THE HORROR OF "THIS PRETTY WORLD": PROGRESSIVE PESSIMISM IN VAL LEWTON'S FILMS AND NOVELS

CAMERON MONEO

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1+1 Canada THE HORROR OF "THIS PRETTY WORLD": PROGRESSIVE PESSIMISM IN VAL LEWTON'S FILMS AND NOVELS

By CAMERON MONEO

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of York University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

©2009

Permission has been granted to: a) YORK UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES to lend or sell copies of this thesis in paper, microform or electronic formats, and b) LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA to reproduce, lend, distribute, or sell copies of this thesis anywhere in the world in microform, paper or electronic formats and to authorize or procure the reproduction, loan, distribution or sale of copies of this thesis anywhere in the world in microform, paper or electronic formats.

The author reserves other publication rights, and neither the thesis nor extensive extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author's written permission. (iv)

ABSTRACT

This thesis addresses the political connotations in the work of Hollywood producer

Val Lewton. Operating from 1942-1946 at RKO Pictures, Lewton's "B" horror unit specialized in bringing an understated technique and a probing social consciousness to bear on low-budget genre filmmaking. This thesis primarily concerns the latter distinction, arguing that the Lewton horror cycle evidences a politically progressive sensibility in its complex treatment of issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Tracing the context and implications of this progressiveness, this thesis focuses on

Val Lewton's importance in the political atmosphere of 1940s genre filmmaking in

Hollywood. This thesis also examines the social content of Lewton's pre-RKO,

Depression-era pulp novels alongside his films, revealing the political strands connecting his work as a whole. Finally, this thesis unpacks Lewton's films through the politically-oriented horror theory proposed by Robin Wood, arguing that

Lewton's social conception of "horror" is both progressive and markedly pessimistic. (v)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Suzie Young for her gracious support, confidence, and guidance.

My heartfelt thanks also go out to Michael Zryd, Scott Forsyth, Evan Cameron, Pat

McDermott, Art Redding, Eriona Voci, Maria Basualdo, Stephen Broomer, Fabiola

Caraza, Jeff Moneo, Samuel Lopka, Eli Horwatt, Scott MacKenzie, Geoff

Macnaughton, Malcolm D. Morton, Coral Aiken, Tina Benigno, and Jamie McKay.

Finally, I would like to thank my parents, brothers, and sisters.

This project was funded in part by a Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate

Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). (vi)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract iv

Acknowledgments v

Chapter 1: Val Lewton and the Importance of "B" Horror 1

Chapter 2: Social Topics in Lewton's Pulp Novels .41

Chapter 3: Patriarchal Horror and Progressive Suicide:

The Seventh Victim 76

Appendix A: List of Lewton's Productions atRKO 108

Appendix B: List of Lewton's Pulp Novels 109

Works Cited 110

Filmography 115 1 CHAPTER 1

Val Lewton and the Importance of "B" Horror

For many Hollywood radicals and progressives of the so-called Golden Age,

genre filmmaking was the ideal vessel in which to smuggle new ideas into an industry

founded on a tradition of sticking to the (ideological) formula, with a low tolerance

for deviation. The forties in particular, while being a rather fertile period for the Left

in Hollywood, proved—if only in retrospect—to be an ill-fated time to be too

politically outspoken, to which everything from William Randolph Hearst's embargo

on Citizen Kane (1941) to the HUAC hearings attests. James Naremore writes that

"when we take into account all the governmental and semiofficial organizations of the

Left and the Right who were involved in making judgments about film, the period

between 1941 and 1955 was probably the most regulated and scrutinized era in the

history of American entertainment" (105). Many members of the Left therefore took

up shop in the "lower" genres, a strategy which could be viewed as an even more

effective way of changing the complexion of Hollywood film over time and by

degrees. "[Precisely because the attention of censors and conservative political

1 When media magnate William Randolph Hearst caught wind of rumours that Orson Welles' film Citizen Kane was a loose—but nonetheless unflattering—account of his own life and affairs, Hearst blackballed Kane and Welles from receiving publicity through any of the channels in his vast media empire. For more on this embargo, see John Evangelist Walsh's book Walking Shadows: Orson Welles, William Randolph Hearst, and Citizen Kane (U of Wisconsin P, 2004). 2 In October 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), headed up by J. Parnell Thomas, began hearings to root out Communist Party members, sympathizers, and propagandizers in the American film industry, calling several witnesses—"friendly" and "unfriendly"—from Hollywood to provide testimony on "subversive" activity within the industry. With the compliance of the major film studios, HUAC assured that "[association with radical causes or radical organizations could lead to dismissal, blacklisting, or even, as the case of the Hollywood Ten [a group of'unfriendly' witnesses cited in contempt of court for refusing testimony] illustrated, imprisonment" (Krutnik et al. 5). 2 critics focused elsewhere, artists on the bottom rungs of the genres often had a freer hand than their more exalted counterparts" (Buhle and Wagner 111-2). Slapstick comedies, musicals, westerns and melodramas of the forties, if implicitly, were just as likely to bear the stamp of the Left as overtly political war dramas and "message films." The films noir (as they retrospectively came to be known) directed in the

1940s by such noted Leftists as Edgar G. Ulmer and the soon-blacklisted Edward

Dmytryk gave proof to a "subtle anticapitalist message that seem[ed] to be inscribed in the genre as a whole" (Booker xi).3 Jean-Loup Bourget asserts that

the freedom of Hollywood directors is not measured by what they can openly do within the Hollywood system, but rather by what they can imply about American society in general and about the Hollywood system in particular ... The implicit subtext of genre films makes it possible for the director to ask the inevitable (but unanswerable) question: Must American society be like this? Must the Hollywood system function like this? (58)

Taking up and often transforming the forms and conventions of pre-established genres (film noir itself joined themes and styles from the gangster film, the detective film, the horror film), Leftists fashioned critiques of the Establishment that both projected outward to the social sphere and fell self-reflexively on Hollywood itself.

An attitude of questioning and contestation imbued the genres; the significance of this

3 In an essay on Ulmer's 1945 B-noir Detour, Andrew Britton explicates the director's use of the metaphor of the road "not [as] a refuge for exiles from a culture in which America's ideals have been degraded; [but as] a place where the real logic of advanced capitalist civil society is acted out by characters who have completely internalized its values, and whose interaction exemplifies the grotesque deformation of all human relationships by the principles of the market"; Britton argues Detour's main characters are "isolated vagabonds whose lives are dedicated to the pursuit of private goals which they set themselves ad hoc, in the light of their own immediate interests, and who collide with one anther in a moral vacuum where human contacts are purely contingent, practical social ties have ceased to exist, and other people appear as mere use values to be exploited at will" ("Detour," 204). 3 attitude continues to bear out as more genre films and practitioners are reappraised from this socially and politically charged era.

Horror producer Val Lewton occupies an ambiguous position in the socio­ political milieu of genre filmmaking in 1940s Hollywood. It is indeed problematic to place Lewton in any explicit relation to the Left, since the producer was never so outspoken as to affiliate himself with one political side or another. "Lewton, it is true, was far from a political leftist" writes Alexander Nemerov, continuing, "figures of nostalgic sadness were always more his specialty than conquerors of the future ..."

(117). M. Keith Booker's Film and the American Left (Greenwood, 1999), which aims to list the year-by-year contributions of Leftists to the first century of American narrative film, features nary a mention of Lewton or his films.4 Val Lewton, Jr. sheds some light on his father's political side in recalling the time of the HUAC hearings:

It was strange that my father never got called up. He knew all those people, some of those people involved were pretty close friends. Though he stayed out of politics, he was really terrified because he was a naturalized citizen and I think he was afraid he would get in trouble ... He was a liberal but not nearly as liberal as my mother. There might have been some ill-will between some of those people who were called and my father, but he never testified against anyone. Although he never got politically involved, he was at some of those parties ... (qtd. in Bansak 410)

Lewton, in other words, put himself in the company of the Left, while remaining mum about his own politics. If we hope for any further insight into Lewton's political

4 Booker's analysis is surely hampered by his almost total disregard for horror films: only Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat (1934) is mentioned, while the films of Tod Browning, Lewton (whose team of screenwriters included known Leftist Josef Mischel), and George A. Romero, to name a few, are completely overlooked. 4 or ideological leanings, it seems we must turn to his films (as well as, I shall argue later, his pulp novels).

Val Lewton's B-budget horror productions—made at RKO from 1942-1946— are perhaps the most highly regarded horror films made in Hollywood in the 1940s, both for the way they renovated the genre and gave it a beating social pulse. Critical thinking on Lewton's productions has unfailingly favoured the idea that the films are either progressive or at least unconventional, in style and content alike. Much has been made of the aesthetics by which Lewton's horrors suggest more than they reveal; it is common Hollywood knowledge that the chilling, "B" budget atmospherics of the Lewton films offered a rebuke to the garish monster makeup of the horror shows made at Universal, Columbia, and the Poverty Row studios at the time.5 Film critic Manny Farber humorously attributes this understated style to

Lewton's "psychological fear of creating expensive effects" (47), though Lewton himself, more concisely, saw it as the best way to illustrate a simple principle:

"audiences will people any patch of prepared darkness with more horror, suspense and frightfulness than the most imaginative writer could dream up" (qtd. in Newman

65).

5 Perhaps Vincente Minnelli's film The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) also contributed to the popularity of this part of the Lewton lore. The film's Kirk Douglas character Jonathan Shields is partly based on Lewton: he is a creative, literate producer charged in the early stages of his career with the unenviable task of making a B film called "The Doom of the Cat Men." Shields resolves to innovate with his limited budget and provide a more suggestive way of scaring an audience. The famous scene in the film where Shields darkens his office but for one lamplight, to prove to his partner the spine-tingling effectiveness of even the slightest shadow among a pool of darkness to evoke unthinkable horrors, is true to Lewton's real-life habits during story conferences, according to Cat People screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen(311). Lewton had a deft hand, too, when it came to implanting political and social

commentary into his horror scripts, the final drafts of which he wrote himself (Siegel

25), either uncredited or under the name Carlos Keith (an old pseudonym from his

pre-Hollywood days writing pulp novels). The contents of all of Lewton's films bear

remarkable traces of a progressive sensibility, a keen evaluation of America's

lingering social problems. Let loose with B-budgets and a "low" genre, Lewton was

free from the pressures of the A "prestige" picture (whose outsized budgets

commonly attracted more interference from studio conservatives) to cut the

Establishment down to size, and to suggest through genre idioms all the "monstrous"

aspects of social relations in the real world. His horror films were never simply

retreats into fantasy, safe in their assurance that the horrors on screen belonged to an

imaginary realm. Martha P. Nochimson, in an indispensable essay on the social

dimensions of Lewton's films, argues "[Lewton] brilliantly evaded the studio scalpel through his indirect portrayals of the ways that gendered hierarchies, aggressively

dehumanized technologies, and corrupted class, racial, and economic relations result

in the tendency of the mind to irrationally create its own devils" (10). Among the

achievements of the Lewton films that place them in the progressive ranks of 1940s

genre filmmaking: the inclusion of a subjective voice and stature for black characters, particularly in The Curse of the Cat People (1944) and / Walked with a Zombie

(1943), the latter film offering powerful reminders of the sorrow and inhumanity of

slavery; a deconstruction of how patriarchal power (and repressed homosexuality) produces psychosis in The Ghost Ship (1944); a depiction of the cruelty of the class 6 structure, in The Leopard Man (1943), The Body Snatcher (1945), and Bedlam

(1946).6 Whether the man ever admitted it or not, it seems readily apparent in his films that Lewton had some creative investment in the plight of outsiders and victims in a determined social order in America, divided by class, gender, race, and sexuality.

Why Lewton might have held this interest, and how precisely it may have been cultivated throughout his life and career, are questions worth pondering.

But first—

Who was Val Lewton?

Val Lewton was born Vladimir Lveton in Yalta, Russia (now Ukraine) in

1904. His dissolute father disappeared shortly after Val's birth, and his mother eventually relocated the family—Val and his sister Lucy—to New York in 1910. In

New York, the Lewton family took up with Val's aunt, the famous Russian stage actress Alia Nazimova, who was soon to embark on her celebrated film career. Val grew up in Nazimova's large estate called Who-Torok, and was reared mainly by intellectual, self-reliant women: his sister, mother, aunt. Only the occasional male authority figure would enter Val's orbit, though whether these figures had any lasting impact on Val is difficult to say. Val Lewton, Jr. comments rather interestingly on the matter: "One of the things that strikes me about [my father's] movies is that there are a lot of strong female characters. Many of the men in his films aren't all that

6 As Nochimson writes of Bedlam: "[The film's] authentic horrors are linked to the abuse of the patients, which so clearly stems from corruptions inherent in the English class structure, that it is astonishing that no critics have made the connection" (12). 7 interesting. And I think that came from his being raised by women—they were a strong influence in his life" (qtd. in Mank 209).

Lewton was recalcitrant throughout most of youth. His early school years were not fortuitous. To teach him discipline, Val's mother sent him to a military academy twice during his upbringing, without much success. At the age of twenty,

Lewton dropped out of Columbia University, before going on to hold and be fired from numerous positions as a newspaper reporter. The problem was that Lewton was a born fabulist: he was once fired from a newspaper for fabricating a story about a truckful of chickens dying from heat exhaustion. It was around this time also that

Lewton won $500 dollars in an essay-writing contest for reviewing a play he never bothered to see (Siegel 10-1). Naturally, Lewton's mischief segued into more appropriate forms of creative writing: poetry, short stories, pulp novels, and, in a couple of notable instances, pornography.

Lewton's early creative writing career provides a fascinating precursor to his later work in horror films. As was previously mentioned, growing up in an all-female family perhaps instilled in Lewton a preoccupation with the social plight of women, for many of his novels are centred around female protagonists navigating the "cultural obstacle course that women must travel" which Martha Nochimson views as a thematic trademark of the Lewton horror cycle (14). Most of Lewton's early pulp writing may be viewed as "lurid" in one way or another, definitely more so than his horror films, but this luridness contains a genuine social impulse. Lewton's most famous book from the period was perhaps No Bed of Her Own (1932), "the first of 8 the 1930s Depression novels, beating even Steinbeck to the punch" (Bansak 20).

Lewton's novel concerned the increasingly hopeless efforts of an unemployed woman trying to survive in Depression-era Manhattan. The book is not "reputable" by any common standard, certainly not when one compares it to its contemporary, John

Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939), though it seems to demand reappraisal in light of Lewton's progressive accomplishments at RKO (the book has recently gone back into print, thanks no doubt to renewed interest in Lewton's career on the heels of the 2005 North American release of a DVD box-set of his RKO horrors). No Bed of

Her Own earned enough notice in its day to be burned under Hitler's orders, as well as adapted—if bowdlerized and altered beyond recognition—into a Hollywood film, retitled No Man of Her Own (1932), and starring Clark Gable and Carole Lombard.

