Carib-noir: Black Moon (1934)

      Black Moon [videorecording (DVD)]; a Columbia production; Columbia Pictures Corporation presents; screenplay by Wells Root, based story written by Clements Ripley; directed by Roy William Neill; cinematography by Joseph H. August; edited by Richard Cahoon. Culver City, Calif.: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2011. Originally released as a motion picture in 1934. Performers: Jack Holt; Fay Wray; Dorothy Burgess; Cora Sue Collins; Arnold Korff.   
     Summary: a young girl who lives on a tropical island loses her parents to a voodoo sacrifice, but although she manages to escape the island, a curse is put on her. Years later, as an adult, she feels a strong compulsion to return to the island to confront her past. Her husband, her daughter and her nanny go with her, but once back on the island, the woman finds herself elevated by the locals to the stature of a voodoo goddess, and she begins her inevitable descent into madness, with disastrous results for her family.

    [Minor SPOILERS in comments below]. Black Moon is a little-remembered pre-Code gem that I recently stumbled upon at the public library. I’d just seen King Kong again and wanted to watch more movies with Fay Wray. Happily my library had a copy of Black Moon. Even better, the library also had Mystery of the Wax Museum, in which Miss Wray does some screaming that gives even her famous shrieks in Kong a run for their money.

    But getting back to Black Moon, it sounded interesting and I snapped it up right away. I wasn’t disappointed, though I must admit that Miss Wray, while she looks beautiful and turns in a competent performance, doesn’t register so much because the character she plays isn’t very interesting and furthermore doesn’t have that much to do. The real revelation is Dorothy Burgess as our ill-fated heroine. She was apparently a big deal in the early Thirties but her star faded quickly in the latter part of the decade. She died of lung cancer in 1961 at the youthful age of 54, largely forgotten. The character she plays is a well-bred sort with a decidedly Brit air [1] who secretly harbors an ambition to return to the island and become a voodoo high priestess. I suspect she enjoyed playing the bad girl, and performing a scandalous dance at that! Miss Burgess’s nuanced performance is all the more impressive when we consider that she was the ripe old age of twenty-seven. Did people really grow up faster in them days? In any event I predict that Black Moon is the role for which she’ll be remembered, if she's remembered at all.

    Of course the most notorious scene in Black Moon is Miss Burgess’s voodoo high priestess dance followed by ritual sacrifice [2]. She performs said dance scantily clad and with considerable verve, and for me the similarity here is not to the better-known I Walked with a Zombie (which has its own, more subdued, voodoo ritual dance scene), but Maria Montez’s infamous cobra dance in Cobra Woman. Miss Montez’s interpretation is doubtless campier (her over-the-top costume helps) but Miss Burgess is sexier. Alas, the scene breezes by all to quickly – even in the pre-Code years the studios could only push the envelope so far [3]. 

    You could say Black Moon rode the crest of popularity of voodoo/zombie movies that were popular in the 1930s and 1940s. Comparisons with the aforementioned, and better-known, I Walked with a Zombie from nearly a decade later are inevitable, and Black Moon holds its own pretty well. My DVD copy was very clean and brings out the film's superior production values. The only mild criticism I could offer is the lack of bonus features or commentary, especially regrettable given the film's historical significance and offbeat content. Indeed, were it not for the racist depictions of the natives, I'd be tempted to dub this one a minor masterpiece. Still, Black Moon gives us lots of atmosphere [4] and intelligent story delivered in a lean 68 minutes. Recommended.  

   A minor bit of trivia: in some scenes Dorothy Burgess and Fay Wray look enough alike to be sisters. I'm not sure whether this little detail is a plus or minus. Whatever. 
   Trivia, part 2: Theresa Harris, who appears as the Sacrifice Girl, also appeared in another zombie/voodoo movie. In I Walked with a Zombie, she plays the maid Alma.

[1] Her quasi-Brit vibe in Black Moon belies her through-and-through American bonafides: born in Los Angeles to a theatrical family, she worked in film and theater in the U.S., and as far as I can tell, never traveled outside the States.

[2] Although the penultimate scene in which there's a (near)sacrifice, followed by a real one, of a sort, is pretty shocking too.

[3] Speaking of pushing the envelope: for the ultimate in snake dance risqué try Marika Rökk's 'Schlangentanz' from Kora Terry (available for viewing on YouTube). This exotic dance routine is pretty outrageous even by today's standards, and more so considering the era, when all German cinema was under the purview of the strait-laced National Socialist regime. 

[4] Along with the much-referenced in this post I Walked with a Zombie, to me the movie that's most similar to Black Moon, especially in atmosphere, is the horror classic Island of Lost Souls.* In particular, Black Moon has a very Souls-esque last scene. Indeed, I might rate Souls as the best Fay Wray movie in which Fay Wray doesn't appear.

   * However, an honorable mention in similarity is due the atmospheric White Zombie (1932), in which the zombie elements are depicted overtly. Indeed, White Zombie is frequently cited as the first movies in which zombies are mentioned by name.  

fate takes an option: the mixed legacy of the Val Lewton horror unit at RKO

     The history of motion pictures is littered with tales of might-have-beens, false starts, and missed opportunities, all chronicled in sources as diverse as scholarly biographies to lurid scandal magazines. They tell of lives, today largely forgotten, of the once promising and can’t-miss future stars (writers and directors, too) that … weren’t.

     Especially compelling, and not so frequently examined, are the stories associated with a trend, genre or studio. An obvious example is the genre (or was it a style?) today we dub film noir, and the seemingly malevolent hold it had on the actors who portrayed the desperate characters in its cinematic universe. Indeed, their private lives were often more noir than the (anti)-heroes and -heroines they impersonated onscreen. To wit: in one of the more infelicitous timings in American cultural history, the noir era counted among its ranks not only actors but many directors and screenwriters with leftist political sympathies. Thus their fate: the persecution by the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee and -like groups, one of the results being the blacklisting of not a few unfortunate souls. It's probably the most conspicuous example of the curse of noir and its extension to real life drama [1].

     But we’d like to focus on another, less well-known, group of ill-fated individuals, with their own attendant maledictions. They were associated with the production unit at RKO Pictures specializing in horror films in the 1940s heralded by maverick producer Val Lewton. The nine films Lewton oversaw from 1942 to 1946 created and perfected the sub-genre of supernatural noir. Conveyed through an aesthetic language similar to that of film noir, these hymns to the night shared with noir a fatalistic, no-exit pessimism and dark world view, though of a different kind [2].

