941
hangover square
Directed by John Brahm-Hangover Square 1945 starring Laird Cregar , Linda Darnell and George Sanders
House by The River
Fritz Lang’s House By The River 1950 starring Louis Hayward, Lee Bowman and Jane Wyatt.
i cover waterfront-1933
I Cover the Waterfront 1933- Claudette Colbert, Ben Lyon and Ernest Torrence
Jewel Mayhew and Wills Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte
Robert Aldrich’s Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte 1964 starring Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Joseph Cotton, Mary Astor, Agnes Moorehead and Cecil Kellaway
Key Largo
John Huston’s Key Largo 1948 Starring Edward G Robinson, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall
Killers Kiss
Stanley Kubrick’s Killers Kiss 1955 Starring Frank Silvera and Irene Kane.
Lady from Shanghai(1947)
Orson Welles penned the screenplay and stars in iconic film noir The Lady from Shanghai 1947 featuring the sensual Rita Hayworth, also starring Everett Sloane
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Lady in a Cage 1964 directed by Walter Grauman and starring Olivia de Havilland, James Caan, and Jennifer Billingsley.
long dark hall
The Long Dark Hall 1951 Starring Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer
lorre M
Fritz Lang’s chilling M (1931) Starring Peter Lorre
Mark Robson The Seventh Victim
Mark Robson directs, Val Lewton’s occult shadow piece The Seventh Victim 1943 Starring Kim Hunter, Tim Conway and Jean Brooks
Meeting leo-Ace in the hole with leo 1951
Kirk Douglas in Ace In The Hole 1951 written and directed by Billy Wilder
mifune-and-yamamoto in Drunkin Angel 48
Akira Kurosawa’s film noir crime thriller Drunken Angel (1948) starring Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune
Panic in the Streets
Elia Kazan’s socio-noir Panic in The Streets 1950 starring Jack Palance, Richard Widmark, Paul Douglas, Barbara Bel Geddes and Zero Mostel
persona
Ingmar Bergman’s Persona 1966 starring Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson
Queen of Spades
The Queen of Spades 1949 directed by Thorold Dickinson and starring Anton Walbrook, Edith Evans and Yvonne Mitchell
Saint Joan of the Angels 1
Director Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s beautifully filmed Mother Joan of The Angels 1961 starring Lucyna Winnicka.
shanghai express
Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express 1932 Starring Marlene Dietrich, Clive Brook and Anna May Wong
The Devil and Daniel Webster
The Devil and Daniel Webster 1941
The Haunting
Robert Wise’s The Haunting 1963. Screenplay by Nelson Gidding based on the novel by Shirley Jackson. Starring Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, and Russ Tamblyn
the Unsuspected_1947
Michael Curtiz’s The Unsuspected 1947 starring Claude Rains, Joan Caulfield and Audrey Totter
Viridiana
Luis Bunuel’s Viridiana 1961 Starring Silvia Pinal, Fernando Rey and Fransisco Rabal
What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?
Robert Aldrich’s cult grande dame classic starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford-What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? 1962