Lewton seemed prouder of the former distinction.

The breakneck pace and efficiency of Lewton's writing method also mirrors his later work as a B film producer. Writing serializations of films for the MGM publicity department in New York, Lewton turned out 50,000 words a week; this is in addition to his publishing nine novels and countless other articles, pamphlets, and under-the-counter pornographic books—all before his thirtieth birthday (Siegel 12).

In the most extreme example of his frenetic output as a writer, Lewton wrote the novel The Fateful Star Murder (1931) in forty-eight hours in a hotel room. Lewton's later work at RKO involved the cramped production schedules typical of B films, and

Lewton's excellence in this pressured atmosphere is no doubt a tribute to the skills he honed as a prolific pulp writer. 9 It would be incorrect to presume that the B-movie maverick Lewton never

worked in A productions during his career in the film industry. His first major film

break in fact began under one of the most prominent figures in A-prestige Hollywood

filmmaking of the thirties and forties: David O. Selznick. In 1934, Lewton earned a job as a story editor for Selznick after Lewton's mother, working for MGM at the

time, added her son's name to a list of potential candidates for a job adapting the

Russian story Tar as Bulba for Selznick's production company. Lewton's work on

Taras Bulba came to nothing, but his professional relationship with Selznick evolved

into a position as, in Joel E. Siegel's words, "Selznick's Man Friday, [with Lewton]

advising on properties and the selection of actors, patching up rough places in

screenplays and checking production designs and set dressings for historical

authenticity" (15). This new role gave Lewton increased involvement in some of the

most popular A productions of the day. During his time with Selznick International

Pictures, Lewton worked on ,4 Tale of Two Cities (1935), Gone with the Wind (1939),

and Rebecca (1940), making a substantial impact on the production of each of these

films. He partnered with Jacques Tourneur (a later director of the first three Lewton

horror productions) for second unit filming of the storming of the Bastille in A Tale of

Two Cities J and reputedly (i.e. according to Lewton himself) came up with Gone

with the Wind's famous elevator shot of the endless mass of wounded soldiers at the

7 Interestingly, Jean-Loup Bourget calls these Bastille scenes "absolutely Eisensteinlike in their depiction of blatant injustice and spontaneous union, Sovietlike, of people and army" (56). 10 train depot (Lewton's mischievous intention was to devise a scene so outsized in

scope, it could not possibly be filmed [Siegel 15]).

In 1941, Lewton's name somehow passed through enough Hollywood

channels to earn him an offer from RKO studio chief Charles Koerner to front a low-

budget production unit specializing in horror films. The story goes (as Lewton

himself liked to tell it) that Lewton won this offer when someone told Koerner he had

heard that Val Lewton wrote "horrible novels," which Koerner naturally

misinterpreted to mean "horror novels," and felt immediately he had found the man to

head his B-unit at the studio (Farber 47). One can only hope there is some truth to this

anecdote, but it is probably safer to say that Lewton earned the job at RKO for his valuable and productive work under Selznick. In fact, as Edmund G. Bansak

surmises, it is most likely that Lewton got the RKO job when the interim head of the

studio Joseph Breen, with whom Lewton had friendly dealings while at Selznick

International, suggested Lewton's name to the entering RKO chief Koerner (88).

Expectations were not high for Lewton's horror unit. The expressed intent for the unit was to make a quick buck on horror programmers, capitalizing on the recent horror hits at Universal, such as The Wolf Man (1941), as well as on the success of the 1942 re-release of RKO's horror classic from the previous decade, King Kong

(1933) (Bansak 48). RKO at the time was reeling from the commercial fiascos of two

Orson Welles projects, Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Amber sons (1942), which by some reports nearly bankrupted the studio. With Koerner's entrance as chief came a new motto at RKO: "Showmanship in the place of genius"—a bitter 11

acknowledgment of the financial blow taken by the studio in giving virtual free rein to the boy genius Welles. Lewton's horror unit was then meant to fit nicely within RKO's refurbished reputation as a studio that placed commercial entertainment at a premium—if not always at a high budget.

Economically, RKO was not looking to invest much into Lewton's horrors.

Generally speaking, the Lewton division was seen as a horror supplement to the

already successful B units at RKO that churned out the popular Falcon and Saint

series. Budgets for Lewton's films began at around $130,000, and shooting schedules were typically set at three weeks. To constrain matters further, Lewton's horror unit was handed studio-appointed, market-proven shock/schlock titles to work with: Cat

People; I Walked with a Zombie; The Leopard Man. The silver lining in this production arrangement was that Lewton and his team were granted the freedom to develop original stories, based as loosely as they desired on the titles.8 {The Curse of the Cat People, a delicate tale of the relationship between a child and her imaginary friend, is a notable example of a Lewton film with an utterly incongruous title.) The team was able to experiment with more nuanced forms of cinematic horror—hence, the Lewton penchant for threatening shadows and human monsters in place of the abject, otherworldly grotesques of the Universal cycle. As Gregory Mank argues, what RKO had on their hands with Lewton was another kind of "genius," a true genre

8 William Friedkin, on the documentary featurette Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy from the 2005 Warner Bros. DVD box-set, states that this type of production arrangement—a studio- appointed title, with the filmmaker(s) free to interpret—was actually common practice in 1930s and 40s Hollywood. 12 artist and innovator, to whom they had given the virtual creative carte blanche enjoyed by Orson Welles (208). Additionally, Lewton's comparatively low profile as a horror producer ensured his innovations at RKO—including the streak of "lively social concerns" he brought to his horrors (Nochimson 9)—would remain in play longer than Welles' more heavily publicized iconoclasm at the studio.

For a unit meant to emulate the successes of Universal's horrors, the Lewton films defiantly refused to follow assumptions about what a horror film should be thematically, and most certainly refused to capitulate to easy scare tactics and special effects, however commercially proven. In fact, prior to embarking on his first film,

Cat People, Lewton screened a number of horror films for the screenwriter DeWitt

Bodeen as examples of the type of horror Lewton did not want his unit to perpetuate.9

The studio meanwhile paid little heed to what Lewton was actually doing with the titles given to him, and proceeded to market the films as standard "chillers." For the premiere of The Seventh Victim (1943), (in reality a poetic meditation on the unhappiness and alienation of a woman amongst a meaningless world of devil cults and hollow Christian moralism), RKO suggested that theatre owners decorate their lobbies with marble busts broken out in wax goose flesh, and attach placards to them reading: "Even this marble developed goose pimples after seeing The Seventh Victim"

(Siegel 52).

9 Aside from one film, Island of Lost Souls (1932), it is not known which horror films Lewton screened for Bodeen (Bansak 90). 13 While it is easy to mock RKO for sensationalizing the Lewton pictures in their promotional strategies, one must simultaneously remember that Lewton himself was no stranger to taking a lurid approach to attracting audiences, having written novels with titles like Rape of Glory (1931), Where the Cobra Sings (1932), and No

Bed of Her Own. Indeed it seems that Lewton throughout his life achieved a popular audience primarily by titillation. The viewers who clamoured to his most successful films were no doubt lured to the theatre by the films' pulpy promotional materials

("SHE WAS MARKED WITH THE CURSE OF THOSE WHO SLINK AND

COURT AND KILL BY NIGHT!" read the promotional poster for Cat People), just as his best-selling novels featured drugstore-ready cover illustrations of peroxide blondes in sheer negligees with plunging necklines (the cover of Lewton's 4 Wives

[1932] went so far as to feature partially exposed breasts.) What Lewton excelled at throughout his professional life was thwarting audience expectations with what lay behind the sensationalistic marketing gimmicks.

A case in point is the preview engagement of Lewton's first RKO production,

Cat People, held at the Hillstreet Theatre in Los Angeles in November 1942. The screening began as a cause of high anxiety for Lewton. The audience jeered and meowed mockingly at the cat cartoon attached to the front of the film and meowed again when the main title came up on the feature (Siegel 37). Evidently, the audience had taken the film's poster to heart and were prepared to revel in the kind of trashy kitsch promised to them. Yet, as the film itself got underway, the audience went quiet, and the film took effect: sitting in rapt attention from then on, spectators were 14 spellbound by the quiet, unsettling atmosphere of the film, and took to gasping and screaming at some of the film's most unexpected chills, including its famous first use of the "bus" technique which came to be a signature of Lewton's horror unit.10

Lewton's formula for intelligent, understated horror was a huge success on its first go around. Cat People, budgeted at under $135,000, made in excess of two million—and by some estimates four million—dollars at the box office. Together with two other low-budgeted pictures, Edward Dmytryk's Hitler's Children and Behind the Rising

Sun (both 1943), Lewton's first film virtually brought RKO back into the black by the end of 1943.u

The Lewton films weren't always successful at RKO. After a string of hits with Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Man, the Lewton unit witnessed its first box office disappointment (relatively speaking—on such a low budget it could hardly lose money), when The Seventh Victim debuted to minor returns and middling reviews. Despite its lukewarm reception, from a production standpoint The Seventh Victim was a pivotal project, marking the beginning of a more unpredictable course for the Lewton unit at RKO. Just as his director Jacques

Tourneur had been promoted to A productions at the studio on the success of their first three horror films, Lewton was offered the chance to produce The Seventh Victim

10 The Lewton "buses" are the moments in his films where, after a prolonged, quiet build up of tension, a sudden noise or object (in Cat People, a bus and its hissing brakes) penetrates the frame from offscreen, producing a shock and "invariably lift[ing] theatre audiences several inches out of their seats" (Siegel 32). 11 According to a New York Times article written by Fred Stanley on 12 December 1943. 15 with A-level financing. Lewton, however, turned the studio down when he was refused his first choice of director, Mark Robson, an experienced editor on the first three Lewton films (as well as, with Robert Wise, one of the editors of the Welles productions that "sunk" RKO earlier in the decade). The studio eventually allowed

Robson to direct the film, with the proviso that Victim's budget would be reduced once again to the B level, where Lewton would stay for the remainder of his career at

RKO.

If The Seventh Victim exposed the fallibility of the Lewton unit in terms of popular reception (never mind the quality of production, which was as high as ever on

Victim), the films Lewton made at RKO afterward provided myriad challenges to the once indestructible B-unit. The Ghost Ship was a mild success at the box office, but was tarnished by a (largely unfounded) plagiarism suit brought against Lewton, which he inexplicably lost, leading to the film's legal unavailability for decades following.

The Curse of the Cat People was a return to critical and popular success, but the production involved a change behind the camera, as the original, overly deliberate— and thus unfit for B-filmmaking—director Gunther von Fritsch had to be replaced by

Robert Wise, who made the jump from editor to director much like Robson before him (a rather felicitous turn of events, as later Hollywood history would have it). In

1944, Lewton also produced two non-horror films with the unit: Youth Runs Wild and

Mademoiselle Fifi. The former film was a major disappointment and compromise for

12 Amazingly, The Ghost Ship only recently debuted on home video with the 2005 release of the Warner Bros. Lewton box-set. 16 Lewton: according to the producer, a "reactionary and Republican organ"

influenced the studio to re-cut the film prior to release, and Lewton (unsuccessfully)

lobbied to have his name taken off the credits (qtd. in Siegel 64). Mademoiselle Fiji,

at the time the least expensive historical costume drama ever made in Hollywood,

barely registered with the public, and did not instil confidence in RKO that Lewton's

talents had much to offer outside of the horror genre. These films are often

overlooked in considerations of Lewton's RKO career, and indeed continue to await a

North American release on DVD, in spite of the success of the recent Lewton horror

DVD box-set by Warner Bros. Home Video.

Lewton's return to horror at RKO was not a happy one for the producer: the

studio had just signed Boris Karloff to a contract that would include three films for

the Lewton horror unit. Believing Karloff exemplified the old Universal monster

mash horror that Lewton's unit consciously worked to avoid, Lewton felt betrayed

and blackmailed by the studio into making more conventional horror shows. Luckily,

Karloff and Lewton wound up getting along famously, though the productions they

made together were not always so providential. Isle of the Dead (1945), their first

collaboration, was beset by off-screen difficulties (Karloff s back injury postponed production) and was a major disappointment to Lewton, who disparaged the studio

interference that corrupted his original material. According to Joel E. Siegel, Lewton

was supposed to move on to non-horror pictures after Isle, but the studio reneged, and the producer was forced into making two more horror films with Karloff (75). The

Body Snatcher (1945) and Bedlam (1946) were highly accomplished for Lewton and 17 his team from a creative standpoint, though only the former really hit home with

audiences.

The Lewton/Karloff films brought a close to the horror cycle at RKO, and

indeed represented the last films Lewton would make at the studio altogether. In

1946, Life Magazine touted the studio's impending promotion of Lewton to A-films,

and the Hollywood trades were rife with news of future productions lined up for

Lewton at RKO (Siegel 83). None of these films came to fruition, however, and by

January 1947, Lewton was gone from RKO, and under a new contract with

Paramount Pictures. Lewton made one unsuccessful film with his new studio, a post­

war drama called My Own True Love (1949), which was a disappointment to all

concerned, becoming the first Lewton production to lose money at the box office

(Bansak 406). Lewton's next picture, with MGM in 1948, is generally thought to be his nadir: a limp comedy called Please Believe Me (1950), starring Robert Walker

and Deborah Kerr. Lewton's final film as a producer was a slightly happier success,

and represented a return to his low-budget roots. Apache Drums (1951), a B-Western

for Universal, and allegedly the cheapest Technicolor feature made at the time, is to many critics the best of Lewton's post-RKO films, and the only one in which Lewton took any glimmer of pride (Siegel 170-1).

Behind the scenes, there were other professional disappointments for Lewton around this time, attended by increasing health issues. In 1947 he suffered a mild heart attack, derailing a planned collaboration with Jean Renoir, with whom Lewton had met on a number of occasions to discuss the making of what would later become 18 Renoir's The Woman on the Beach (1947). Perhaps Lewton's single greatest

professional disappointment came in 1949, when he was excised from Aspen

Productions, an independent production venture he had launched with his erstwhile

directors at RKO, Robert Wise and Mark Robson. Ironically, Robson and Wise

dismissed Lewton from Aspen because, according to Wise, he was "slow in coming

up with acceptable story material. Mark and I finally decided that it would be too

impractical to keep him on with Aspen since we could not get any backing without a

specific project in mind" (qtd. in Siegel 96). The news from this time that Lewton

couldn't work quickly in developing projects seems strangely out-of-sorts for a

producer/artist who made his name in working fast and efficiently, but perhaps

Lewton was losing confidence in his talents by then.