     Usually seeking material gain, the edgy characters in noir employed methods both legal and otherwise to achieve their aims, and were often menaced, or manipulated, by powerful, mysterious forces. Sometimes the forces were not so mysterious, but nonetheless eminently threatening – state officialdom, criminal elements, hostile foreign powers, duplicitous femmes fatales. The protagonists in the Lewton films had their own issues, but they stemmed from within, to be precise from the subterranean realms of the human psyche, the result being an existential searching for something they, and often the audience, couldn’t quite get hold of [3]. Theirs was a quest for meaning and direction in a world that seemed devoid of meaning, and moreover arbitrary and chaotic in its dispensation of fate.

     The characters in the Lewton films often confronted their issues by way of supernatural or other-worldly manifestations: a sexually repressed woman metamorphoses into a vicious panther; a lonely child summons an angel from the beyond; a doomed heroine seeks redemption by joining a devil cult; an adulteress becomes one of the walking dead; a no-nonsense general succumbs to ancient superstitions and eventual madness.

     In any event, and getting back to the notion of a Lewton curse, it’s only fair to list some exceptions, as any number of major and minor creative types associated with Val Lewton went on to successful, lengthy careers: directors Robert Wise, Mark Robson and Jacques Tourneur; composer Roy Webb; wardrobe designer Renié; cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca; art director Albert D'Agostino; and actors Boris Karloff, Kim Hunter, Anna Lee, Kent Smith and Henry Daniell. Moreover, not all the aborted careers were involuntary. Some were very much by choice, a prime example being Jane Randolph, so effective in Cat People and its quasi-sequel Curse of the Cat People. One of her best roles during this time was in the noir classic T-Men (1947), in which she was cast against type as a ruthless high level apparatchik in a counterfeiting scheme. The following year her career came to an inglorious end with her appearance in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, whereupon she left films, married a rich guy and lived out her life in Europe, mostly Spain, amid much material comfort.

     But among the less fortunate there’s quite a litany of unfulfilled promises, one-hit wonders, and should-have-beens. Of course the elephant in the living room is Val Lewton himself. So creative during his peak years at RKO (and before), upon his departure in 1947 he oversaw nothing of lasting value. Times, and tastes, were changing, and the new productions he supervised were critical and commercial failures. As a result of a weak heart and years of overwork, Lewton finally succumbed to heart failure in 1951 at forty-six years of age. In many ways Lewton’s was a tantalizingly brief and unfinished career, and we can only wonder what he might have accomplished had he lived longer, another twenty years, even ten years. Perhaps the old magic would have returned, perhaps not, but we’ll never know.

     There was also the eccentric screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen, whose career likewise peaked in the 1940s. He wrote the insightful scripts – arguably the best of all the Lewton films – for Cat People and The Seventh Victim, the latter co-written with Charles O’Neal [4]. But he did little of consequence after 1950, confining himself mostly to work in television and film criticism. He left Hollywood disillusioned and died in obscurity in 1988 at the age of 79.

     Bodeen's co-author on Victim, Charles O'Neal, lived a long life (he passed in 1996 at the age of 92), but his career as a screenwriter is spotty. He had a string of mostly B films in the Forties but his career stalled around 1950, after which he worked only sporadically, contributing mostly scripts for television.    

They walked with Val lewton 

Another writer casualty, this one a victim of the aforementioned anti-communist witch hunts of the late Forties and early Fifties, was screenwriter and Lewton stalwart Ardel Wray, who helmed the scripts for I Walked with a Zombie (co-written with Curt Siodmak), Leopard Man and Isle of the Dead. Her refusal to name names in 1948 effectively ended her tenure at Paramount, the studio where she was working at the time, and furthermore resulted in her blacklisting by the entire industry. Her career as a Hollywood screenwriter was now over, and she subsequently confined her work to various and odd jobs: script reader, story analyst, movie serializations, and especially script writing for television programs in the 1960s.

     But as for actors and actresses, a good place to start is Simone Simon, who had a fairly substantial career in her native France before coming to Hollywood in the late 1930s. She became a genuine star after Cat People in 1942, and she appeared in the sequel Curse of the Cat People two years later. But then her career went southward. She returned to France in the late Forties and her roles were spotty. Her best film during this time was La Ronde, after which she appeared in fewer films. She more or less left the movies altogether in 1956, although she did appear in one final film, The Woman in Blue, in 1973. Hers was a sketchy career, and her star burned bright only intermittently.
 

     Cat People’s other cat woman was portrayed by Lewton favorite Elizabeth Russell (she appeared in five of his films, always in cameos or supporting roles). Her post-Lewton career gradually faded and by 1960 she had left the movies altogether. With the renewed appreciation of the Lewton oeuvre in the 1980s and 1990s she became a kind of cult figure, but her glory days in the movies, focused as they were in the 1940s, were limited at best. Mary Halsey, who played the pert blonde desk attendant at Alice's hotel in Cat People, frequently appeared (mostly uncredited) in B movies in the Forties, but her career was to be short lived: her last film was in 1945. She passed in 1989 at the age of seventy-five.

     The other actor from Cat People that deserves a mention is Tom Conway, who also appeared in two other Lewton films, I Walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, Conway was the older brother of George Sanders and has been variously described as the nice George Sanders and, less generously, the B movie George Sanders. Perpetually on the fringe of stardom, Conway was under contract to RKO and enjoyed a mildly successful run in the Forties, especially for his appearing in ten Falcon mysteries. But in the Fifties his career slowed and substantial roles came few and far between. By the Sixties he was reduced to cameos and the occasional television appearance. His last credited role was on a Perry Mason episode in 1964, in which he essentially plays himself: a washed up theatrical actor given a raw deal by the industry, reduced to touring with a Shakespearean troupe who perform readings. Conway died at the age of sixty-two, destitute and severely alcoholic, in Culver City, California, in 1967.

     I Walked with a Zombie, the film that followed Cat People and considered by some to be Lewton’s masterpiece, nonetheless had its share of casualties. Zombie’s leading lady was Frances Dee, and it’s certainly the performance she’s remembered for, but by this time her star was dimming. The rest of her career is obscure, if recalled at all. But in some respects she escaped the curse, living out a long, and by all accounts very prosperous life (she passed in 2004 at age 94).

                                             

     Tom Conway was Dee’s leading man in Zombie, but the titular character was played by Christine Gordon, whose (uncredited) credits include only five other films, all dating from the mid 1940s. But at least she has a modest place in cinema immortality as the catatonic Jessica who, appropriately enough perhaps, suffers a tragic fate in the film. An even smaller, if pivotal, role in Zombie is taken by the Panama born dancer Jieno Moxzer, who plays the voodoo priest. Moxzer’s only other film credit is Cabin in the Sky. Zombie also featured Sir Lancelot, a singer/actor who more or less cornered the market on the calypso singer cameo in the 1940s. He appeared in a string of films in the Forties, including appearances in three Lewton films. Lancelot had a long career as a singer, performing into his sixties, but by the late 1940s his career in film was essentially over. He died in 2001 at the age of 98.

