Is it man, beast or both behind a string of savage maulings and murders? An escaped leopard provides the catalyst for a foray into fear in which a cemetery is the rendezvous for death and love, and a closed door heightens rather than hides the horror of a young girl’s fate. The Leopard Man once again teams producer Val Lewton with director Jacques Tourneur (Cat People). This thriller stars Dennis O’Keefe (T-Men, Raw Deal), Margo (Lost Horizon) and Jean Brooks (The Seventh Victim).Read More »
“Death is good” is how producer Val Lewton summarized the message of his films, a credo that received its most explicit expression in this strikingly nihilistic shocker, the first film directed by regular Lewton editor Mark Robson. Kim Hunter makes her film debut as a young boarding-school student who, in search of her missing sister (proto-goth icon Jean Brooks), travels to New York’s bohemian Greenwich Village, where she uncovers a sinister shadow world of devil-worshippers and murder. And what about that mysterious room furnished with nothing but a chair and a hangman’s noose? With its daring treatment of depression and queerness, The Seventh Victim has haunted the margins of cinema for decades, its radical bleakness undiminished by time.Read More »
A seemingly tame leopard used for a publicity stunt escapes and kills a young girl, spreading panic throughout a sleepy New Mexico town.Read More »
Chicago Film Society writes:
Tasked with heading up RKO’s horror unit from 1942 to 1946, producer and screenwriter Val Lewton was responsible for one of the most extraordinary runs of films to ever come out of classic Hollywood. Given modest budgets, lurid titles, and a running-time cap of 75 minutes by his superiors, Lewton, along with up-and-coming directors Mark Robson, Jacques Tourneur, and Robert Wise, produced a string of bewitching, ethereal masterpieces and developed a house style defined by expressive shadows, pervasive melancholy, somnambulism, and ambient dread. One of Lewton’s crowning achievements, The Seventh Victim broke from horror conventions of its time and found darkness lurking not in the vampires and monsters of the old world but in good ol’ American sham psychoanalytics and success-centered occultism.Read More »