In 1950 Lewton signed on to produce a series of pictures for the budding "boy

wonder" of the social-issue film, producer Stanley Kramer. Lewton's role in the

Kramer productions in fact turned out to be an associate position, much less

substantial than Lewton had originally hoped. It all came to naught, in any case, when

Lewton suffered a second heart attack in 1951, before work with Kramer really got underway. A third heart attack landed Lewton in an oxygen tent at the hospital, where

he complained of feeling suffocated and claustrophobic. Lewton died of

complications from this heart attack on 14 March 1951, at the age of 46. Lewton's

friend Alan Napier eulogized him:

13 Lewton also had a habit of procrastinating when not faced with a strict deadline, according to Robson (qtd. in Siegel 37). 19 Val gave us of his best and was often hurt in the giving. He was often tormented because of the restraints and limitations imposed on him by the structure of the Motion Picture Industry. Yet this was the field to which he was called... Let us say good-bye with thankfulness in our hearts that we have known this gay, delightful, tormented, generous and most dear spirit.14

Four sources on Lewton

Lewton has garnered much critical scholarship, not all of which will be pertinent to the present discussion of the Lewton cycle as exemplary of the progressive potential of the horror genre. What follows is an account of the four major texts written on Lewton to date. Each is valuable in its own right, to be sure, but which prove most crucial to our understanding, simultaneously, how the films came to be, what makes them unique, and what their value and importance is in the socio-political milieu in and outside of Hollywood filmmaking, then and now?

Two books on Lewton can be justly grouped and considered together, for they both focus more heavily on biographical and historical issues than on rigorous and original textual analysis: Joel E. Siegel's Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror (Seeker

& Warburg, 1972) and Edmund G. Bansak's Fearing the Dark: The Val Lewton

Career (McFarland, 1995). Siegel's volume is the pioneering source on the producer- auteur. As such, the book introduced much of the important biographical information on Lewton that would influence readings of his films to follow. Here the reader is privy to the first indications of how Lewton came to the RKO job, what his work

14 A copy of this eulogy can be found in Reel 1, Val Lewton Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20 there entailed, how it affected him personally, etc. Siegel was the first author to

have access to Lewton's personal effects, through the goodwill of Lewton's surviving

relatives, and he was also the first to collect a great deal of hitherto unavailable

information about the man through personal correspondence with these relatives and

other acquaintances. Where Siegel's study is less groundbreaking is in the author's

readings—or rather, reviews (a "reading" suggesting in-depth analysis)—of Lewton's

films, some of which amount to abbreviated dismissals (e.g., Siegel dedicates only

two-and-a-half pages to essentially writing-off Isle of the Dead). While the

production information that attends Siegel's reviews is valuable, a sustained and

grounded critical insight into the philosophical and thematic workings of even the

Lewton "failures" is sorely missed. Often it is a dearth of critical elaboration that

sinks Siegel's readings. He argues, for example, that The Seventh Victim is the

apotheosis of Lewton's "negativity" as an artist, a profoundly nihilistic work that

"more than any other, reveals the man" (120). This potentially fertile critical assertion

(in truth, one that has had great influence on the present thesis) does not bear much

fruit in Reality of Terror, for Siegel neglects to proceed in his film reviews with any

firm analysis of the philosophical, and I would argue political, strains that might

connect each Lewton film to the next—in effect, to show how "negativity" informs the Lewton cycle as a whole, and to what end(s).

The same barrenness of critical insight in respect to film readings attends

Edmund G. Bansak's expansive Fearing the Dark, though this particular book

improves on Siegel's in providing even more wonderful biographical detail. Bansak 21 details an exhausting context for Lewton's relatively brief career over the span of more than 500 pages. Perhaps the most impressive of Bansak's chapters attempt to catalogue both Lewton's predecessors and "heirs apparent" in the horror genre; the chapters pertaining to the former especially help to dispel the common misconception that Lewton parted completely from what came before in Hollywood in his use of suggestion to create terror (e.g., Universal's The Mummy [1932], among its more outlandish effects, contained certain "Lewton-esque" touches, avant la lettre).

Bansak's film analyses, meanwhile, are heavy on plot description and production context, but ultimately do not go very deep in evaluating the Lewton films' subversive narrative and visual signatures (e.g., their problematization of the "happy ending"; their expressive, noir-like use of shadow). Both Bansak and Siegel's books seem more occupied with summarizing Lewton's career and importance than with paying critical attention to his work's many-layered meanings, which to my mind are what make his work so vital and lasting in the first place.

To forgo grappling with (even if not ultimately to solve) the origins and motivations of a creative product—or, as Andrew Britton says, an "historical action"15—is in one way to threaten to reduce the product to something ahistorical, self-contained, which ultimately means emptying the product of its social and political resonances. This is the risk Rick Altaian identifies in his argument for genre theory:

15 Britton writes: "Inasmuch as it is such [historical] action, a work of art cannot be detached from the history in which it intervened, and one's judgment of it will be continuous with one's understanding of what the nature of that intervention was" ("The Myth of Postmodernism," 470). 22 As long as Hollywood genres are conceived as Platonic categories, existing outside the flow of time, it will be impossible to reconcile genre theory, which has always accepted as given the timelessness of a characteristic structure, and genre history, which has concentrated on chronicling the development, deployment, and disappearance of this same structure. (682)

In the same way one cannot understand the syntax and function of horror films at any given period without at least grasping the germination of the genre, its development and adaptation over history, as well as the genre's relevance to its current historical moment, one can also only fail fully to appreciate what is special about the Lewton films—even besides their exceptional use of horror idioms—if one does not at least bother to look at what catalyzed and inflected their making from a historical, economic, political, and social perspective, and also at what impact history had on the cycle as a whole as it unravelled over five years at RKO. I find it very limiting to read the Lewton films outside of the material conditions (of Hollywood and America) within which they were produced and to which they make reference, because to do so is to misrecognize the importance of the very "horrors" they evoke. In advocating for a materialist reading of the Lewton cycle, I naturally neglect more fantasy-based examinations, but such a critical stance seems appropriate in respect to Lewton's films, which are predominantly concerned with grounding horrific "monstrosity" in actual social relations, concerning real people, and not with merely abstracting this world into a realm of the mind, a fantasy.

This is my main point of contention with J.P. Telotte's Dreams of Darkness:

Fantasy in the Films ofVal Lewton (U of Illinois P, 1985). Telotte is unabashedly anti-materialist in his argumentation, and indeed scores other critics for too hastily 23 treating horror/fantasy to materialist readings (2). Telotte argues that film fantasy overcomes the materialist bias of the camera (truth) in order to present the reality found only in dreams and the unconscious, which promises a redemptive effect for the viewer:

Cinematic fantasy reflects a desire or need to gain access to an archetypal experience, one of myth and mythic patterns, where we might confront the dreamself we daily turn from and save the dark side of our self and our world from a strictly materialist perspective. (4)

As an anti-materialist, Jungian critic, Telotte is not concerned with paying any extended or meaningful attention to the motivations of the individuals involved in the making of the Lewton films—indeed, with investigating how outside forces

(economic, social, cultural) may have affected these individuals' creation of the material. Telotte likewise has little use for examining how the resultant films themselves reflect and critique the ideology of the material conditions from which they arose, since fantasy (at least as Telotte sees it) has a timeless, archetypal character and function (it aids us in "making soul" [5]). What becomes frustrating then, throughout Telotte's book (a very well-argued one), is the manner in which the author must repeatedly overlook the most vital socio-political contexts and implications of the films, in favour of insisting that the films evoke ahistorical, archetypal structures (i.e., "collective unconscious" processes), and in doing so, work to articulate the psyche's coming to terms with both its "light" (rational, conscious) and "dark" (irrational, unconscious—or "vesperal") components in order to achieve a

Jungian "completeness." 24 For example, in his reading of 7 Walked with a Zombie, Telotte takes Paul

Holland's imprisonment of his catatonic wife Jessica inside the gates of his plantation as a sign of Paul's unease at the seductive influence of the voodoo practised by the island's natives. To Telotte, the island natives represent the dark, "unpredictable forces" of the psyche, from which Paul's rationality must stay closed off, protected:

"Faced with its basic limitations, the rational perspective turns within itself, becomes a conservative force which shuts out, as a way of denying existence to, that with which it cannot adequately deal" (54). It might seem from this that Telotte could make a connection between Paul's "rational" insularity and the "Otherness" of the black characters on the island who practise the voodoo; in other words, intuiting that

Paul's self-segregation, as much as it houses "rationality," also enforces racial boundaries, recalling the colonial history of the island and the misery it has caused.

The film speaks to the latter on several occasions; for instance, when Mary the nurse first arrives on the island, her black driver tells her: "The Hollands are a most old family, miss. They brought the coloured people to the island ... [their] enormous boat brought the long-ago fathers and the long-ago mothers of all of us—chained down to the deep ship floor." Attached to the front of this boat was the figurehead

"Ti-Misery," an image of a slave "with arrows stuck in him and a sorrowful, weeping look on his black face." The imagery here is one of mournful segregation: the boat chains the slaves "deep down" and features a weeping symbol of their oppression at its front. We find, then, in the island natives' voodoo practices, a powerful symbol of the liberated energies of a formerly enslaved race; Paul's self-containment must 25 surely read as an anxiety about these energies, and thus as a (perhaps unconscious)

anxiety about the Holland family's colonialist past coming back to haunt them. In

light of this, the fact that Wesley Holland finally murders Jessica and himself with

one of the arrows from the Ti-Misery figurehead (now part of an ominous fountain in

the Holland's courtyard) seems no coincidence.16 In Telotte's analysis, however, none

of this has any bearing, because his theory obliges him to hew to the notion of

"Other" (the black natives; voodoo) as simply "unpredictable force," neutered of

political and historical specificity. It is an especially disappointing tack to take with

respect to the film, given how careful Zombie is to detail the slave context of the

island, not to mention the fact that the film itself stands out in a period of increasing

consciousness about racial issues in Hollywood.17

By interpreting Lewton's films through a psychic framework, Telotte claims

to get at the very root of these films' appeal, and argues that political and social

readings can only follow from this root. Of course, this entails a complete inversion

of materialism: following Jung, Telotte believes "the psyche precedes the material

world and not vice versa" (189). If, by Telotte's belief, all social, cultural, and

political conditions can be derived from the primal workings of the psyche, then the

Lewton films might be said to express the psychic foundations that come before the

16 It is also important to note that the matriarch of the Holland family, Mrs. Rand, herself colludes with the island natives to practice a voodoo curse on her step-daughter Jessica, in effect sealing her own family's fate. For more on the ideological ramifications of Zombie, see Chapter Three. 17 Thomas Cripps recounts that the NAACP met with Hollywood executives in 1941 to discuss putting "a new African American on the screen" (44). I will further elaborate on Zombie and its racial context in Chapters Two and Three. 26 oppressions found in material culture, society, politics; these oppressions, when evoked in the films, thus only become relevant insofar as they dramatize psychic dysfunction. In his reading of the way Cat People structures the marital strife between the Serbian Irena and her "good, plain Americano" husband Oliver, Telotte has to de- emphasize the cultural import of Oliver's ignorance about Irena's sexual anxiety, even though it appears to be central to it. Telotte admits:

Oliver's limited experience and understanding speak of a personal and even cultural absence that has been deferred or banished, as if to the shadows or dark patches which frequently frame the screen or fill its depths, hinting at some discomfiting presence which lingers just out of view. Besides evoking a sense of the unknown or unseen, therefore, those ubiquitous shadows suggest how much in these people's lives remains unconscious, unformulated, and unquestioned. (24-5)

Again, something potentially fertile in Telotte's argument—namely, that there is a

"cultural lack" in Oliver that goes "unquestioned"—remains undernourished and disappointingly cryptic, as generalized as the "unpredictable forces" he locates in

Zombie. The idea that Oliver's ignorance (about Irena's sexual anxiety) might derive directly from his being a "good, plain Americano," and all that entails (ideologically), is not essential to Telotte because Oliver's affliction can be said to sprout from a universal psychic deficiency, and not from the ideological designs of a damaging, wilfully ignorant social order. That Lewton only gets more explicit about this social order as the RKO cycle continues (in such films as The Body Snatcher and Bedlam, not to mention the non-horrors Youth Runs Wild and Mademoiselle Fiji) seems no small matter, particularly if one chooses—as Telotte and I do, alike—to view the 27 cycle as a continuous, thematically linked project, and not as a series of disconnected entries.

What Telotte ultimately hopes to prove in his analysis is the "need to subordinate the material and literal to the imagination, giv[ing] the psyche primacy once more. In this way we might reinfuse appearances—'save' them—with a renewed sense of our own mysterious participation in their reality" (190). This is the benefit of Lewton's films, according to Telotte: they remind us that we shape reality in the image of our psychic processes; the greater control and balance we maintain over this shaping, the greater happiness and harmony we will evince in our reality. In

Telotte's view, Irena's sexual anxiety and jealousy—literally, her fear of losing control in transformation—signal a psychic crisis where "the dark element in human nature ... must find a proper balance with the persona and anima if one is to live happily, without a disabling dread of that dark realm within" (36); meanwhile, the socio-cultural pressures that tacitly—but coherently—actuated this anxiety in Irena

(i.e. her fear of her "dark realm within"—or, her sexuality) remain undiagnosed in

Telotte's account, and so for that matter does material (social, sexual) history.

For its insights into the social issues suggested and sometimes directly addressed in Lewton's work, Alexander Nemerov's Icons of Grief: Val Lewton 's

Home Front Pictures (U of California P, 2005) comes as a revitalizing antidote to

Telotte's anti-materialist thesis, and is perhaps the most enlightening and original study done on the producer to date. Nemerov accounts for the films as historical products in two senses: for the way they fit in a continuity with Lewton's life, career, 28 and interests; and for the manner in which they reflect the realities of World War

II. It is curious that Nemerov's book, the most recent extended study on Lewton, is the first to make an explicit connection between the war and his work, the first to assert that "World War II haunts the horror films of Val Lewton" (1), being that

Lewton's RKO unit operated during the approximate period of the US involvement in the conflict (Lewton made films at RKO from 1942-1946). In the same way that criticism on film noir of the 1940s has underscored its war context,18 Nemerov reads

Lewton's horrors for the manner in which they filter the effects of the war in ambiguous, troubling images.