     The next film, The Leopard Man, had at least four actresses whose careers were touched by the Lewton shroud. Three of them played the victims in Leopard Man and their acting tenures likewise  came to unfortunate or equivocal ends [5]. Incidentally, of the three Hispanic victims, two were played by Caucasian actresses, a fairly common practice in them days of casting ethnic roles with Anglo performers. In any case Leopard Man also included in its cast Isabel Jewell, who improbably takes the role of a card reading fortuneteller. Jewell also appeared in Seventh Victim, where she had a more substantial part and accordingly made an even stronger impression, but by this time her once promising career was decidedly on a downhill slide [6]. Leopard Man also featured the fetching Ariel Heath in an all too brief appearance as the cigarette girl at the club. IMDB lists fourteen films to her credit, mostly in uncredited roles. Her last film was in 1945, and she died in 1973 at age fifty-one.

     The fourth Lewton film, The Seventh Victim, is probably the darkest of the entire canon, and is also where we find two of the most tragic true-life cases. Jean Brooks’s saga has uncanny parallels to the doomed heroine she portrayed so effectively in Victim. She appeared as a supporting player in B pictures in the late 30s and early 40s. RKO picked her up in 1942, and she starred in six Falcon pictures with Tom Conway in addition to appearing in three Lewton films. She showed great promise with her easy confidence and screen charisma. But her personal life was another matter: she struggled with alcoholism, and there were incidents of public drunkenness and disheveled appearance. In 1946 RKO dropped her from their roster. Her last movie was the 1948 World War II exploitation film Women in the Night. For a time she worked in dinner theater but by the 1950s had disappeared from public life altogether. She eventually moved to San Francisco, where she worked in the classified department at the Examiner newspaper. Jean Brooks died of complications from alcoholism and malnutrition on Nov 25, 1963, at Kaiser Hospital in Richmond, California, at the age of forty-seven, largely forgotten. Hers was a sad case of a potential star that might have been.

     A truly tragic story is that of Erford Gage, who in Victim took the role of the Lewtonesque poet Jason Hoag. Gage’s wafty intensity brought a genuine pathos to the character and provided a tantalizing hint of what he might have become as an actor. Very sadly, it was not to be. He died in combat in World War II in Manila, the Philippines, on March 17, 1945. Victim also boasted quite a collection of colorful secondary characters and bit parts. Several of them are associated with the devil worship cult, which meets at the apartment of one Mrs. Cortez (Evelyn Brent), who has a fondness for wearing flamboyant satin outfits. Brent curiously gets a high billing in the credits despite hers being a relatively marginal character. In any case she was quite the star in the Twenties but by this time had slipped to B movies. Seventh Victim was one of her last films.

     Another career that ended in the Forties was that of Ben Bard, who plays the elegantly sinister Mr. Brun in Victim. His solid if unspectacular career included a nice run of Lewton films with appearances in Leopard Man, The Ghost Ship, and Youth Runs Wild, in addition to Victim. But in 1946 he left movies altogether to concentrate on managing acting schools. Eve March, who takes the role of Miss Gilchrist in Victim, kept busy as a supporting player in the Forties but her career sputtered in the Fifties. Her last film was an uncredited part in 1958 in The Last Hurrah. She died in Hollywood in 1974 at the age of sixty-three.

The fifth Lewton film, The Ghost Ship, is the transitional work that heralds the shift away from mood and atmosphere to story and character. And character indeed comes to the fore in the person of the totalitarian-minded Captain Stone, portrayed with edgy menace by once major star Richard Dix. But Dix’s salad days were two decades prior and by this time his career was in decline. In the Forties he appeared in B movie programmers, most notably six of the Whistler mysteries in which he played unhinged types not that dissimilar from Capt. Stone. After years of struggling with alcoholism, he retired from films in 1947 and died of a heart attack in 1949 at the age of 56.

     Rising star Russell Wade was Dix’s costar in Ghost Ship, taking the role of Capt. Stone’s reluctant protégé, Third Officer Merriam. Wade also appeared in Body Snatcher and (uncredited) Leopard Man. He was in over 60 movies in the Forties but retired from films in 1948 for a career in business and real estate in the Palm Springs area. He died in 2006 at the age of 89. Ghost Ship also boasted Skelton Knaggs, whose craggy looks and eccentric disposition seemed to predestine him to an untimely demise, which did happen, both onscreen (in Isle of the Dead) as well as off. Knaggs also appeared in one other Lewton film, Bedlam. Born in Yorkshire, England, he came to the U.S. in 1939 and by the early Forties had established himself as a reliable performer who specialized in offbeat character roles. His career slowed in the 1950s and his last film was in 1955, the year of his death from cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 43.

     1945’s Isle of the Dead, the first of three films to showcase Boris Karloff, also featured in a prominent role the ingénue Ellen Drew, who always seemed one step away from the stardom that ultimately eluded her. She does well in Isle of the Dead but is probably best remembered as a brutal gangster’s wife in the noir programmer Johnny O’Clock. By 1950 her career in film was essentially over, after which she confined her work to television. Her last appearance on the small screen was a Perry Mason episode in 1960. Isle also included the distinguished stage actress Katherine Emery, who had a modest run of film appearances in the 1940s in which she essayed mostly character roles. Her film career ended abruptly in 1953 with the 3-D cult classic The Maze.  

     Also released in 1945 was The Body Snatcher. The fetching Rita Corday took the sympathetic role of Mrs. March. Corday had a good run in the 1940s, mostly in B pictures, but her career petered out in the Fifties and her last film was in 1954. She died in 1992 at the age of age 72. Body Snatcher also featured Donna Lee in the small but pivotal role of the street singer. IMDB lists five credits for her. Her last film was in 1946 in a small role in Bedlam. The valedictory Bedlam had at least one performance worthy of a mention in present traversal. That’s the one given by Joan Newton. Even by Lewtonian standards she had a very brief career, appearing in only two movies: Riverboat Rhythm and Bedlam, the latter in the minor but crucial role as Dorothea the Dove. She passed away in 2012 at the age of 91.

