Microreview [film]: The Body Snatcher

Val Lewton was in charge of the "horror unit" at RKO Studios in the early 1940s. He produced nearly a dozen genre-defining movies, saving the studio from financial collapse, launching the careers of several directors, and resurrecting (pun intended) the career of Boris Karloff in the process.

The Meat

The Body Snatcher is my favorite of all the Val Lewton movies. It may not have be influential as Cat People or as lauded in later years as I Walked with a Zombie, but for me it does eerie, skin-crawling atmosphere about as well as any movie of the period, whatever the budget or pedigree. The movie is based on the short story of the same name by Robert Louis Stevenson (of Jekyll and Hyde fame, of course), which was in turn inspired by the real-life serial murderers Burke and Hare, who sold the bodies of the people they killed for medical dissection.

The movie follows Dr. Wolfe MacFarlane (what a name, right?!?) as he rises in prominence and social station due to his success as a surgeon. But he's only able to gain the surgical insights necessary for his breakthroughs from his work dissecting cadavers. To get those puppies, he enlists coachman (symbolism?) John Gray, played by Boris Karloff at his most oily and sinister, to dig them up out of graves. But after a while, Gray decides to go for...fresher...specimens. A very interesting power struggle goes on between the two men, and it raises interesting questions about the moral imperative of advancing medical knowledge and at what cost, but doesn't linger on the questions, keeping the proceedings a fun diversion.

The Math

Objective Quality: 6/10

Bonuses: +1, for being the first movie directed entirely by Robert Wise, who would go on to become a legendary director and producer; +1, for Karloff's nuanced and caustic performance; +1 for being the final onscreen pairing of Karloff and Lugosi.

Penalties: -1, for the comically out-of-place sound cue that mars what would've been an otherwise haunting murder of a singer.

Cult Movie Coefficient: 8/10. Well worth your time and attention.

[See explanation of our non-inflated scores here.]

Microreview [film]: I Walked with a Zombie

My favorite vintage horror movie poster

Val Lewton was in charge of the "horror unit" at RKO Studios in the early 1940s. He produced nearly a dozen genre-defining movies, saving the studio from financial collapse, launching the careers of several directors, and resurrecting (pun intended) the career of Boris Karloff in the process.

The Meat

The second low-budget horror movie Val Lewton produced for RKO, like Cat People directed by the masterful Jacques Tourneur, I Walked with a Zombie is generally regarded as the best of the Lewton horror movies. Probably this is because people like to make out that, in liking it, they display their refined, old-world tastes, since the movie is most famous these days as being a voodoo-infused adaptation of Jane Eyre. As far as who'd-a-thunk-it? movie adaptations go, it's probably less faithful than Forbidden Planet's take on The Tempest, but more faithful than The Man From Laramie is to King Lear. What I Walked with a Zombie owes in debt to Charlotte Bronte, though, is less about any famous literary romance than a pervading atmosphere of Victorian sensibilities that clashes in really engaging ways with the voodoo underpinning of the movie's Caribbean setting.

The movie itself follows Betsy, a nurse hired to care for Jessica Holland, the invalid wife of plantation owner Paul Holland. Betsy relocates to the Caribbean island of San Sebastian for the job, and soon begins questioning Jessica's medical diagnosis (spinal cord injury), fearing that the woman may actually be a "zombie," murdered and brought back to life as the meat puppet of a voodoo priest or priestess. Part of the film's appeal is that it never makes an explicit statement of "rightness" -- neither upholding the self-congratulatory scientific surety of Western medicine (because let's face it, how'd the whole practice of bloodletting work out?) and condemning voodoo as the mindless superstition of savages, nor the reverse, by pulling a "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy" moment and subverting medicine in favor of magic. It suggests that things are more complicated than that, which, in reality, they surely are. The result is a lyrical and poetic meditation on the occult that remains evocative, if no longer as shocking as it probably was in 1943.

The Math

Objective Quality: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for being a spiritual forebear to later voodoo-themed horror movies like the Vincent Price English-colonial-guilt vehicle The Oblong Box and Wes Craven's still-way-creepy The Serpent and the Rainbow; +1 for beating Seth Grahame-Smith to the punch by 70 years.

Penalties: -1 because even at only 70 minutes, the pacing would have benefited from a bit of a jolt. The methodical forward momentum lessens the visceral impact you'd expect from a horror movie (and which Cat People delivers).

Cult Movie Coefficient: 8/10, well worth your time and attention.

[See explanation of our non-inflated scores here.]

Microreview [Film]: Cat People (1942)

Val Lewton was in charge of the "horror unit" at RKO Studios in the early 1940s. He produced nearly a dozen genre-defining movies, saving the studio from financial collapse, launching the careers of several directors, and resurrecting (pun intended) the career of Boris Karloff in the process.

The Meat

If you are a fan of psychological horror movies that leave most of the scares where they are the most frightening (in your brain) than I cannot recommend highly enough the movies Val Lewton produced for RKO Studios -- the "Little Engine that (Sometimes) Could" among movie studios. The first of these films was Cat People.

Born in czarist Russia and emigrating to the States as a child, Lewton had been a newspaper reporter and pulp novelist before getting into the picture business. At RKO, he was given meagre budgets, salacious titles, and permission to use sets left over from other films, then mostly left alone. So one day, the studio handed him a Ziploc bag full of nickles and a title -- Cat People! -- and told him to go off and make something that would keep the studio out of the looming bankruptcy brought on by Orson Welles rolling cigars in $100 bills from the RKO coffers, and smoking as many as he could while down in Brazil and laughing maniacally. By rights, the result of this gamble on Lewton should've been utterly asinine (it's called Cat People, for God's sake. Cat. People.), but instead, it is an unsettling, and almost heartbreaking parable about the fear of commitment and sex, drenched in atmosphere and Eastern European folklore.

The film tells the story of Irena, a Serbian woman living in New York, played by the utterly feline Simone Simon, who believes herself descended from a cursed race of outcasts that developed the power to transform into giant cats through witchcraft and idolatry. She falls in love with a guy named Oliver, but is terrified of what she'll do to her new husband if she allows herself to lose control. This aloofness unwittingly drives Oliver into the arms of Alice, a woman he works with, and boy, if Irena thinks its hard to stay on top of lust, it turns out it might be even harder to stay on top of jealousy...so watch out, Alice.

The Math
Objective Quality: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for overcoming its B-movie budget through the moody and evocative direction of Jacques Tourneur, who later directed the ultimate film noir, Out of the Past; +1 for its pioneering use of jump scares; +1 for introducing psychological horror to the movies; +1 for forming the basis of the Kirk Douglas character, based on Lewton and the Cat People production, in The Bad and the Beautiful.

Penalties: -1 for what is essentially a soap opera plotline; -1 for a relatively show start, given its 73-minute runtime.

Cult Movie Coefficient: 9/10, for an impossible-to-quantify influence on the genre and remaining an effective horror movie even after 70 years

[See explanation of our non-inflated scores here.]