Nemerov's book takes various positions on the ways Lewton registered the sorrow of war in his film, but the main line of argument running throughout is that the

Lewton films contain recurring "icons of grief," certain frozen, sculptural images of characters which Nemerov argues "constitute Lewton's vocabulary of the tragic, a static visual language of grief haunted, as we will see, by the war" (3). Nemerov, for example, isolates the first appearance of the character Irena in The Curse of the Cat

People, studying the way in which this scene becomes tableaux-like, and indeed, similar to a Russian icon painting. Nemerov concludes that this iconic image can be read as Lewton's addition of a proper form of sorrow into the narrative, one born of

18 See, for instance, Sheri Chinen Biesen's Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir (Johns Hopkins UP, 2005). Biesen's thesis is fairly unique, arguing that film noir was very active during—and directly responsive to—the war. Many other scholars have proposed that, on the contrary, noir necessarily didn't flourish until after the war: "It's only at the end of 1941 that the war overtakes the United States, and the war effort quickly mobilizes all the nation's energies. Now, film noir is to a large degree 'antisocial' ... This was out of place in a world under fire, in which American soldiers were defending a certain kind of order and set of values. There was an obvious discrepancy with official ideology. Whence this laying dormant for five years" (Borde and Chaumeton 29). 29 his Russian heritage that can authentically record the effects of the war on those it traumatizes. Nemerov secures this argument by showing up the contrast made in the film between Irena's iconic, solemn appearance in the frozen backyard of an

American family house, and the carefree, blissfully unaware scene going on inside the house, as the American family celebrates Christmas with friends by a warm fire (29).

Nemerov invokes the mournful song Irena sings upon her first appearance as a potent reminder of the film's sense of the tragic, one typically glossed over in Hollywood:

"Irena's song on Christmas Eve would not seem the most likely place, but it is one of a few scenes in Hollywood wartime cinema that give powerful expression to grief and loss. Her song, so sad even now, is the engraved sound of sorrows otherwise unheard" (34). The melancholy of Irena is thus contrasted with the American lightheartedness typical of wartime films (e.g., RKO's flag-waving hit Bombardier, released in 1943), which take faith in a blind optimism and patriotism, inhibiting a deeper understanding of the tragedy overseas.

Part of the Lewton ethos is a sensitivity and attentiveness to secondary,

"insignificant" characters. For example, nearly every last speaking part in a Lewton film is expressive of a personality, no matter how small the role. In Bedlam, Lord

Mortimer's young servant boy Pompey (Frankie Dee) is shown to have a mocking sense of humour during his brief screen time, when he imitates Boris Karloff s Master

Sims in a mirror by scrunching his face into a grotesque grimace. Nemerov links this principle—of making even minor characters memorable—with Lewton's humanistic wartime iconography. Nemerov argues that the melancholy icons, like Irena, found 30 throughout the Lewton cycle continuously arrest the progress of the films' narratives; in doing so, they concentrate a certain energy in the film on rather minor, alienated characters, who most often carry the burden of inscribing the war's effects on the films. A chapter in Nemerov's book is devoted to the forgotten bit-part character actor Skelton Knaggs, whose screen credits in Hollywood mostly amount to brief, one-line cameos, but who appears in much more consequential roles in several

Lewton films. Knaggs makes his most memorable screen appearance in Lewton's The

Ghost Ship. The audience is introduced to Knaggs' character the Finn when the protagonist, sailor Tom Merriam (Russell Wade), encounters him as he boards the ship. The Finn, a mysterious, mute deckhand with wet, penetrating eyes and a face that "makes you think of the gum under the seats" (Nemerov 95), silently points

Merriam in the direction of the ship's captain. Just as one expects the narrative to follow Merriam onto the ship, Lewton stays with the Finn, allowing the character to arrest the flow of the film in his mournful solitude. As the viewer considers Knaggs' ravaged, unlovable features, s/he is treated to the character's inner monologue, which bespeaks the sorrow the mute Finn feels in not being able to communicate with his fellow man, but also tells of the profound knowledge and insight the character has into human beings, which alas cannot be shared. Nemerov finds in the Finn another

Lewton creation that stands as a "shrine of tragic singularity" (6) and as a conduit for rendering a lasting image of "wartime alienation" (73). The Finn takes on rather unexpected importance at the climax of the film when he saves Tom Merriam from the murderous rage of the demented Captain Stone. That such a "socially alienated," 31 minor character could impact the narrative in this way is a touchstone of the

Lewton cycle, according to Nemerov, who justly places Lewton in lineage with

Dickens in this respect; like Dickens' minor characters, the Finn's "intense psychical

oddity and isolation" (75) oversteps the narrative and stands out to signal "a social

world gathered and condensed into his person" (95). For Nemerov, the world the Finn

comes to represent is one tuned to the neglected home front reality of "downtrodden

social ambience" (94).

Where Nemerov's book becomes most fascinating (and influential to the

present thesis) is in its analysis of the socially progressive aspects of the Lewton

films, a project sorely lacking in Telotte's anti-materialist study. Nemerov devotes a

chapter to the significance of another minor Lewton character, the black zombie

Carre-Four (Darby Jones) in / Walked with a Zombie. By Nemerov's lights, Carre-

four is both a static, laconic symbol of the debilitating tragedy of war, and also a

strong, resilient figure standing for the injustice of racial prejudice. In great historical

detail, Nemerov elucidates the social criticism made by having Carre-Four tower so

resolutely over and against the flow of the narrative. Tying Carre-Four's startlingly

still appearance in the film to historical images of slavery in art, Nemerov finds that

An iconography of racial violence haunts [Carre-Four's] scenes even amid the erasure of rope-and-gun specifics. Alone, dead, beautifully and self­ consciously staged, facing the audience directly and meant for its inspection alone in a story explicitly about a people's long memories of slavery, he is disquietingly insisted upon. (112)

Nemerov draws attention to two images in particular to elucidate the implications of

Carre-Four's iconic appearance. The first image is contained in perhaps the film's most famous sequence, when the nurse Betsy leads her catatonic, zombie-like charge Jessica through the sugar cane fields towards the beating drums of a voodoo ceremony. Along the way they are faced with the tall, frozen figure of the zombie

Carre-Four. This scene has highly provocative connotations:

Strong and imposing, blocking the path, [Carre-Four] confronts the audience with a strength that anticipates images of heroically defiant black men in the 1960s and 1970s even as he also harks back to the imagery of lynching. No other figure in the history of American visual culture stands so perfectly at the crossroads between the Scottsboro Boys and the Black Panthers. (118)

The other image of importance to Nemerov's discussion of Carre-Four occurs towards the end of the film. Framed from above against the crashing surf of the ocean, the towering Carre-Four is not given the privilege of a lower angle to play up his significance. Yet Nemerov finds in the refusal finally to emphasize Carre-Four's significance the filmmakers' (perhaps unwitting) statement of the "the black man's lack of a higher cause" (131) in America, which evidently has reverberations in certain African Americans' responses to the war effort fought in the name of a country in which they are still alienated—as a black man commented in Harper's magazine at the time: "This war doesn't mean a thing to me" (qtd. in Nemerov 131).

In the zombie Carre-Four, the sorrow of slavery and the sorrow of the war are compounded into one sculptural, unforgettable screen image.

The implicit social criticism in Zombie is given fuller measure in Lewton's last film at RKO, Bedlam. It is for this film that Nemerov reserves his final points on the war and minorness in the Lewton cycle. On a cultural level, Nemerov finds that

Bedlam resonates with the end of the war, the transitional period in American culture 33 when the tragedy of the conflict gave way to a voracious consumerism in the country. "Appropriately about a film made on the verge of peace," writes Nemerov,

"Bedlam divides into realms of violence and frivolity, pain and pleasure" (139). To illustrate the "split visual language" (141) of the film, Nemerov concentrates on the

Vauxhall Gardens scene, wherein a young man (Glenn Vernon) coated in suffocating gold paint drops dead reciting a poem for a group of otiose, aristocratic banqueters.

The scene in the garden is one of opulence, baroquely decorated and abundantly catered—earning, for Nemerov, a parallel with the nascent greed of the postwar consumer boom. Yet the Gilded Boy, trotted out as entertainment for the evening by the cruel Master Sims, undercuts the celebratory nature of the scene; the Gilded Boy's class suffering is foregrounded and isolated: his exploitation for the pleasure of the nobility literally precipitates his demise. Nemerov also finds that his radiant, metallic appearance and baffling suffocation uncannily predict the victims of the Hiroshima bombing, afflicted as they were with an unfamiliar "glowing sickness" brought on by radiation exposure (157-8). While the film was shot before the bomb was dropped,

Nemerov believes it entirely possible that a "post-Hiroshima editing choice" was made in bringing the Gilded Boy's special suffering into insistent close-up, for the audience to scrutinize in the tradition of the Lewton cycle's disquieting "icons of grief (158). Allegorically speaking, in the Vauxhall Gardens scene the festivities of a postwar consumerism are haunted by the sufferings of the victims of the war, another of the Lewton films' responses to the attitudes of Americans (and American films) towards the war and its (global) after effects. 34 Nemerov withholds some of his most effective and enjoyable commentary on Lewton's status and attitude as a B-level artist for his concluding discussion of

Bedlam. In the appearance of the Gilded Boy, Nemerov finds an irresistible symbol for Hollywood's totem of "quality" and success: the Oscar. The Gilded Boy's suffocation is then rife with hints of Lewton's own orientation towards the "official"

Hollywood tradition of Quality, with implications of the Lewton mission to "bring the big production down to size" (164). At the centre of Lewton's most "epic" production

(in terms of budget and scale), Lewton inserted a piece of industry-criticism starring a minor actor: "The Gilded Boy's demise mocks epic productions and major stardom as things not worth achieving: the Oscar drops dead" (164). It is Nemerov's contention that Lewton also wrote this scene as self-criticism, acknowledging his own creative temperament, which was "unsuited to make something important anyway" (162).

Nemerov cites Lewton's contempt for the excess and pretentious "grandeur" of David

O. Selznick's productions, particularly Gone with the Wind, and finds in Bedlam an attempt to criticize such excess, to bring it back down to size (164). (Lewton famously referred to the novel of Gone with the Wind as "ponderous trash" and advised Selznick to film War & Peace instead. One remembers too Lewton's claim that he created the depot of wounded soldiers scene in Gone with the Wind as a kind of mocking joke, an impossible scenario, too outsized to be filmed.) Nemerov spins an excellent argument about Bedlam's industry criticism by drawing upon Harold

Bloom's idea of kenosis, which refers to a minor figure/artist's coping with the stature of his/her more "major" predecessors/contemporaries by enacting a kind of critique 35 that belittles the stature of both the minor and major work at once. Nemerov sees this as characteristic of Lewton's B-auteur status as a whole: "One makes work to be laughed at—or to be dismissed as just a B film or some other instance of minorness.

But in so doing the minor producer empties the authority of the source" (164).

Lewton's films are then a form of revenge against larger productions in all their notions of "importance," "Quality"; hence, the Gilded Boy literally gags to death on a poem whose lyrics pay tribute to "This pretty world." Speaking to the larger picture of the American postwar home front, the Gilded Boy and other alienated figures in the Lewton collection dramatize that "[t]he loneliness of the little man is the same as the quarantined darkness of the war years: none of it—minorness, tragedy, isolation—belongs in the new postwar world" (169). One is encouraged by

Nemerov's book to see that Lewton's films countered the generalities of mainstream

Hollywood filmmaking with the specific, intimate details of real, lived existence, in all its sadness and solitude.

New directions on Lewton

The importance of Nemerov's study to the present thesis cannot be understated. There is much from Nemerov to suggest Lewton's progressive orientation as a filmmaker. The central thesis of his book, which regards Lewton's images as belonging to a tragic wartime iconography, points to a sensibility in

Lewton's work that could be deemed progressive. Lewton's concentration on minor characters not only expresses a humanistic sympathy for outcasts and marginalized perspectives (about war and about America), but also ramifies as a response to social and cultural forms of alienation and oppression. Irena, Carre-Four, the Finn, and the Gilded Boy's Otherness stand in relief against the social and cultural contexts which aim to suppress difference. This interest in the minor and the Other ensures that the Lewton films never take for granted the "goodness" or "rightness" of dominant political, social, and cultural ideologies.

Where I aim to expand significantly upon Nemerov's study is in arguing that the Lewton films' pessimism about the dominant ideology in America harkens back to the producer's pulp writings of the early 1930s. In light of the RKO horrors,

Lewton's novels demand reconsideration: they transcend their trashy roots by using the vulgarity of pulp to speak frankly about America's social ills. In Chapter Two, I will conduct a close analysis of seven of Lewton's novels, alongside his RKO work.

What I hope to foreground is that Lewton, throughout his career in both literature and film, was the author of a series of—I think progressive—works that condemned

America by exposing its attitudes towards race, class, sexuality, and gender.

There is another major aspect of Lewton's career that I think Nemerov mainly neglects: the reality that his RKO films were products of a genre, and adhere, however loosely at times, to the structures and idioms of the horror film. One cannot blame Nemerov for largely overlooking the horror genre in his analysis, as the

Lewton cycle hardly invites surface comparison to most other horror cycles (e.g., the

Universal series of the 1930s and early 1940s), concerned as it is, not with explicit forms of monsterhood and the supernatural, but with a realistic—if stylized—diegesis 37 that complicates questions of genre. As Edmund Bansak argues, "[One] should be

reminded that only four of the eleven Lewton films (Cat People, I Walked with a

Zombie, Isle of the Dead, and The Body Snatcher) can rightly be called horror films

and that even these four may be open to debate since, in each case, they leave room

for a rational explanation for their suggested supernaturalism" (361). But the fact

remains that nine of the Lewton RKO pictures are categorized as horror films, for all

intents and purposes (the studio's especially), and rather than dismiss this

categorization outright, it rather seems productive, granted the proper perspective on

the genre, to analyze the films in a horror genre framework.

To supplement Nemerov's evaluation of the social and political importance of

the films in the framework of B, or "minor," modes of production and articulation, I

think it fruitful to offer a genre analysis of the films that addresses the implications of

the Lewton cycle's intervention into its Hollywood/American ideological context.

The theory of the horror genre most suitable to undertake such an analysis I believe

comes from Robin Wood. In his highly influential conception of cinematic horror,

Wood offers a simple formula: "normality is threatened by the Monster." What Wood

means by normality is, of course, the reality found in Hollywood and America

everyday: that of bourgeois patriarchal capitalism. Wood's formula is remarkably

supple for assessing the politics and ideology of Hollywood horror films, as it

succinctly defines how the genre structures itself around playing out fears of monstrous attacks on all that America holds dear—thus fears of the corruption of patriarchal capitalism. The "monster" will inevitably take on characteristics that 38 betray, at any given historical period, America's sense of what "threatens" the prosperity of its norms.