Isle of broken dreams

     It’s risky, and counterintuitive, even counterproductive, to generalize in such matters, but a pattern does  emerge. Most of the individuals discussed above reached their peak in the 1940s, especially, and sometimes exclusively, in the Lewton films. For some, the career arc was already on a downward slope. In any event, most did little of substance after 1950, usually with a gradual diminishing of output, both in quality and quantity. Several struggled with alcoholism, and most died in obscurity and/or near-poverty.
Indeed, was there a kind of curse, a shroud of doom that wrapped itself around the lives of many of the actors and actresses who appeared in the Val Lewton films of the early and mid-Forties? It’s tempting to see a connection. But perhaps we have it wrong. What if the reverse is true? Could it be that the kind of films Val Lewton produced attracted a certain personality type, especially so in the case of the supporting performers and bit players. Quirky, erratic, self-destructive, unable or unwilling to conform to the Hollywood standards of career molding and good behavior, these actors brought their own imperfections to the overall alchemy of films like Seventh Victim and Isle of the Dead, to cite two of the darkest exemplars in the Lewton canon. And these individuals carried their own burdens with them, quite independent of their brief association with Val Lewton [7].

     Truth be told, there are several possible explanations for the Lewton actors’ memorable contributions to the films, and, more to the point, their eventual fates [8]. Some are offered above and some are not, and overall patterns and trends are debatable at best. Simply put, it wasn’t just fatalistic pessimism, a sorcerer’s spell, or the callousness of a depraved, indifferent industry, though some of these might have played a part. More practical issues – financial exigencies, career change, lack of ambition, bad timing, inept management, and any number of other factors, singly or in combination – no doubt figured into the mix. It could all come down to a bizarre witch's brew of contradictory motivations and circumstances, both internal and external. Either way it’s difficult, indeed well nigh impossible, to arrive at definitive conclusions, especially so given the tenuous and conflicting evidence.

     Still, it’s a peculiar and tempting conceit: an individual artiste becomes involved in, even enmeshed in, an aestheticized, artificial world of darkness – exotic, dangerous, seductive – yet upon departure, the melancholy and mystery linger on, sometimes for years, even decades. The scenario is certainly consistent with the message of these nine little pictures, these nocturnes for the dead: dark, mystical forces reach out, and with a shadowy, inexorable malevolence, perpetuate the nightmare expressed so eloquently in the movies themselves, and their bleak existential universe somehow bleeds over into the private worlds of at least some of those connected with the production unit that created the Val Lewton films.

    [1] The curse of noir didn’t confine itself to anti-communist witch hunts and show trials. Though they were never officially investigated, many individuals known for their work in noir had real lives with an undercurrent of scandal, unfulfilled promise or untimely death. Tom Neal, Cleo Moore, Jean Hagen, Lynn Baggett, Peggy Castle, Albert Dekker, Gloria Grahame, Laird Cregar, Zachary Scott, Barbara Payton, Steve Cochran, Veronica Lake, Linda Darnell, Lizabeth Scott, Susan Shaw, Gail Russell, Barbara Nichols, Jean Gillie, Rita Johnson and Helen Walker are only some of the more prominent examples. For more on noir and the Blacklist see: "Noirlisted: Film Noir and the Hollywood Blacklist".
   [2] By way of amplification, we may cite Wells, who, writing in the context of science fiction and horror, explains that the former is concerned primarily with the external, the macrocosmic, and horror is more directed at the internal, or microcosmic: “science fiction is potentially utopian [although often critically grounded] … the horror genre is almost entirely dystopic, and often nihilistic in outlook.” Paul Wells, The Horror Genre: From Beelzebub to Blair Witch, London: Wallflower, 2000, pp. 7-8.
     Applied in our context, the characters in film noir proper are driven by external things like status, social hierarchies, police excess, and the corruption of capitalism, whereas Lewton’s protagonists are more concerned with inner fears, phobias and existential worries. To be sure, noir certainly concerns itself with the inner worlds as well, and conversely there are elements of social and political criticism in the Lewton films, albeit more as background (see: Martha P. Nochimson, “Val Lewton at RKO: The Social Dimensions of Horror,” Cineaste Fall 2006, pp. 9-17; Cameron Moneo, The Horror of ‘This Pretty World’: Progressive Pessimism in Val Lewton’s Films and Novels, Thesis [M.A.], York University, Toronto, 2009).
     By the way, we refer to the Lewtonian subgenre as supernatural noir, but it might just as well be called, more accurately perhaps, 'horror noir,' or 'psychological horror,' since at most only three of the films deal with overt supernatural elements.
    [3] Boardwell explains that “characters of the classical narrative have clear-cut traits and objectives, while characters of the art cinema lack defined desires and goals.” Such a lack of a center of gravity gives them the freedom to “...express and explain their psychological states.” Ergo we never discover who they really are. [David Bordwell, “Art Cinema,” The European Cinema Reader, Routledge, 2002, p. 96]. This existential searching further underscores the Lewton films’ flavor of the highbrow and arty while paradoxically retaining their appeal as popular entertainment.
    [4] Bodeen also contributed the script to Cat People’s unofficial sequel Curse of the Cat People.
    [5] The actresses who played Teresa Delgado, Consuelo Contreras and Clo-Clo/Gabriela were, respectively, Margaret Landry, Tula Parma (Tuulikki Paananen), and Margo. Landry was American, Parma Finnish and Margo Mexican. Landry appeared in a few films in the 1940s, in mostly uncredited roles. Her last picture was in 1945. Tula Parma moved to the U.S. from her native Finland in 1940. Her career in film is sketchy. Leopard Man is listed as her only American film. From 1968 to 1973 she appeared in a few episodes of the television series Hawaii Five-O. Margo had a more substantial career than either Parma or Landry, and her Mexican bonafides were impeccable: born in Mexico City in 1917, she came to the U. S. in the early Thirties and was cast in a few films, most famously Lost Horizon. But by the early Forties and Leopard Man her career was in decline. Blacklisted in the 1950s for her activist views, film roles were scarce. She did manage to appear in one prestige production, Viva Zapata (1952). Her last film was Diary of Mad Housewife (1970).
    [6] Isabel’s later years were not always happy. In 1959, she was arrested in Las Vegas for passing bad checks. The bad check was for 37 dollars to be paid to a cab driver. Isabel was again arrested in Los Angeles in 1961 for drunk driving. She was sentenced to five days in jail and she was put on probation as a driver. Isabel Jewell died in Los Angeles, California on April 5, 1972, aged 64. Sources differ on the cause of her death. Some versions say it was suicide by taking an overdose of barbiturates, others claim she died of natural causes due to her lifelong struggle with diabetes.
    [7] Of course it’s not just actors who figure into the mix, but all the creative individuals associated with the Lewton films from 1942 to 1946 – writers, directors, cinematographers, wardrobe designers, editors, set decorators – all of whom brought their own individual, often unconventional, visions to the final product that was the nine unique films that make up the oeuvre.
    [8] Lacking anything in the way of statistical or scientific support, nonetheless I’ll posit an idea, though it tends to undercut my thesis presented above: anecdotal evidence does suggest that a goodly amount of performers from Golden Age Hollywood (Lewton veterans and otherwise), especially those in the lower tiers, ended up living out their sunset years in obscurity, poverty, or in any case greatly reduced circumstances. Indeed, it would seem very few enjoyed a later life of Norma Desmond-like opulence, and many were bitter about the time they spent working in the motion picture industry. In any case their eventual fates were attributable to non-supernatural, eminently human factors.
    In this context it’s interesting to theorize what sort of results we would get if we investigated other studios of the era, especially the small ones. Would there be similarly sad, equivocal, stories? Is the Lewton phenomenon of ill-fated lives and unfulfilled promise inevitable in the entertainment business? In particular one might wonder what kind of results an analysis of that most prominent of Golden Age studios specializing in horror films, Universal, would reveal. Might the darkness of its product be mirrored in careers and lives of its employees, both in front of and behind the camera? Fascinating stuff, and perhaps grist for an enterprising PhD student. Indeed a casual perusal suggests the principle may apply to television as well. As a case in point we may note the original Perry Mason series of the late 50s and early 60s, in which it seems an inordinate amount of guest performers had shortened careers.