Postcards From Shadowland No.6

The 49th Parallel (1949) Directed by Michael Powell and starring Leslie Howard and Laurence Olivier
La Belle et la Bête 1946 directed by Jean Cocteau starring Jean Marais and Josette Day
Beggars of Life 1928 staring Wallace Beery, Louise Brooks and Richard Arlen. Directed by William Wellman
Bunny Lake is Missing 1965 Directed by Otto Preminger. Starring Carol Lynley, Laurence Olivier, and Keir Dullea
La Main du Diable or Carnival of Sinners 1943 Directed by Maurice Tourneur and stars Pierre Fresnay, Josseline Gael and Noel Roquevert
The Devil and Daniel Webster 1941 Directed by William Dieterle and stars Walter Houston as Old Scratch, and Edward Arnold, Jane Darwell and Simone Simon.
Dracula’s Daughter 1936 directed by Lambert Hillyer and starring Gloria Holden, Otto Kruger and Marguerite Churchill
Experiment in Terror 1962 directed by Blake Edwards and starring Lee Remick, Glenn Ford, Stephanie Powers and a raspy Ross Martin as ‘Red’ Lynch
Fallen Angel 1945 Directed by Otto Preminger and starring Linda Darnell, Dana Andrews and Alice Faye
Fedra The Devil’s Daughter 1956 Directed by Manuel Mur Oti and stars Emma Penelia, Enrique Diosdado and Vicente Parra
Joan Crawford is Possessed 1947 directed by Curtis Bernhardt, also starring Van Heflin and Raymond Massey
Diaboliques 1955 directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot and starring Simone Signoret, Vera Clouzot and Paul Meurisse
Never Take Sweets From A Stranger 1960 Directed by Cyril Frankel and stars Gwen Watford, Patrick Allen and Felix Aylmer
The Night Holds Terror 1955 Directed by Andrew L. Stone starring Jack Kelly, Hildy Parks, Vince Edwards and John Cassavetes
Robert Mitchum is Harry Powell, in Night of The Hunter 1955 Directed by Charles Laughton also starring Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish
Plunder Road 1957 directed by Hubert Cornfield and stars Gene Raymond, Jeanne Cooper, Wayne Morris and Elisha Cook Jr.
Seance On a Wet Afternoon 1964 directed by Bryan Forbes and stars Kim Stanley, Richard Attenborough and Margaret Lacey
Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers On a Train 1951 starring Farley Granger, Robert Walker and Ruth Roman
Gloria Swanson is Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard 1950 Directed by Billy Wilder and starring William Holden and Erich von Stroheim
Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim 1943 Directed by Mark Robson and stars Kim Hunter, Tom Conway and Jean Brooks
Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi star in Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat 1934 inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s story.
The Killer Is Loose 1956 Directed by Budd Boetticher and stars Joseph Cotten, Rhonda Fleming and Wendell Corey
The Ox-Bow Incident 1943 Directed by William Wellman and stars Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Mary Beth Hughes and Anthony Quinn
The Prowler 1951 Directed by Joseph Losey and stars Evelyn Keyes and Van Heflin
The Queen of Spades 1949 Directed by Thorold Dickinson and stars Anton Walbrook, Edith Evans and Yvonne Mitchell
Lon Chaney stars in Tod Browning’s The Unknown 1927 also starring Joan Crawford and Norman Kerry.
Edward L. Cahn’s 1956 film The Werewolf
Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher 1928 inspired by Edgar Allan Poe and adapted for the screen by Luis Bunuel
Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) Based on a story by Sheridan Le Fanu. Starring Julian West, Maurice Schutz and Rena Mandel

Postcards From Shadowland No.2

BORN TO KILL (1947) Directed by Robert Wise starring Claire Trevor and Lawrence Tierney
CAGED (1950) Starring Eleanor Parker, Agnes Moorehead and Ellen Corby
The Cape Canaveral Monsters 1960
The Spiral Staircase 1945 directed by Robert Siodmak, Starring Dorothy McGuire, George Brent and Ethel Barrymore
Phantom Lady 1944 Directed by Robert Siodmak, starring Ella Raines, Franchot Tone and Elisha Cook Jr.
I Walked With A Zombie 1943 Produced by Val Lewton, directed by Jacques Tourneur, edited by Mark Robson, written for the screen by Curt Siodmak and starring Frances Dee, James Ellison and Tom Conway.
MAN HUNT 1941 directed by Fritz Lang, starring Walter Pidgeon, Joan Bennett and George Sanders
QUICKSAND 1950
The Naked Kiss 1964
PUSHOVER 1954 directed by Richard Quine, starring Kim Novak and Fred MacMurray
The Seventh Victim 1943 Produced by Val Lewton and directed by Mark Robson, starring Kim Hunter, Tom Conway and Jean Brooks.
THE BURGLAR 1957 Directed by Paul Wendkos and starring Dan Duryea, Jayne Mansfield and Martha Vickers
Sunset Blvd. 1950 directed by Billy Wilder, starring Gloria Swanson and William Holden.