MGM's 1932 horror The Mask ofFu Manchu offers a plain example of

Wood's theory in practice. Here we have the white, Western (they are British, but could just as well be American) protagonists squaring off against the sinister Chinese

Dr. Fu Manchu (Boris Karloff), who aims to conquer the entire white race by reclaiming the magical lost relics of Genghis Khan. The film unabashedly employs horror idioms to capitalize on the so-called "Yellow Peril" still feared in America in the 1930s.19 Karloff s Fu Manchu is the "monster" whose exotic Otherness (on top of his race, he's also given feminized traits) threatens the very sanctity of "normal,"

Western ideals—for example, both Fu Manchu and his daughter (Myrna Loy) are portrayed as sexual perverts, taking orgasmic delight in the elaborate torture of their white captives; elsewhere, Fu Manchu promises his minions that the enslavement of the white race will permit the yellow man's sexual cooptation of white women. Seen through Wood's formula, Fu Manchu's reactionary politics emerge rather bluntly

(and campily) from the affirmation the film gives "normality" in the face of vile, foreign "monstrousness."

The "Yellow Peril" refers to the well-publicized paranoia and racism in white America around the turn of the twentieth century surrounding the perceived loss of jobs and quality of life to Chinese immigrant workers. World War II spurred a recrudescence of the "Peril" in America, this time turned on "enemy" Japanese immigrants and citizens in the country, a large number of whom were placed in internment camps. For an account of The Mask ofFu Manchu and its "Yellow Peril" subtext, see Gregory Mank's Hollywood Cauldron (McFarland, 1994). 39 Far from only exposing the conservative uses of horror, Wood's appraisal of the genre also fundamentally supports an argument introduced at the outset of this chapter: that genre films were—and are—an ideal place for progressive politics to be staged in Hollywood. Wood finds this is possible because, culturally speaking, genre films are still not "taken seriously" (except in academic film scholarship, one might add), to the extent that their ideological underpinnings may easily pass unnoticed.

Wood elaborates:

For the filmmakers as well as the audience, full awareness stops at the level of plot, action, and character, in which the most dangerous and subversive implications can disguise themselves and escape detection. This is why seemingly innocuous genre movies can be far more radical and fundamentally undermining than works of conscious social criticism, which must always concern themselves with the possibility of reforming aspects of a social system whose basic lightness must not be challenged. ("The American Nightmare," 70)

If it is impossible for explicitly "political" mainstream American films to call openly for the dismantling of the bourgeois capitalist system, genre movies—particularly horror and sci-fi films, at their most apocalyptic, or dystopian—provide the idioms to imagine this dismantling: in a way, to "fantasize" about it (fantasy here retaining an allegorical relationship to material conditions, contrary to Telotte's argument).

Lewton never quite dabbles in the apocalypse, but his films are filled with harsh rebuttals against the "Tightness" of patriarchal capitalist ideology. I find

Jacqueline's suicide at the end of The Seventh Victim an exemplary case in this respect—a lasting, pessimistic retort to the myriad oppressions of society. In Chapter

Three I will look at Victim in greater depth, accounting for its downbeat energies in 40 the framework of Wood's horror formula, and moreover in the larger scope of

Lewton's generally negative social philosophy, as evidenced throughout his work—

indeed, what one might call his "progressive pessimism." 41

CHAPTER 2

Social Topics in Lewton's Pulp Novels

The following chapter broaches issues of authorship surrounding the Val

Lewton RKO horror cycle. Here, I will attempt more fully to consolidate what I mostly took for granted in the first chapter: that Val Lewton is the driving auteur force behind the cycle as a whole, in spite of his taking the role of producer to the films, rather than the more popularly auteurist mantle of director. Few critics have quarrelled with the notion that Lewton's influence on these films was primary. In one sense this is not surprising, since Lewton's production credit was the only constant over the nine films, amid a rotating list of directors, screenwriters, cinematographers, etc. In another sense, it is a wonder more critics have not challenged the Lewton auteur thesis, given that the RKO B horror unit was marked by close collaboration in many respects, and furthermore that such eminent directors as Jacques Tourneur and

Robert Wise—and to a lesser extent, Mark Robson—helmed the films, and were largely left alone in doing so (Scorsese 98).

Of course, not every critic agrees that Lewton is the only author worthy of attention, across the board. Among the unit's directors, Tourneur is probably the one most frequently discussed in auteurist terms,1 and it thus seems no coincidence that

1 See especially Chris Fujiwara's Jacques Tourneur: Cinema of Nightfall (McFarland, 1998) for a close study of the aesthetic and thematic trademarks linking Tourneur's filmography. Wise and Robson present more problematic and arguably futile cases for auteur study, by virtue of their frequent forays into depersonalized Hollywood entertainments and Oscar films (e.g. Wise's West Side Story [1961], Soundof Music [1965], and The Sand Pebbles [1966]; Robson's Pey ton Place [1957], Valley of the 42 his contributions to the RKO cycle—especially Cat People and / Walked with a

Zombie, but with the possible exception of The Leopard Man—have to date received the most scholarly attention, with due credit paid to Tourneur himself. Reynold

Humphries, for example, views the chief distinction of the RKO horrors to be their poetic use of the "hesitation" and ambiguity characteristic of To&orov''sfantastique, and finds that only Tourneur's films properly achieve this effect (42). As Humphries insists, "Just to what extent Tourneur's direction is chiefly responsible can be seen from the ludicrous attempts by Mark Robson to instil suspense and anxiety into the mundane script of [The Seventh] Victim, the only outright flop of the series" (52).

While I can hardly agree with Humphries' dismissive take on The Seventh Victim, there is no doubt something to his assertion that the cycle lost much of its visual poetry when Tourneur departed: there is nothing as visually entrancing as / Walked with a Zombie among the succeeding films of the RKO series. In his essay "The

Shadow Worlds of Jacques Tourneur," Robin Wood joins Humphries in championing

Tourneur's poetic achievements with Cat People and Zombie, and finds that in their realization of themes (imprisonment, familial tension) through visual atmosphere

Tourneur's films excel over such later Lewton productions as The Body Snatcher, distinguished as these films are in their own way (253).

Dolls [1967], and Earthquake [1974]). Needless to say, the unit's other "lost" director, Gunther von Fritsch, has received practically no auteurist consideration attention whatsoever; his most notable post- Lewton credit is perhaps as director of the Vienna scenes in This is Cinerama (1952), a feature length documentary of sorts, made to showcase the new super-widescreen, Cinerama process. 43

If the auteur argument for the RKO films were based solely on better- directed, more visually distinctive films, Tourneur's contributions would surely stand above the rest in the cycle. Yet, to my mind, Tourneur's films still seem of a piece with the entire cycle, especially when studied for their ideological aspects. If I am correct in presuming a progressive thread runs throughout the series, I would argue this is principally because Lewton remained the producer, not to mention uncredited screenwriter, in all nine of the films. It is my feeling that Lewton's early pulp novels anticipate the social sensitivities of the RKO films, their insights into the ideology of

American society, if in an understandably cruder form. I am not the first to acknowledge the significance of Lewton's pulps to his RKO work. In an afterward to the recent reprint of Lewton's novel No Bed of Her Own, Damien Love lists some of the affinities shared between Lewton's novels and films: "the abiding concern for female protagonists; the frank and humanist approach to society and sex; the eye for the details of character's lives' the forward-driving storytelling; the persistent literary digressions" (260). In his biography of Lewton, Edmund G. Bansak takes an extended look at not only No Bed of Her Own, but also Yearly Lease, and finds in both cases motifs and character types that would later turn up in the RKO films (20-9).

There are doubtless arguments to be made against the validity of analyzing

Lewton's pulp novels together with his RKO output. For one, Lewton expressed some embarrassment with his pulp past, perhaps seeing in it his degradation as an artist, selling himself to a sensationalist genre. Lewton in fact carried these feelings with him as he prepared to take on the horror job at RKO: in a letter to his mother and 44 sister in 1942, Lewton wrote, "I know so surely that whatever small talent I have in this field [i.e. motion pictures] will be broken and ruined by working in cheap things, just as surely as my writing was ruined" (qtd. in Nemerov 6). As the story goes,

Lewton redeemed himself and, arguably, the cultural reputation of the horror genre by forgoing the old haunted house techniques of the films that went before him and refining a more literate, meditative, and understated approach to horror. With his newfound success in the movie business, Lewton's pulp roots seemed to become even more discreditable to the man. As Lewton's secretary at RKO Verna de Mots remembers: "The only time he ever scolded me was when he came into the office early one morning and found me reading one of his novels. He blushed and became quite angry. 'Don't ever let me catch you reading one of those books again,' he shouted and slammed the door to his office" (qtd. in Siegel 60). Still, whether the above is evidence of Lewton's total disownment of his pulp work cannot be said conclusively. Indeed, Lewton's wife Ruth believed that, self-conscious as Lewton was about his pulps, he in the very least remained proud of his novels No Bed of Her

Own and Yearly Lease (Bansak 242).

To further offset the evidence of Lewton's distaste for his pulp work, one finds everywhere in his novels the traces of an artist enjoying himself at work.

Degrading and purely mercenary as the job of pulp writer may have seemed at times,

Lewton still wedged his own personality and wicked sense of humour into his writing. There is no denying that Lewton churned out pulps as quick cash fixes,

and he made self-deprecating light of this fact in his novels. Take, for instance, the

final passages of The Fateful Star Murder (1931), the novel he wrote (under the

pseudonym Herbert Kerkow) in forty-eight hours to capitalize on the tabloid

popularity of the Starr Faithfull murder case (the novel nevertheless amusingly

insists that "The characters in this book are fictitious and in no way pertain to any

person living or dead"). At the end of The Fateful Star Murder, after the character Dr.

Rothmere has solved the murder of his patient Dawn Loyall, he asks his secretary

Brownie to go out and buy him a book to read during his forthcoming vacation.

Brownie returns in shock with a copy of the latest drugstore novel, "The Dawn Loyall

Murder" (an orange book with black letters just like The Fateful Star Murder), which

Rothmere immediately orders her to kick out into the street, cursing, "God damn

these cheap and ready writers!" (239).

Alexander Nemerov takes the above excerpt to be an example of the more

facetious side of Lewton's identification with the culturally disregarded. According to

Nemerov, "[Lewton's] novels are knowingly half literary: their revelations come

equally from the Bible and transparent negligees" (5). Yet, if Lewton's writing was

often playfully self-aware of his cultural insignificance as a pulp writer, it could at

other times turn more thoughtful, even despairing about this insignificance. In Yearly

2 A tragicomic story has Lewton writing Where the Cobra Sings briskly and secretly, so that he might stuff his MGM paycheques with twenty-five dollars extra to convince his wife he had received a raise he couldn't in reality drum up the courage to ask for (Siegel 16). 3 As of August 2009, a collection of newspaper articles published around the time of Starr Faithfull's death can be found at: http://starrfaithfull.blogspot.com/ Lease (1932), a novel Bansak calls Lewton's "most autobiographical" (25), Lewton creates a quasi-surrogate for himself in the character Hans Fife, a down-on-his-luck short story writer trying to make ends meet for his wife and soon-to-be-born child in

Depression-era New York. Fife toils away endlessly at his typewriter, but has great difficulty finding anyone to publish his work. When a commission to ghostwrite a book publisher's autobiography fails to turn up any pay cheques, Fife resorts to racking up debts with friends to convince his wife that the commission has paid off as promised.

Fife can be read not merely as an example of an author "writing what he knows," but also, more poignantly, as a figure articulating Lewton's own anxieties about his profession, and the economic uncertainty that comes with it. Professional stress appeared to follow Lewton everywhere in the early 1930s. Writing to his mother and sister on 3 February 1934, Lewton said:

Have left the office [at MGM]; sick of injustice, too small a wage, and have a feeling, perhaps a stupid feeling, that I will do much better on my own. My plan is to write at least six novels this year and twice as many short stories as well as a dozen articles. This rate of work, would at least keep us out of the poor house.4

Indeed, this anxiety about landing in "the poor house" infects countless characters in the Lewton novels; the Depression haunts Lewton's pulps just as surely as the war does his RKO films (if we accept Nemerov's thesis). Yet one discovers that the economic straits Fife and many characters find themselves in seem just one aspect in

4 Reel 3, Val Lewton Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 47 Lewton's larger, jaundiced mosaic of American society, his depiction of the myriad

anxieties and conflicts capitalist society gives rise to. This is where the novels

become most fascinating and relevant to the study of Lewton's later work at RKO, as

I hope to establish in the following pages.

My argument regarding the social concerns present throughout Lewton's

career certainly owes much to Nemerov's study Icons of Grief, in which the author

maintains the validity of the Lewton pulps by linking them to the RKO cycle's

ideologically resonant visual motifs. As was elucidated in Chapter One, Nemerov

isolates "a logic, a set of visual effects, that rigorously recurs in all the producer's

films and helps to stamp these indisputably corporate productions as Lewton's," proposing that, "This set of effects is their repeated imagery of immobilized figures—

I call them icons—standing statuesque and alone" (3). Such "immobilized figures,"

says Nemerov, also proliferate in Lewton's pulps (19), though it is worth noting that

Nemerov seems content simply to identify images of frozen contemplation in the

pulps, failing in most cases to locate these images in the iconography of socially

marginalized, yet resistant figures and stances that they represent in the films.

Nemerov is more successful in pointing out how, beyond the use of icons,

Lewton's novels evince socio-cultural commentary by contrasting "outsiders" and

"[p]lain Americans ... [who] cannot understand these outsiders" (27). The prime

example of such a contrast in the Lewton pulps can be found in This Fool, Passion

(1934; written under the pseudonym Carlos Keith). The novel's main character

Sablin, a Russian immigrant haunted by memories of the carnage of the Russian Civil War and of the fiancee he lost in its aftermath, cannot find happiness or connection among the carefree denizens of his adopted New York City. His American lover,

Barbara, fails to understand Sablin's dour moods, and dreading the thought of

"another lecture on the soul" (283), decides to skip out on him to revive the youthful party lifestyle she once enjoyed. By the end of the novel, Sablin has shot himself in the mouth with his Lueger pistol, not specifically because Barbara has left him, but because his old world spirit seems consigned to vagrancy, without a homeland and without kindred. It is in particular Sablin's sorrow over the slaughter he has witnessed in war that makes him an alien in America, where violence is exploited daily for tabloid fodder, and grief is a fleeting state, soon out of fashion. With the aid of

Nemerov's thesis, one can see in Sablin a spiritual if not figural prototype for the wartime icons on display in such Lewton productions as The Curse of the Cat People, in which the character Irena's mournful stillness—legibly embodying the Russian

Lewton's own feelings about war—is set in marked contrast to the relatively naive contentedness of the American family.