 

the strange fascination of The Seventh Victim

Even as fog continues to lie in the valleys,
so does ancient sin cling to the low places,
the depressions in the world consciousness.
   - Dr. Louis Judd, The Anatomy of Atavism
    [also attr. Sigmund Freud]
 
To offset its then precarious financial position, in 1942 RKO Pictures brought in Val Lewton to head a small production unit specializing in horror films. The limitations placed on the productions were: low budget, tight schedule, pre-selected titles, and running time not longer than 75 minutes. Within these parameters Lewton was given a large amount of creative freedom, especially if the movies delivered, i.e. made money. And they did. The result was a series of poetically beautiful and haunting films, nine in all, most of them running little more than an hour. Released from 1942 to 1946, the films are: Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, The Seventh Victim, The Ghost Ship, Curse of the Cat People, The Body Snatcher, Isle of the Dead, and Bedlam, and they delight film historians and devotees to this day.  

    And yes, I confess to being very much a fan of the Val Lewton oeuvre, and share the growing consensus that the first four films (Cat People, Zombie, Leopard Man and Victim) are the best. The remaining five are respectable, even exemplary works, especially when considered against the standard B movie fare being cranked out at the time. But with their emphasis on story and character over mood and atmosphere, the five later entries lacked the visual poetry and philosophical underpinnings of the previous four. Anyhow, and with a nod to Cat People and Zombie as arguably the best of all the Lewton films, I come back to The Seventh Victim and its seemingly inexhaustible font of riches. So much so that, upon repeated viewings, I have the sneaking suspicion that, in its modest way Seventh Victim may indeed be Lewton’s ultimate masterpiece in the sense that it's the most perfect realization of his dark aesthetic vision.

    One of the many delights of Victim is that it’s a film that can be interpreted in a myriad of ways. Feminist, behaviorist, romanticist, Freudian, metaphysical, and of course purely cinematic takes have gushed forth over time. In many respects it’s a profoundly disturbing film – dreamlike, enigmatic, witty, highbrow, absurdist and frightening – it revels in the subterranean realms of both our conscious and unconscious experience. One could go on and on; commentators have gone on and on.

    Many issues arise within the film’s deceptively brief 71 minutes, and most of said issues remain unresolved. Moreover, despite its satanic backdrop, The Seventh Victim is the first Val Lewton film that’s not about the supernatural. Both the previous Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie contained more or less overt supernatural elements, and even Leopard Man, a hybrid mystery/horror film, flirts with the magical by way of its prescient fortune teller, who incidentally is not a gypsy but a very blonde Anglo (Isabel Jewell). Curiously, she uses the standard four-suit fifty-two card deck for her readings instead of the traditional Tarot cards. In any case, Seventh Victim relies on a dark overlay of nihilistic despair and no exit fatalism, conveyed in very human terms through its picaresque characters and, even more so, the noirish visuals that stunningly suggest the nighttime menace of a large urban metropolis.

    While it’s somewhat cliché to give top honors to the film’s chiaroscuro look and in particular the stellar work done by ace cameraman Nicholas Musuraca, subsequent viewings of The Seventh Victim, all the Lewton thrillers for that matter, reveal other, unsung heroes, in particular Roy Webb’s low keyed scores, the always literate, usually literary, scripts, and the invariably spot-on casts.

    Like The Leopard Man which immediately preceded it, The Seventh Victim has its share of abrupt transitions and awkward cuts. Its labyrinthine universe also includes complex characters, bizarre plot twists, and several plot dead ends. Consequently it’s difficult to say who the protagonist, hero, heroine, or villain, really is.

    In the first third of the film the clear lead is Mary (Kim Hunter). In the middle third she gives way to the three male leads, Jason, Gregory and Dr. Judd [1], who ultimately pass the baton to Jacqueline (Jean Brooks), and only rightly so. She’s the emotional and spiritual glue that holds the film together, and her disappearance is what sets everything in motion by way of Mary’s quest, all the while the devil worshippers lurking in deep background. Indeed the Satanic cult that goes by the name of the Palladists might be seen as the true star of the film’s final third [2]. And it’s their inclusion that makes Seventh Victim the existential masterpiece that it is. To wit, would this film possibly have the same resonance had Jacqueline fallen in with drug smugglers or Nazi spies instead of Satan worshippers?

    As was often the case in Lewton’s films, it’s the supporting actors and bit players in Seventh Victim who steal the show, the possible exception being Jean Brooks in the performance of a career as our doomed heroine Jacqueline [3]. Best among the men is Ben Bard as the creepily earnest first Satanist Mr. Brun. Kudos are also due to Lou Lubin as a nervous private detective. Among the women the other standout is Lewton favorite Elizabeth Russell, who appears onscreen for just a few minutes as the terminally ill Mimi, but even so outdoes her famous turn as the cat woman in Cat People. Interesting that mystery woman Jean Brooks plays a character the diametric opposite of what she essayed in Leopard Man, the film that immediately preceded Seventh Victim. There she portrayed itinerant nightclub singer turned amateur sleuth Kiki Walker, who is eminently sane, practical, healthy (both physically and emotionally), almost a proto-feminist character. She also has a conventional romantic friendship with her manager Jerry Manning (Dennis O’Keefe). A greater contrast to the somnambulant, death obsessed Jacqueline would be difficult to imagine, and yes, it’s no surprise that Jacqueline is the far more interesting character.