For its critical, sometimes socially-minded attention to Lewton's pulps,

Nemerov's contribution to the literature on Lewton's career is a valuable one. But I

5 The novel takes a very ambivalent view of the Russian Civil War. It is revealed that Sablin fought for the White Army during the conflict, but as he tells an acquaintance in America: "I don't hate the Bolsheviki. Often when I read of vast improvements in the newspapers, I admire them. Things were not always well conducted under the old regime. I have seen a great deal of misery and suffering. At the time—in 1919—I thought our way—the White way of getting rid of misery and suffering was better than the Red. Now, I don't know if we could have done as well" (125). 6 This Fool, Passion features a murder subplot very similar to that of The Fateful Star Murder, but in nearly every respect is more contemplative about the grief that follows—or should follow—violence, and much more critical about the way grief is exploited for self-gain (by the press and ordinary citizens alike) than is the latter book. 49 do think there is much more to be said about the novels' rather complicated depiction of American society than Nemerov has provided, and definitely more to learn about the films through analyzing these novels. Having read seven of Lewton's nine published novels,71 find that his pulp work comprises an especially volatile and incriminating examination of race, sexuality, class, and gender in American capitalist society. For all their tawdriness, the Lewton novels never stray far from the reality of how capitalism influences and corrodes human relations. In an early draft of his biography of Lewton, Joel E. Siegel writes: "With very little effort, [Lewton's] life could be used as an indictment of the human waste in American capitalism with

o

Hollywood as a microcosm." To my mind, Lewton himself already critiqued this

"human waste" in his novels, and this critique carried on into his RKO work.

The reader will remember that I take Lewton's RKO films to show strong evidence of a progressive sensibility, an idea I hope further to define in the next chapter when I look more closely at one of his films, The Seventh Victim. I find it is much more difficult to identify Lewton's novels as distinctly progressive, however, given some of the coarser aspects of the social and ethical attitudes on display in them. Nevertheless, I find it will not pay to ignore what seem the quasi-reactionary elements of the Lewton novels—that is, their intermittent racism, classism, sexism— or further to excuse these as the unfortunate tropes of a lurid literary market, or as the

7 The seven novels are, in order of my recommendation: No Bed of Her Own; Yearly Lease; This Fool, Passion; 4 Wives; The Laughing Woman; The Fateful Star Murder; and Where the Cobra Sings. At the time of writing, I was not able to procure copies of Lewton's novels Improved Road (1925) and The Rape of Glory (1931). 8 Found in Reel 3, Val Lewton Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 50 symptoms of the benighted social consciousness of America in the 1930s, no doubt

partly shared by Lewton. I intend to face these problem areas head on, and in doing so

prove that the ostensible signs of racism, classism, and sexism Lewton exhibits as a

writer in many instances become quite purposely damning of American society as

well, once subjected to scrutiny.

I have chosen to organize the following extended analyses into categories,

based on the key problems of American society Lewton raises in the novels, and takes up later in his films. Despite the segmentation of the categories, I am sure the reader will notice the interconnectedness of all the issues discussed below, seeing as they

make up, in total, the social, cultural, and ideological products of American patriarchal capitalism. My focus will be on, roughly speaking, positive and negative

images falling under each of the categories—in other words, how positively or negatively Lewton views the aspects of American society I have categorized here

(e.g., how does he treat the topic of race relations—with pessimism? optimism?

ignorance? naivete?). I will also pay close attention to the ideological tensions

inherent in the novels and films: i.e. the ways in which positive and negative images of American society work against each other to construct the underlying dramatic conflicts in Lewton's work.

Race

None of the entries in the Lewton cycle can rightly be called a liberal

"message film" explicitly about race, in the mode of, for instance, Mark Robson's 51 post-Lewton picture Home of the Brave (1949). Yet it is often commented that certain Lewton RKO horror films are among the most distinguished of the classical period for their progressive treatment of black characters. Critic James Agee, one of

Lewton's earliest champions, found in The Curse of the Cat People's Edward (Sir

Lancelot) "one of the most unpretentiously sympathetic, intelligent, anti-traditional and individualized" black characters in Hollywood pictures at the time (85-6). Robin

Wood has written several times about Zombie, one of his favourite films, and has singled out for praise the black calypso singer (again, played by Sir Lancelot) who taunts the film's (white) lead characters with a song about their familial woes. As

Wood writes, "There cannot be many Hollywood movies of the early forties in which a coloured character is permitted to make sly, malicious fun of whites who are neither comic nor villainous—with the film's at least partial endorsement—and get away with it" ("The Shadows Worlds of Jacques Tourneur," 267). As I noted in Chapter

One, Nemerov has made the most of Zombie's dignified treatment of race, expounding in great detail upon the significance of the film's mournful slave imagery, particularly as embodied in the iconic, powerful figure of the black zombie

Carre-Four.

Positive or at least sensitive images of coloured characters are admittedly not easy to ascertain in the novels. There is in general a cavalier attitude about race in such New York-set novels as No Bed of Her Own and A Laughing Woman (1933; written under the pseudonym Carlos Keith). For example, No Bed features a rather unflattering depiction of two Filipino Johns who have joined Rose and her prostitute 52 friends in their apartment. Still, one finds the passage with these Filipinos

simultaneously reflects poorly on the white characters:

Short and so grotesquely ugly that they had a certain beauty of their own, [the Filipinos] would never have appealed to [Rose]. On looking at Mildred, she was surprised to note how much animation there was in her countenance. She was getting a real 'bang' from being on a party with the little yellow men. Dimly, Rose remembered that Mildred once told her she had danced with a Negro when she was drunk. (141)

What is implied here—that race in the 1930s is something of an entertainment, an

arousing commodity to white Americans—is more fully elaborated on in A Laughing

Woman. The main characters of this novel travel up to an all-black club in Harlem to

take in "the spectacle of the Negroes abandoning themselves to the rigors of the

Lindy Hop" (178), from the privacy of a balcony above the dance floor. Lewton's

depiction of the black characters in this scene, drunk and wild, is surely problematic,

especially given that it is not counterbalanced in the novel with less stereotypical

depictions of black characters. But I would argue this Harlem sequence also

illustrates the degree to which racial segregation is supported by a white cultural predilection to exoticize race as spectacle from a safe distance, as is further emphasized in the sequence when the character Jean, from the window of her car

leaving the club, gets a final kick out of the sight of "two Harlem dandies" fighting in the street, "each ... patently afraid of spoiling his own gaudy raiment" (187).

Exoticization of race runs rampant in Lewton's Where the Cobra Sings (1932; written under the pseudonym Cosmo Forbes), but in this case too the novel has a lot to say about the ultimate culpability of white capitalists in creating and sustaining 53 racial divides. Initially, Where the Cobra Sings seems an object lesson in

Orientalism for its essentialist depiction of the Far East. Take, for example, the description from the book's jacket, which promises an "enthralling and exotic story of a white man in the Orient. Can a white man preserve his manhood and his honor in the Eastern tropics, where the Ten Commandments are unknown, and vice is a white man's privilege?" One's worst impressions based on the jacket description appear to be confirmed near the beginning of the novel, when the lead character Jim arrives in

Cambodia from San Francisco. The novel's title is clarified as Jim encounters the oddly melodic hiss of a cobra elicited by a snake charmer; a French officer informs

Jim: "A strange song, M'sieu, and one never to be forgotten. Who hears it, they say, can never tear himself away from Cambodia" (62). We are told the spell of the

Orient, "where the cobra sings," will inevitably lead men down to vice, but Jim avers that "[t]he cobra's song would never enslave him" (80).

As it turns out, Jim has less to worry about regarding the temptations of the

"exotic" East than about the corruptions of the British and French imperialists who are there to exploit the land and its people. Indeed, Jim is soon "tempted" (or rather blackmailed) into joining in this exploitation when he buys a Cambodian tea plantation along the Mekong River from a local Brit, Murgatroyd. Jim is initially put out by the dealings of people like Murgatroyd: "Brought up in the American spirit of fair play and a square deal for all, Jim could not understand the various social nuances of the East which make it almost compulsory for an employer to abuse his workers if he expects them to respect him" (129); but it is not long before Jim himself becomes a 54 slave-driver on his plantation, beating his native coolies with a rattan stick (166).

Murgatroyd, for his part, has betrayed Jim's trust by sending him "all the shiftless and worthless natives who had been kicked off other plantations. There would be a double profit to him in that. Not only would he collect a placement commission from these men, but the money Jim gave them as wages would come back to Murgatroyd's till for liquor and tobacco" (125). Here Lewton suggests the ugly and multifaceted extents to which native labour is exploited and controlled in the colonized East.

Lewton also carefully depicts the exploitation of native women as a commodity among the colonies. The novel details the life of a beautiful Indonesian girl, Amarah, who has been raised to desire the white masters who will buy and sell her on the congai market. Amarah takes a special fondness for Jim, but he will not have her as his congai, instead paying her to work on his plantation. Jim realizes he loves Amarah after she puts herself in harm's way during an attempt on Jim's life.

Rather than take her as his mistress, Jim decides to marry Amarah, earning him the disapproval of the majority of the white men and women in Cambodia. Lewton reminds us of the unenlightened attitudes of Jim's home country, too, when he has a

French Jesuit tell Jim: "in marrying her you are saying farewell to your homeland. In

France she might be accepted; in America, never!" (214). Jim's former love from San

Francisco, Anne, shows up unexpectedly at his plantation, throwing his marriage to

Amarah into jeopardy and explicitly setting up a clash between Jim's American loyalties and the meaningful bonds he has formed in Cambodia. Murgatroyd believes he can already predict how the story will end up: 55 Jim would go back to the States with Anne; Amarah would drift down to Saigon, to squander the money he left her, and end by being picked up by a slaver or forced into one of the brothels. That was what usually happened to a congai. That Amarah was Jim's legal wife would not make any difference. No one bothered to get too excited over the rights of a native. (264)

To everyone's surprise, Jim resolves to stick by Amarah, and chastises Anne for ridiculing Amarah's history as a congai: "Do any of these girls who are bought and sold when they are only children have anything to do about it? No! It takes a white woman who has had every advantage and liberty life can give her to come here and mock them" (278-9). Quite unexpectedly, given one's initial impressions of the novel,

Where the Cobra Sings ends by favouring miscegenation and openly criticizing the kinds of condescension privileged Americans bring with them to the Far East.

In spite of the progressive approach he seems to take in examining the life of natives in the colonies, Lewton does not seem concerned with making Amarah a very interesting or complex character. She is not given much more to do than pray to her love gods and pine after Jim; at one point she intimates that she loves Jim "[m]ore than can say. Happy to be his wife ... be his slave. All the same to Amarah" (255).

Amarah is finally much less unconventionally portrayed than the black characters in /

Walked with a Zombie, who are likewise subjects of a (former) Western colony. (The film takes place on the fictional island of St. Sebastian, though its emphasis on voodoo calls to mind Haiti.) We might say, then, that Where the Cobra Sings is only part-way progressive for its depiction of the corruptions adhering in the lives of the white characters, born of capitalist-imperialist attitudes. Where Zombie improves upon this early theme is in adding a more meaningful and resonant image of the black 56 characters' subjective responses to their colonizers. This is embodied quite poignantly in the film when Betsy, upon arriving at the Caribbean colony, remarks to the black driver of her coach that the slave ship that first brought over the island's ancestors certainly picked a beautiful place to dock, to which the driver only responds, "If you say, miss—if you say."

Class

For many characters in Lewton's novels, the Depression presents the danger of insolvency, and thus the fear of falling below one's class. In Yearly Lease, a group of young women discuss the economic crisis nervously over tea, using "parrot-like phrases": e.g., "Conditions are terrible," "No one knows what's coming next" (113).

Underlying their words is a genuine anxiety that their social comforts may be taken from them at any moment: "I'd hate to be poor" they repeat, and try to reason to themselves that they have nothing to worry about (114). Sitting in on this conversation, the character Laura (who has lately lost a considerable amount of her own money) takes pleasure in the unease of these young women:

[Laura] was interested. It was the first time she had been allowed an intimate glimpse into these girls' lives. They had always been too close to the suburban standard to interest her before. Now that they were confronted by a fear of the future, they excited her imagination. (114)

Evidently Laura believes there is something like romance, or perhaps wisdom, to be found in poverty; as she makes a toast to the women: "Here's to the depression, may we all be poor and learn a little about life" (115). 57 In No Bed of Her Own, Rose Mahoney learns quite a bit about life from experiencing poverty, none of it very romantic. Lewton puts Rose's recent unemployment in striking perspective: "a month before she would have thrown away two dollars on a worthless trifle without a thought. Now two dollars and twenty-five cents was all the difference between despair and exalted joy" (131-2). Having financial security is also the difference between social constriction and freedom: after they are both laid off, Rose's friend Fanny remarks: "I was thinking of the things we might have to do to earn a living—things that will make us go rotten inside.

Prostitution for a girl like Mildred, a rotten marriage for me, and God-knows-what for you" (85). Here is Lewton as it his most grimly deterministic, finding that the threat of poverty could naturally consign women to objectify themselves in prostitution or loveless marriages of convenience (as the book's epigraph from Victor Hugo goes:

"Man begs; woman sells"). Lewton, to his credit, has no lessons to preach about the

"moral degradation" of women who sell themselves, and focuses instead on the bitterness and cruelty that can result from such self-commodification (e.g., Rose's friend Mildred takes up with a pimp, who beats her, steals her money, and forces her to solicit herself on the streets [218]).

With great ingenuity and the charity of friends, Rose manages to stay financially just above water for the greater part of the novel, never going very far in selling herself (she poses nude for an "art" photographer, but refuses to appear in the same photographer's proposed stag film; she joins a troupe of women who perform simulated sex acts for rich guests at cocktail parties, but plays the side role of emcee 58 between acts). One discovers Lewton is saving his harshest cynicism for the final passages of the novel, however, when Rose will face little choice but to prostitute herself. In high melodramatic fashion, we learn that the young child of Rose's friend

Julia is deathly ill and in urgent need of medicine. Rose runs the child's prescription over to the pharmacy, but is told she will have to pay four dollars to have it filled.

Frantic, Rose takes to the streets, desperately proffering herself to every passing man in exchange for the four dollars required for the prescription. She eventually finds a paying John, purchases the prescription, and rushes back to Julia's apartment with the medicine in hand, only to find that the child has already died. To make matters worse, we learn that the child's prescription should have been free, if only the pharmacist had properly notified Rose of this before she went out to prostitute herself (244).

Rose is completely outraged by what has transpired, but not because her "honour" or some such thing has been sacrificed for nought. Rather her anger cuts at the economic basis of human suffering: "It was want of money that had killed the child. It was want of money that made all the unhappiness in the world" (244). Having witnessed first hand the waste engendered by poverty, Rose summons a new, horrifying resolve:

She would be inhumanely cruel. Self-assertive, immoral, industrious— anything; whipping herself on to become rich and secure. That was what mattered. And poverty was the crime of crimes. Tomorrow the new job. She would never let it go until she had a better one. (245)

In these, the novel's final words, Lewton might as well be outlining the hardened credo that lives at the core of capitalist values—the stigma placed on lower classes (to be poor is a "crime" in itself); the faith put in upward mobility; the emphasis on 59 accumulating wealth and security at the sacrifice of human feeling for both self and

others.

Martha Nochimson argues that, "With Rose, Lewton takes an early position

that social injustice fosters the monstrous in us" (14), a theme Lewton will return to in

his RKO horror work. The Body Snatcher (based on Robert Louis Stevenson's 1885

story) portrays both the affluent Dr. MacFarlane (Henry Daniell) and his cabman

Gray (Boris Karloff) as complicit in "monstrous" acts, the former having funded the

latter to dig up cadavers for use in medical operations. MacFarlane's exploitation of

Gray emphasizes their class hierarchy: the lowly cabman is paid a pittance to conduct

the doctor's grunt work, while the latter reaps the greater social and financial rewards.

To the doctor's increasing chagrin, Gray also yields a measure of power over him: he

holds the secret of the doctor's professional and legal misconduct as an accessory to

grave robbery. Says Gray: "I am a small man, a humble man, and being poor I have

had to do much that I did not want to do. And so long as the great Dr. MacFarlane jumps to my whistle, that long am I man. And if I have not that, I have nothing." The

resentment between the two comes to a head when MacFarlane attacks and murders

Gray, at last cutting out the "cancer" that has come to plague his career, as well as his

conscience. The lower class will have its climactic revenge, however, when the

spectre of Gray's "living" corpse appears in MacFarlane's carriage, causing the

terrified doctor to veer violently off-road and perish in the subsequent crash. At the

heart of MacFarlane and Gray's antagonism is the fact of their class, a social and

economic asymmetry that remains irresolvable, and only breeds corruption. Though it 60 takes place in 1831 Scotland, The Body Snatcher allegorically stands together with

Lewton's New York-set pulps in exposing the consequences of an unfeeling and exploitative class system.

Lewton's depiction of the lower classes in his novels is not always sympathetic. He paints a fairly hideous portrait of a blue-collar marriage in the first chapter of 4 Wives (1932; written under the pseudonym Carlos Keith), where we find

John Wenceslau, in a rage upon discovering he is not the biological father of his son, first beat his "flabby" wife Mamie then bludgeon her lover Burke to death with a stove pot lid. What Lewton adeptly illustrates is how the lurid and depressing details of this working class soap opera become a matter of detached spectacle for the moneyed classes, echoing the previously discussed motif of exoticized racial spectacle apparent in other Lewton novels. Take this grotesque scene from 4 Wives: two aristocratic women, debating the attractiveness of charitable causes over cocktails, turn their discussion to the recently in-the-news Mamie Wenceslau, finding in her and the sordid details of her husband's murder conviction an appealing charity prospect: "Even the other half are interesting when they're sexy" (102). The news that

Mamie now "hustles" to make ends meet titillates their imaginations and amuses them. One of the women even vows she'll write a check for Mamie, but conveniently forgets to do so moments later upon receiving a phone call from one of her beaus

(108).

This facile, passing indulgence in the suffering of the lower classes is very forcefully expressed in Lewton's Bedlam. In this film, Master Sims offers paid tours 61 of his insane asylum for the "amusement" of visiting aristocrats, boasting to Nell

Bowen on her visit that he treats the inmates as animals ("Some are dogs—these I beat"; "Some are tigers—these I cage"). Similar class cruelty is portrayed in the film's Vauxhall Gardens scene, previously mentioned in Chapter One, where Sims trots out a young inmate in suffocating gold paint to recite poetry for the pleasure of dining aristocrats. Alexander Nemerov finds the film "casts a critical and almost

Marxist light on this commercialization of suffering" (153); continuing his thesis on the RKO films as social commentaries on America during wartime, Nemerov further connects Bedlam'' s brutal depiction of seventeenth-century England to Lewton's contemporary moment: "Lewton supported the war, but the Vauxhall scene comes close to showing a leisured class of people not only indifferent to those who die on their behalf but scandalously giddy at the spectacle" (153). Here is another of

Lewton's cynical depictions of the way privileged classes get a "bang" from seeing

"how the other half lives"—as well as how this other half dies.

Bedlam lends another, unexpected dimension to its commentary on class in the climactic scene of Master Sims' trial before a kangaroo court of lunatics in his asylum. After a revolt in Bedlam, the inmates charge Sims with a number of crimes—

"neglect, cruelty; whippings, beatings; dirty straw to lie upon ... starvation; stealing our food." They are willing to let Sims defend himself, however, and the Master pleads that he committed all these crimes "out of fear":

[Fear of] the great world—the great world of this age that gave me my place, the comforts and the authority, what little I have of riches. What that world thinks, I must think. What they do, I must do ... I've had to fawn and toady 62 and make a mock of myself, until all I could hear was the world laughing at me. But once I had what I wanted—this, my place here ... I could not [lose it]. I had to please those to whose favour I owed everything. I was afraid.

Sims here insists on his own dehumanization within the class structure; his cruelty is

a product of his fear of losing his acquired place in society (embodied in his authority

over the property and people of the asylum). Sims' treatment of his inmates is only a

reflection of the treatment accorded all lower classes in "the great world" ruled by the

aristocracy. The inmates judge Sims not guilty ("sane"), on account of being a victim

of the "fear that strikes out, that claws and tears at the world like a singed cat" (this

same fear may be said to motivate Rose Mahoney's vow to become "inhumanly

cruel"). Sims is released, but moments later a mute inmate (a young woman whom

Sims has earlier in the film termed a "dove," caressing her face so as to imply a

history of sexual exploitation) emerges from the shadows of the asylum chamber to

stab the Master. Acting quickly, the other inmates decide to cover up the murder by

concealing Sims' body behind some brickwork. Just before the last brick is laid, we

see Sims is still alive; he is thus left to suffocate (not unlike the Gilded Boy in the

Vauxhall Gardens scene), imprisoned within the walls of his asylum—i.e. the

property that stands as a totem of an oppressive class hierarchy.

Sexuality

Needless to say, on the topic of sexuality Lewton's pulps are far more candid than his films. Lewton's film Cat People famously alludes to sexual arousal and jealousy as the cause of Irena's animal transformation. It remains allusion to sex, 63 however, and the viewer must do the work to interpret or draw out this allusion.

What Cat People communicates rather powerfully is the degree to which women's potential difference in sexuality cannot be countenanced by pious, domesticated

American living. Lewton's pulps take up this theme in a more direct manner. While by no means graphic, the novels do feature a lot of actual sex, and deal quite openly in some of the issues raised by sexual relations. Lewton's writing never takes a moralistic tone about liberal sexuality (even when it means adultery10), though he does explore the pettiness of society's moral attitude towards sex, particularly when it comes to women. In No Bed of Her Own, we learn that "as a matter of course," Rose

Mahoney sleeps with every one of her boyfriends, even occasionally finding that the

"lovemaking was almost as much pleasure as love stories and dirty jokes would have one believe" (28). On the other hand, Rose is also obligated, "as a matter of course," to give off the pretence that she is still virginal around the office where she works

(28). Elsewhere in the novel, Lewton elucidates the stigma of sexual "immorality" in society and the work place. Finding she is jobless and homeless near the beginning of the novel, Rose moves into the apartment of her friend Grace, a prostitute. When

Rose later gives Grace's address at the municipal registration bureau, a clerk informs her: "I'm afraid, Miss Mahoney, that we won't be able to register you here. Your

9 See Chapter Three of this thesis for an extended discussion of this film. 10 Several of the characters in Yearly Lease maintain extra-marital affairs, many of which are accepted, if sometimes grudgingly, by their spouses. In A Laughing Woman, the character Mary discovers her partner (though not her husband) Cunningham has had an affair with another woman, yet finds that she feels "only pity for [him] and a desire to get him out of his troubles and bring him back to happiness" (240), understanding that the other woman has only used Cunningham for his money and has broken his heart. mend's address is one of those on our list of houses where immoral women live"

(138). Rose's prospects for employment are thus curtailed by her mere proximity to women who are socially and morally determined to be "of bad character" (138).

In This Fool, Passion, Lewton scathingly depicts the tabloid frenzy that surrounds the murder of a young woman, Anita Tredwell, who is accused in the press of having sealed her fate by indulging in a "[pjerverted sex craving" (197). Lewton exposes the hypocrisy of the readership who revel in the lurid headlines, but pretend a moral superiority to it: "Every one of the humdrum readers, themselves afraid to transgress against moral codes, found in [Anita's] story the smug satisfaction of knowing that in this one exceptional case the sinner had expiated her crime in violent death" (139). The novel hints that Anita may have been sexually exploited by her uncle in her teens (40), but the sad possibility that this was somehow responsible for her "perverted" and apparently destructive sexual complex goes almost completely ignored by the press corps. It must be said that Lewton, too, fails to follow up on the disturbing implications of Anita's relationship with her uncle (this relationship in fact quite baldly duplicates certain details that emerged during the real-life investigation into Starr Faithfull's death). But Lewton seems less concerned with examining the facts leading up to Anita's murder than with the way these facts are twisted, invented, or otherwise glibly reported by the press. Rather unsettlingly, we never do find out who murdered Anita, only that a reporter has convinced a man already sentenced to life in prison to take the murder rap in exchange for a payment of $100 to the convict's wife—all in the interest of the reporter winning his "exclusive" (144). 65 Fully capitalizing on pulp's candidness, Lewton's novels do not shy away from presenting non-heterosexual orientations, and in fact handle them in both positive and negative terms. The most affirmative image of non-hetero sex is found in

Yearly Lease. Early on in the novel, we meet Laura, a lesbian, or perhaps bisexual

(she has been unhappily married to two men, resulting in two divorces, and has now taken up with a female lover). Over the course of the novel, Laura becomes sexually attracted to her friend Jean. A young tomboy, Jean complains to Laura of being coerced by her disapproving mother to take on a more "feminine" appearance: her mother wants her to dye her hair just like Jean Harlow's, so as to attract a husband.

Resigned to playing the role of "proper" female, Jean eventually takes a fiance, Dick.

Upon hearing the news of Jean's engagement, Laura finds she must exercise restraint around Jean, fearing the consequences of enacting her desires for the girl: "It would be too easy to kill a whole life," (165) Laura tells herself. The bond between the two women remains strong, however, and sometime after Jean splits with her fiancee

(after stumbling upon him making love to her mother), Laura throws caution to the wind and embraces the girl, kissing her passionately (223). By the end of the novel,

Laura and Jean have become lovers, but find that they must keep this a secret. The way Lewton depicts their clandestine affections during a cocktail party is quite lovely in its simplicity:

"Drink, Jean?" Jean shook her head. Laura took a quick glance around to see that no one was watching. Then they kissed each other tenderly. "I love you," murmured Jean in the moment of their embrace. 66 Laura smiled back at her as she moved away. (245)

Jean and Laura's is very nearly the only sexual relationship with any positive connotations at the end of the novel, based as it is in mutual respect and genuine attraction. Meanwhile, the other characters seem to be resigned to marriages and affairs that only reinforce the novel's central theme: namely, the disavowal of personal truth and happiness for the sake of keeping up social appearances (Hans

Fife's relationship with his wife and newborn child is a good illustration of this).

The unfortunate part of the homosexual partnership in Yearly Lease is that it must stay private: the anxiety lingers that, if word got out about Jean and Laura, it could "kill an entire life." This idea becomes hideously manifest in 4 Wives. In this novel, the character Martin Moncure comes to realize, in spite of himself, that he has homosexual desires for his friend Robin. The morning after making a failed, drunken pass at Robin, Moncure panics at the thought of his desires and the stigma they place on him:

Pacing back and forth in his bedroom, Moncure was sick with worry and disgust. Never had he suspected that these things were in him and that some day they must rise to the surface. He had always hated things of that sort. They seem dirty and degrading to him. He knew with what disdain they were held by other people. What a difficult ostracism such persons had to endure! (272)

Moncure further compounds his homosexuality with his self-image as an utterly useless, lonely "sensualist," and decides to kill himself. According to Moncure's belief: "He was a living corpse—worse than a living corpse, he was a corpse that had in himself the seeds of degeneration" (273). Without delay, Moncure takes a gun to 67 his temple and pulls the trigger, jolting Robin out of his "sound sleep" in the next room (273).

This image of the self-loathing, suicidal homosexual is by no means progressive in itself, comparable as it is to the unfortunate tradition of subjecting gay characters to "[djeath by unnatural causes" that Tom Waugh has identified in bourgeois cinema (19). But I think Lewton's use of this figure in 4 Wives has interesting implications; indeed, ones that will surface again later in his film work.

Lewton shows that Martin's suicide instantly opens the door for his wife Lilith and

Robin to marry (the two in fact already planned to wed, after Martin filed the necessary divorce papers, but his suicide eliminated the formalities). An implicit link is thus drawn between the suppression of homosexuality and the establishment of the marriage institution; one exists at the expense of the other (Lewton further suggests this by having Lilith wear black at her wedding, in acknowledgment of the departed

Martin [277]). We see this motif come up again in Lewton's The Seventh Victim. At the end of this film, the bisexual character Jacqueline hangs herself, indirectly freeing her sister Mary and husband Gregory to actuate their own budding romance. Once again, because the films cannot help but be infinitely more suggestive than the novels, it takes some care to derive the preceding conclusions from The Seventh Victim. I will conduct a closer reading of Victim in Chapter Three, but for now I only wish to point up the ideological implications the film shares with 4 Wives. I do feel Jacqueline's suicide in Victim is more "progressive" (if one can call it that) than is Martin's, as hers carries no traces of sexual self-loathing, only bitter unhappiness with an 68 institutionalized existence. Both suicides, however, resonate as socially affected, and in turn mutually disclose Lewton's cynicism about American sexual ideology.

Gender

Lewton's RKO films negotiate questions of gender through the framework of the horror genre. Often this entails addressing sexuality as well. I have previously mentioned that feminine sexuality is seen, with Lewton's sympathy, as potentially

"monstrous" in Cat People. The monstrous dimensions of masculinity are explored in

The Ghost Ship and Isle of the Dead. In the former, Captain Stone (Richard Dix) is driven insane by the idea of his ultimate authority aboard his cargo ship, and begins to murder crew members who challenge this authority. What is especially striking about

The Ghost Ship is that Stone's murderous drive for control over his men can be interpreted as a perverted reaction to his own repressed homosexuality, and thereby, as the cliche goes, to the "threat" of his masculinity.11 Isle of the Dead lacks a heavy homoerotic subtext, but returns to the theme of overreaching masculine authority; this time we find the character General Pherides (Boris Karloff) reacting to the perceived threat of powerful female eroticism in the person of Thea, who is imagined to be a life-depleting "vorvolaka" (or Greek vampire). This masculine impulse to stamp out female sexual power (as a means for men both to disavow the loss of control to arousal, and sustain this arousal in a new kind of power) exists in The Leopard Man

11 See Harry M. BenshofFs Monsters in the Closet, 104-10, for the finest analysis of the homoerotic undercurrents of The Ghost Ship. I will also return to and expand on this subject in Chapter Three. 69 as well, where Gilbraith develops an animalistic desire to murder young girls once consumed early in the film by the image of a female body mauled by a leopard.