    The film’s Sapphic undercurrent has been much discussed elsewhere so we’ll not dwell on it here, except to offer a few observations [4]. To be sure, there are subtextual elements to be found in at least one prior Lewton work, Cat People [5]. But in Victim the coded references are now brought out into the open, albeit in a plausibly deniable way (this was the early Forties, after all). Thus, and with the debatable exception of Dr. Judd, Jacqueline’s most significant relationships, both emotional and (implied) physical, are with women, not men. And this includes her sister Mary. Indeed, if we interpret the the clues subtextually, there are decided suggestions of lesbian incest between Jacqueline and Mary. In this context the coven of Greenwich Village devil worshippers might be seen as proxies for a group that needed to be cloistered and remain in the closet. Interestingly, this same idea was revived a decade and a half later in the film Bell, Book, and Candle, in which a nest of witches who reside in Greenwich Village is forced to keep their existence under wraps out of fear of discovery and resultant persecution.

   As for the members who comprise the Palladists, they are an uneasy mix of the ordinary and the colorful. They gravitate to darkness and Satanic majesty and as such need to remain underground, while ‘normal’ folks like Mary, Jason and Gregory can carry on their lives openly, bathed as they are in the light of truth and virtue. Characters like Jacqueline and Dr. Judd hover in between the two worlds, floating trance-like in a murky netherworld and unable to commit to one side or the other.

   Be that as it may, most of the Palladists are well-spoken, even cultivated, and all have a touch of the ambiguous. There’s the brusque, vaguely masculine Mrs. Redi. Then we have the shapely blonde who breathlessly exclaims to Mary that she and Jacqueline “were intimate.” This same claim might be made by Frances (Isabel Jewell), so obviously besmitten as she is with Jacqueline. Although the lady at the party is quite a bit taller and fleshier than the petite Frances, it’s easy to confuse the two women. Fascinating that the unnamed blonde lady (who also has an eye for Dr. Judd) doesn’t reappear in the film, and, like the others present at this soireé, she may or may not be a member of the devil worship cult. True to Lewtonian form, the relationships and connections in The Seventh Victim are sketchy at best: more is implied than actually spelled out.

   There’s also the exotic hostess Mrs. Cortez [6], provocatively dressed in outfits that suggest designer nightgowns; and finally the elegantly sinister head devil worshipper Mr. Brun. Rounding out the mix are two thugs named Leo and Dirk and a mysterious satanic hit man. By the way, Mr. Brun becomes progressively less appealing as the story unfolds. Unable to browbeat Jacqueline into drinking poison-laced wine as punishment for her supposed betrayal, he literally strong arms her into leaving the apartment, to fend for herself amid the city’s dark streets.

   With no disrespect to journeyman director Mark Robson, who did a fine job on the film, Seventh Victim might well be considered Jacques Tourneur’s fourth Lewton film in everything but credit only. He directed the first three Lewtons, and Tourneur-like vignettes and set pieces are everywhere in Victim [8], even if they lack the French master’s final touch of elegance. But ultimately it’s the long shadow of Val Lewton that hovers over The Seventh Victim. The auteur producer was a status often aspired to throughout the history of the movies but rarely attained. Few achieved it so profoundly or completely as Val Lewton.

  
   [1] Dr. Judd is played by Tom Conway, thus an immediate connection to Cat People since Dr. Judd appears in that film as well (also played by Conway). But the connections don’t end there: of all the Lewton horror films Seventh Victim is most akin to Cat People both in style and content. Indeed it's not too much of a stretch to see Cat People and Victim as equal parts of the same movie. Both deal with dark, quintessentially Lewtonian themes and subjects (death, fate, loneliness, suspense, shadows, neurosis, psychoanalysis, desperate women, ineffectual men, and dark streets). Moreover, both take pace in Greenwich Village. Most significant, both main characters are sexually ambiguous outcasts who struggle, ultimately unsuccessfully, to fit into a world of conventional normalcy, and do so in a ‘normal’ way. Then there's those two, near identical, dark fur coats that both Irena and Jacqueline wear.
    [2] The Palladists’ ritualized meetings seem to consist mainly of afternoon teas and cocktail parties, all held at Mrs. Cortez’s spacious apartment. The one exception is the Jacqueline death watch in which the atmosphere takes on a literally deadly seriousness.
    [3] Jean Brooks came by her insight into the character of Jacqueline honestly. Born in 1915 in Houston, Texas, she appeared as a supporting player in B pictures in the late 30s and early 40s. RKO picked her up in 1942, and she starred in six Falcon pictures with Tom Conway in addition to three Lewton films. But she struggled with alcoholism, and there were incidents of public drunkenness and disheveled appearance. In 1946 RKO dropped her from their roster. Her last movie was the (post)World War II potboiler Women in the Night. The folks who made this film must have been impressed by the Jacqueline character - and Jean Brooks's inimitable take on the role - as she retains much the same black-drenched look and mysterious persona. The same sexual inclinations, too: yes, it's strongly implied that she has a lesbian relationship with Frau Thaler (Bernadene Hayes), who bears a striking resemblance to Jacqueline's love interest Frances in Victim. Interesting that Women in the Night came out in 1948, only five years after Victim, and already the Jacqueline look - and personality - as embodied in the form of Jean Brooks, was beginning to attain cult status.
      In any case, by the end of the decade her relatively brief career as a film actress was over. In the 1950s she disappeared from public life, eventually moving to San Francisco, where she worked in the classified department at the Examiner newspaper. She died of complications from alcoholism and malnutrition on Nov 25, 1963, at Kaiser Hospital in Richmond, California, at the age of forty-seven, largely forgotten.   
   [4] The overtones appear as early as the first scene, in which we meet Miss Loughwood, headmistress of the Catholic school Mary attends, and her assistant Miss Gilchrist. We don’t see these two characters again, but their cozy relationship anticipates much of what follows vis-à-vis the film’s female characters. Miss Gilchrist takes Mary aside and tells her to have courage, that one must have courage to live in the world. Some commentators read this as a coded subtextual message.  
   [5] William Mann, Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969, Viking, pp. 208-09.
   [6] There’s the two Satanists Mrs. Cortez and Mrs. Redi, but no Mr. Redi or Mr. Cortez. Both Mrs. Redi and Mrs. Cortez are middle aged, thus the husbands are probably too old to be away fighting the war. Do the husbands not approve? Do they even know? Are the two ladies widowed? Divorced?
    Several commentators mistakenly identify Mrs. Redi as being played by Evelyn Brent, a sensible error since Miss Brent’s name appears high in the credits and Mrs. Redi is an important character in Seventh Victim. Actually Mrs. Redi is played, brilliantly so, by Mary Newton, who goes uncredited while Evelyn Brent takes the fairly peripheral character of Mrs. Cortez.
   The credits for the Lewton films have always been a little dodgy: sometimes actors who play major characters aren’t credited at all and conversely some performers who receive high billing play roles of relative unimportance. An example is Jack Holt, who gets a high billing (fourth?) in Cat People yet contributes what’s little more than a glorified cameo. Similarly, in I Walked with a Zombie, James Ellison gets top billing yet Tom Conway, Frances Dee and, arguably, Edith Barrett play more significant characters. Moreover, Ellison more or less disappears for the middle third of the film. Also in Zombie, Jenny Le Gon is given conspicuous (if low) billing in the credits even though she appears for at most a couple of minutes as a voodoo ceremonial dancer. The other dancers receive no credits, and neither do other, more substantial, characters, such as the coachman (Clinton Roseman) or the voodoo priest (Jieno Moxzer). It seems name recognition and star power rather than actual importance in the story carried the day with the folks in top management, and even a purist like Lewton couldn’t change that reality.
   [7] Judd is a study in contradictions. Apparently killed in Cat People by Irena in her panther form, he’s inexplicably reincarnated in Victim. At first he retains a vaguely sinister air, a carryover from the prior film perhaps. But as the film progresses, his good qualities are gradually revealed. Curiously, his lecherousness, which was his downfall in Cat People, isn’t a factor in Victim. His relationship with the Satanists is tenuous at best. We encounter him at one of their parties, where he seems in congenial mood, not so surprising as he’s more or less treated as their guest of honor. But later in the film he gives them quite a dressing down, improbably reciting passages from the Lord’s Prayer as he delivers a brief moralistic rant on the folly of their Satanic ways.
   [8] Not so coincidentally, Robson served as editor on the first three, Tourneur-helmed, Lewton films, thus an immediate and direct window into the Tourneur style. Robson also edited the atmospheric thriller Journey Into Fear (1943), directed by Orson Welles protégé Norman Foster. The film has a subtle but undeniable Lewtonesque vibe.

a surrealist masterpiece (?) : Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959)

  
 

   Plan 9 from outer space. [videorecording (DVD)]. Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2000. Producer, director, writer, Edward D. Wood, Jr. Originally released as a motion picture in 1959. Director of photography, William C. Thompson; editor, Edward D. Wood., Jr.; music supervisor, Gordon Zahler. With: documentary, Flying saucers over Hollywood: the Plan 9 companion.
   Performers: Bela Lugosi, Gregory Walcott, Vampira, Tor Johnson, Conrad Brooks, Paul Marco, Norma McCarty Wood, Dudley Manlove, Bunny Breckenridge, Criswell, Lyle Talbot. Summary: Plan 9 follows the alien-led zombie invasion as the aliens attempt, for the 9th time, to take over Earth.

   "Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future." 

 
    "The inspector is dead  – and somebody's responsible!"

 

 Can you prove it didn’t happen?

     

     Plan 9 From Outer Space may or may not be the worst movie of all time, but the case might  be made that its enduring classic status is due in part because so many things are right with it: atmosphere, colorful characters, good casting, humor. Say what you will about Plan 9, it's seldom dull, and not conspicuously inferior to comparable low budget fare of the era. Mostly, and for all its technical flaws, it's just a wonderfully entertaining movie and a showcase for some headliners of the day. Moreover, it's a revealing window into 1950s sensibilities.

    Plan 9’s production history and subsequent evolution from little known curiosity to its anointing as the worst film ever has been much discussed online and elsewhere, thus I’ll skip over these aspects and get right to it: is Plan 9 a masterpiece? Well, perhaps. I’m tempted to say one of the reasons Plan 9 is held in such affection is not because it’s so bad but because it’s so good. At the very least, I agree with the sentiment these days that Plan 9 is anything but the worst movie ever made. Even its bad qualities have a certain method to the madness.

     I am not an expert on surreal films, so I can’t speak with any authority, academic or otherwise. However – the jarring cuts, jumps from day to night and back again, stock footage, and not-so-special special effects, to say nothing of the creepy graveyard scenes, can only be described as surrealistic [1]. Indeed, Plan 9 has such a bizarre incongruity we have to wonder what kind of intelligence created it.

     Moreover, there’s Plan 9’s (unintentional?) subversive elements, thus the connection to surrealism and its related movements – dada, pop, beat, expressionistic, absurdist, underground, lowbrow. These are almost by definition questioning, contrarian, shocking, anti-establishment, outrageous, bizarre, and Plan 9 ticks all the boxes.


Albuquerque's a nine o'clock town

     The great irony is that Ed Wood probably never heard of surrealism in films and was totally serious in the art-for-art’s sake earnestness he brought to his work. That doesn't lessen our enjoyment of the film; it adds to it. The very appeal of a camp classic is that it doesn’t set out to be, well, campy. As has been pointed out by devotees more devoted and better informed than I, had Wood intended to make a parody or comedy, or worse, possessed the financial resources for a bloated extravaganza, Plan 9 wouldn’t have anything close to the same magic. It’s the sheer nobility and good intentions of Wood and his collaborators, not the slipshod, dodgy content of the product, that make Plan 9 and his other films so compelling.

     And though it’s not been written up so much in the literature, one of the plot threads – aliens resurrect dead humans to scare the bejeezus out of stupid earthlings – obviously anticipates the contestably surreal and much more highly regarded Night of the Living Dead of a decade later. There are even hints of Plan 9 in the cult horror classic Carnival of Souls, a film with its own surreal elements. Lest we give Plan 9 too much credit, it works both ways: there are definite antecedents in films like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

One of the great existential injustices is that Wood never profited from Plan 9; he sold the rights to his landlord to pay for back rent he owed. The ultimate insult was Wood’s untimely death in 1978 at the age of 54, so he couldn’t even enjoy the classic status the film would attain only a couple of years later.

     But perhaps there is some divine justice, albeit ironic and long overdue, in this universe of ours, and it seems Ed Wood, schlockmeister supreme, the worst director of all time, has gotten in the last word, appropriately enough, from beyond the grave. Much beloved by fans and even some critics, Wood is today guaranteed cinema immortality, and thus, the reputation of Plan 9 only continues to … increase over time. [2]

     As the most unlikely of auteurs, Ed Wood serves as an inspiration for us lesser lights and would-be auteurs, regardless of artistic medium, who have the drive to create something beautiful but lack the necessary talent to do so, at least in a conventional way. But then again, whatever Ed Wood may have been, it certainly wasn’t conventional.

    For Ed Wood was, yes, a genius, even if his genius was the kind that limited itself to the B picture, exploitation film, and surrealist fantasy. Wood's sui generis talent was born out of, and thrived, if that is the word, in the peculiar environment that was 1950s America. Such was the unique alchemy of Wood's vision that it couldn't transfer to different eras and contexts, though others have tried. 

    Even if the manifestation of his genius wasn't in the elegance of the final product but rather the creative ebullience and energy that allowed him near miracles of efficiency, i.e. to produce something of value from (practically) nothing, it does not diminish its accomplishment. In a word, there will never be another Ed Wood.

    [1] I’ve not seen Wood’s other opus maximus, Glen or Glenda, only snippets of it, but I understand it has its share of surreal touches as well. And recently I had the good fortune to catch Jail Bait, Wood's only venture into film noir. It's actually pretty good, in a Woodian sort of way. 

     [2] Update 6 Dec 2025. I just caught Wood's Bride of the Monster on the Harvey's Festival of Fear tv program, and with no disrespect to Plan 9's many delights, I now anoint Bride to be Wood's 'masterpiece,' as it has the most polished look of all his films. I've read that Bride was much better financed than Wood's other efforts, and it shows in the final product. Indeed its production values are comparable to other 1950s B movies that had a reasonably sufficient budget.  

the skull that wouldn't die: The Screaming Skull (1958)

   Cult classics. Collection 2. Del Mar, CA: Genius Entertainment, c2003. 2 DVDs, ca. 318 min. [AMC Monsterfest Collection]. Contents: Dementia 13; Frozen Alive; The Screaming Skull; Jessie James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter.
   Performers (Screaming Skull): John Hudson, Peggy Webber, Russ Conway, Tony Johnson, Alex Nicol. The Screaming Skull was released by: American International Pictures, Madera Productions, USA, 1958. Summary: A newly married couple arrives at the home of the husband's late wife, where the gardens have been maintained by a gardener faithful to the dead woman's memory. Strange goings on start to happen, which lead the new wife to think she's going mad.
 

As to the merits of this public domain ‘monsterfest’ collection, volume 2, with no disrespect to Francis Coppola on his debut directorial effort (Dementia 13)* or Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter (a favorite of mine, reviewed elsewhere in these pages), the true pick of the lot is The Screaming Skull. By the way, Frozen Alive, more a domestic melodrama/murder mystery than sci-fi, comes in a distant fourth.  
     * Not to be confused with John Parker's 1955 cult classic Dementia (aka Daughter of Horror).

   Skull is a curious amalgamation of William Castle-like showmanship (the opening scene pretty much clinches it here) and the old dark house formula, with a touch of Rebecca and a fairly heavy pinch of the Val Lewton horror films, especially in the middle third when the heroine goes meandering though the house peering into places she has no business, well, peering into, recalling the famed Val Lewton walks [1]. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

   Skull also somehow manages to suggest The Brain That Wouldn’t Die in that it has a creepy, unsympathetic husband, damaged wife [2], rural setting, B production values, and a leering, near soft-core porn quality, at least by the standards of the era (more on this below). To its credit Skull omits Brain’s luridly smoky saxophone music that accompanies the mad doctor as he cruises for babes. 

can a skull scream?

   Inasmuch as Skull takes its share of critical beatings online and elsewhere, and admittedly while the technical aspects of present print are so-so at best, for this viewer the film is an easy watch and holds up pretty well to repeated viewings. It has several especially effective sequences and the acting is generally competent if nothing spectacular. Ernest Gold’s score is creepy and intense. Also kudos to cameraman Floyd Crosby for the noirish visuals with well placed shadows. Best of all is leading lady Peggy Webber, who plays the nervous wife Jenni. She’s one of the best heroines-in-peril in the business and has a quality that makes her as likeable as hubby is instantly dislikeable.

   Moreover, Skull has an oppressive atmosphere of diseased eroticism that seeps into all the nefarious goings on: case in point, the developmentally disabled gardener, who’s a little too attached to the deceased lady of the house, to the point of necrophilic. The gardener character incidentally is played by Skull’s director Alex Nicol. Thus, and by way of getting back to our, very much alive, leading lady, as the story progresses we get some unexpected quasi-cheesecake moments: in one, there’s an impromptu if fairly bland undressing scene as the heroine gets ready for bed. Far more alluring are the extended sequences of her slinking though the large house in the middle of the night clad only in billowing negligees [3]. Interestingly when Jenni appears during the daytime she’s still attractive but dressed rather frumpy, which I suppose is consistent with the character, who is on the timid and retiring side.

   Certainly not a masterpiece, not even a minor one, and not especially different from or superior to other low budget products of its era, The Screaming Skull is nonetheless an enjoyable, scary movie that fills its 68 minutes with enough intelligence and thrills to keep the viewer’s attention [4], at least this viewer’s. However … and for all its good qualities, Skull comes by its reputation as a guilty pleasure honestly, and is best viewed on a dark and stormy night with a fireplace crackling nearby.

Trivia: this was Tony Johnson’s first film (she only made two altogether). A pity. She has a nice screen presence and quiet charisma that lights up the, alas underwritten, role of Mrs. Snow.

[1] Especially praiseworthy in the Lewton context is the highly effective use of sounds – rattling windows, scratching tree branches, screeching peacocks – all of which suggest unseen menace.

[2] In the case of Jan (Virginia Leith) in The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, there’s damaged and then there’s damaged! By the way, Brain, like Skull, is available in public domain. Note: okay, the guy in Brain, Dr. Cortner (Jason Evers), isn't technically her husband, but they are engaged to be married and he acts in a very husband-like way (at least in his own mind), his lecherous search for babes and the perfect body notwithstanding.

[3] Though tame by today's standards, the strip scene and Jenni’s creeping around the house clad in see-through nightgowns were pretty advanced for 1958. Indeed, and R-rated optical illusions or no, in some scenes the back-lit see-through effects get perilously close to the full monty. 

[4] Recently I had the good fortune to catch Screaming Skull on the Horror Hotel television program, a very fine print at that, far superior to my grainy, scratchy, DVD version. It all gave an added gravitas to the story, but more so revealed just how visually striking the film is, especially the beautifully lit scenes at night.