The character Brenner in Lewton's novel A Laughing Woman presents a prototype for the male psychopaths in the RKO horrors. Brenner has a religious mania about women, rejecting most of them as moral degenerates—e.g., his nickname for the sexually liberal character Jean Daly is "Babylon." But there is another side to Brenner's mania: "In his body and his mind the mystic and the sensualist fought a battle that had but one invariable ending; the sensualist won and

Brenner slid from his own ideals of grace to the most fantastic debaucheries" (61).

Brenner fixates on a flirtatious female escort at a speakeasy, Kitty. His subsequent relationship with the girl oscillates between extremes of revulsion and desire. Kitty torments Brenner by denying him sex, despite constant temptation; Brenner finally snaps and assaults Kitty, leaving her face looking "[l]ike the landscape of Hell" (284).

Still feeling an emasculated man, Brenner turns his thoughts to the other "temptress"

(or "laughing woman") of the novel, Jean:

The harlot! Babylon! She had brought destruction to men and ideas alike. She had made them all unhappy and yet not one of them realized the well-spring of their various disasters ... He felt dizzy and there was a sick feeling at his stomach. As he clung to the bar, voices, great and terrifying voices, rang in his ears shouting: "Babylon! Babylon!" He straightened up. This was God talking to him. It was God who had opened his eyes to Jean Daly's responsibility in all their afflictions ... And for what reason had God opened his eyes? So that he might punish her. He was the Hand of God; he was the Flaming Sword of the Arch Angel. (303-4) Brenner asks the bartender of the speakeasy if he can borrow his gun (excusing the request by claiming he wants to take a pot shot at some wild cats that have been keeping him up at night in the alleyway beside his place). He heads to Jean's apartment. Brenner intends to rape Jean at gunpoint, but she only laughs in the man's face: "So that's punishment—forcing me ... It's bringing coals to Newcastle, if you ask me" (312). Her laugh cuts deep into him, echoing in his mind over and over again. Brenner runs back out into the streets, a raving lunatic, and is taken in for

"observation" at the local sanitarium as the novel closes.

Brenner's fanaticism embodies the unhealthiest aspects of society's gender divide. His use of religion as a tool of sexual disgust compensates for what is his basic inability to control unyielding, self-determining women (e.g., even after he bribes Kitty, she will not sleep with him as promised). To be sure, the portrait Lewton paints of Brenner is quite ambivalent, and problematically so. Lewton makes it possible to read Brenner as a sympathetic figure, despite his contemptible misogyny.

The book's title—A Laughing Woman—appears to refer disapprovingly to La

Charpillon, the one woman who spurned Casanova; indeed, Lewton's dedication of the novel reads: "To Giacomo Casanova. May he find all the women of Elysium

'without prejudice.'"12 At one point in the novel, Brenner pitches the story of

Casanova and La Charpillon as a subject for a movie, describing it as a "tragedy":

"She never gave herself to him. He tried to buy her, he tried to rape her, he tried to

12 One of Lewton's favourite pieces of literature was The Memoirs of Giacomo Casanova; he even publicly advocated for the addition of The Memoirs to high school curricula (according to a New York Central News article dated 17 June 1933). 71 coax her by making love—he, the great lover—and she just laughed at him, cheated him and drove him mad" (134). The "tragedy" of Casanova is possibly

Brenner's own, as appears to be illustrated in passages like the following:

Brenner, worn out with desire, frustrated, angry, uncomprehending, wept into his pillow, trying to stifle the sound of his crying so as to rob [Kitty] of this further satisfaction. But she was aware and was pleased and felt her skin flush and grow warm with accomplishment and power. Brenner was a dupe such as she had longed for as another girl might long for a young and ardent lover. (161)

I do not take from all this that Lewton is out to essentialize Woman as treacherous, or to make an unequivocally tragic figure of Brenner, for all his trials at the hands of "La Charpillons" like Jean and Kitty. To devalue the former notion, the most positive character in the novel is a woman, Mary, and she is shown to wield a very affirmative influence over men. Mary works in Hollywood writing screenplays for her lover Cunningham, a film director. Though the pair are said to be close collaborators, we learn that Mary is the primary creative force behind the operation, and Cunningham is lost without her. As Lewton writes, "[Cunningham] had come to

Hollywood, lonely, ineffectual and a little awed, and Mary had taken him under her wing" (49). We learn that even Brenner is fond of Mary.

On the other hand, Mary does not embody much of a sexual presence for men: she is "a plain, intelligent-looking girl... [and] hardly regarded as a woman" (49).

Lewton suggests here the existence of certain gender stereotypes that create a perception of "Woman" for men like Brenner: indeed, "Woman" as physically desirable spectacle for the male gaze. This perception not only compromises any 72 deeper understanding of Mary as a sexed human being ("No one had insight enough to see that perhaps behind those shining glasses was a woman, shy, anxious to be loved" [49]), but also engenders a distorted sense of entitlement on behalf of men like Brenner, who may act out violently when this entitled gaze is met with dismissal or reprisal (e.g., a "laugh"). In his identification with Casanova, Brenner finds a suitable justification for his own failure to possess women. As arguably "tragic" as

Brenner may come out in the end, it is worth noting that Lewton reserves a less ambivalent fate for a character very similar to Brenner in another of his novels, The

Fateful Star Murder. The killer of that novel, the bootlegger Jack Minor, also acts out of rage at the laughter of his female victim (he kills Dawn Loyall after she mocks the working class immigrant roots Jack—or "Giacomo"—is trying to bury). In this case,

Lewton has the character Dr. Rothmere track down Jack and execute him in cold, exacting fashion. A similar kind of retribution is doled out at the end of The Leopard

Man, when the boyfriend of one of the murder victims shoots the serial killer

Galbraith, just as Galbraith explains that he got the urge to murder the young woman when he saw "the fear in her eyes." Here we implicitly find the return of the gaze; the eyes of the woman interrupt the spectacle, provoking Galbraith's wrath. In Cat

People the returned gaze itself becomes violent: Irena's glittering, mesmeric eyes after she is kissed by the caddish Dr. Judd signals her transformation into devouring panther. In every instance, we find a masculine entitlement and possessiveness that reflects the gender hierarchies giving support to patriarchal ideology, as well as the potential disruption of this entitlement in the "threat" of non-cooperative female 73 responses. Lewton is generally more favourable to the latter position: for every

Brenner, one finds in Lewton's work several Irenas, Jacquelines, Lauras, and Jeans to impose alternatives to society's gender imbalance.

Conclusion

I concede that Lewton's pulps and films are very unalike in several key respects. For example, there is a vulgarism and bluntness of expression in his pulp writing that is hardly apparent in the restrained, suggestive RKO films. One can perhaps chalk the latter up to the visual sensibilities of Lewton's collaborators (e.g.,

Jacques Tourneur), or to the Lewton unit's decision to do without shock and sensation in presenting a new type of sophisticated horror to the screen. I grant, then, that

Lewton was probably not chiefly responsible for the aesthetic distinction of the films.

What I have attempted to demonstrate in this chapter is that a particular dissatisfaction with social mores and the status quo carries on throughout Lewton's oeuvre as fiction writer and film producer, and it is primarily on this score that I argue the validity of viewing Lewton as a primary auteur on the RKO horror films.

But am I attributing too much to Lewton? If indeed my readings of the novels and films are accurate in detecting social criticism, does it stand that this criticism was Lewton's doing? Here we find ourselves in the precarious realm of authorship and intention. I submit there is little evidence to argue that Lewton favoured one political position or another in reality; therefore, it is very difficult for me to argue that the social meanings I have found in his work are in any particular sense 74 intentional on Lewton's part. I do not find, however, that this negates the Lewton auteur thesis. Paisley Livingston argues that

If one recognizes that an utterance can be both intentionally produced by someone and have meanings that are not all and only those intended by that person, then it follows that strong intentionalism is not entailed by a broad conception of authorship. We can identify someone as the author of an utterance without having to say that that person has authored each and every meaning (or significance) that the utterance manifests. (137)

I think it reasonable to say that Lewton deserves authorial credit for the "utterances," or textual details I have identified in my above analysis. To my mind, this is even true of the film examples, and I hope I have begun to suggest as much by detailing instances where specific motifs Lewton employs in his novels recur in his film productions. (Of course, there is the added fact that Lewton wrote the final draft on each of the film's screenplays, and thus had final "authorization" over the story to be told in the film, and arguably the themes to be explored.) The problem lies in determining whether Lewton was the author of the meanings I have extracted from the textual examples.

I have argued here that Lewton's novels and films compose a critique of

American capitalist ideology. This is not to say that Lewton would have described his work in this way. Alexander Nemerov writes that "Lewton enjoyed his adopted country in many respects, and he finally became a citizen of the United States in 1941

(after thirty-two years in the country). He also did his defense duty during the war.

But his novels teem with satire of American attitudes" (27). That Lewton's work implies a progressive politics, oppositional to American capitalism, is what I gather 75 from the type of social commentary (or "satire") evinced in his work, and not an argument that Lewton was a progressive. In other words, Lewton may not have been

a "progressive author," but he was the author of legibly progressive utterances.

Livingston argues that an author, in order to be the author of an utterance, must possess "at least a schematic idea of some of the attitudes he or she aims to make manifest in the utterance, as well as an idea of the processes by means of which this utterance is to be realized" (141). Doubtless, the prevailing attitudes in Lewton's work are consciously cynical. Nearly all of his novels and films end with a sense of

disquiet; see for instance the suicide that closes The Seventh Victim, or the death by electric chair in the final chapter of 4 Wives, both surrounded by society's indifference to the respective characters' fates. And Lewton's cynical work is always rooted in a kind of social realism, detailing, for example, the common aspects of

American work and leisure, even when Lewton operates in the ostensibly "fantastic" realm of the horror genre (one would be hard-pressed to identify instances where the

Lewton films become unequivocally "supernatural," when they stray from a program of depicting horror in the "everyday"). I conclude from all this that Lewton was the conscious author—as well as auteur—of utterances that expressed a critical attitude about society. It is finally my contention that together these utterances (or what I have referred to as "images" above) compose a. progressive politics that scrutinizes inequities of race, sexuality, class, and gender. 76

CHAPTER3

Patriarchal Horror and Progressive Suicide:

The Seventh Victim

"Perhaps by definition, the import of the horror film is unhappy. Yet this film may offer its spectator the comfort of hearing the truth in a world that commonly denies it" - Ira S. Jaffe (277)

In the course of outlining the political relevance of the horror genre in his famous essay "The American Nightmare," Robin Wood offers a "basic formula for the horror film: normality is threatened by the Monster"—adding that by "normality" he means "conformity to the dominant social norms," or, it goes without saying in

America and elsewhere, the norms of bourgeois patriarchal capitalism (71). Here

Wood provides a dependable framework for pinpointing conservative and/or progressive ideologies in (particularly American) horror films, relative to their unavoidable patriarchal capitalist context. To wit, Wood's formula engages with the politics inherent in a given horror movie's definition of the Monster, as well as in its conception of "normality," e.g. along sexual, racial, social lines. Furthermore, Wood argues that his formulation evokes the horror genre's perhaps inextricable link to the

Freudian concept of repression. For Wood, the Monster's disturbance of normality recurrently embodies a "return of the repressed," of the (primarily sexual) energies patriarchal capitalist society has in its interest to keep subjugated; among Wood's examples of such repressions are: liberated sexual energy in general (i.e. non- 77 monogamous); the human race's innate bisexuality; women's sexuality/creativity

("The American Nightmare," 64-5). When symbolically and violently unleashed in the form of the Monster, these repressed energies manifest distorted, grotesque, and explicitly threatening qualities. They become "Other" in an extreme sense (while often retaining the physical appearance of patriarchal capitalism's common Others: women, non-white races, non-hetero sexual orientations, ethnic groups, children), and must be oppressed/annihilated by the protagonists, who fear for their lives but also— if tacitly—the upheaval of society as they know it.

Thus, as Wood writes, "One might say that the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses: its re- emergence dramatized, as in our nightmares, as an object of horror, a matter for terror

..." ("The American Nightmare," 68). The treatment accorded to the "nightmare" invasion of the Monster—what we might describe as, for lack of a better term, the film's own "perspective" on this nightmare—may take on progressive or reactionary characteristics, which can finally be clarified only through a close reading of the film itself. The interest of any ideological critique of a horror film then lies in not only determining the socio-political implications of the representations of the Monster and, in turn, the "normality" which it threatens, but also in ascertaining the political perspective(s) undergirding the film's particular dramatization of this threat.

I hope to demonstrate in the course of this chapter that Val Lewton's RKO horror cycle yields formidable progressive tendencies when put to the test of close readings through Wood's genre formulation. It must be said that Lewton's idea of 78 "horror" complicates the very idea of Monsterhood, freeing it from its strongly pejorative sense, and effacing the divide between "Monsterhood" and "normality." It therefore becomes a very complex—but all the more important and rewarding— matter to attempt an evaluation of the ideological criticisms obtaining in Lewton's ambiguous horrors. One finds that Wood's formula becomes invaluable in negotiating the varying degrees to which Lewton evokes patriarchal society's horror at its own repressions, as well as the more subtle ways in which Lewton aligns himself and his films with certain of his social outsiders, or "Monsters," against bourgeois patriarchal normality. Before I engage in a more in-depth discussion of the Lewton cycle—and in particular The Seventh Victim—in tandem with Wood's horror formula, I would like to discuss some of the further dimensions of Wood's essay alongside films roughly contemporary to its first publication (i.e. from the 1970s and 80s). This will not only provide me the opportunity to demonstrate the immediate applicability of Wood's formula to horror films at the moment of his writing, but also to show the debt some of these later, progressive films owe to Lewton's example, and conversely how

Lewton's progressive attitudes offer a rebuke to the more reactionary films of this era, some forty years prior.

Wood and Horror in the 70s and 80s

Horror films are expected to invoke cultural and social fears as part of their effect; based upon this reputation, the genre is more apt than perhaps any other to subvert society, to compromise its protective confines by indulging in its 79 "nightmares." Following Wood's formulation, the Monster's violent invasion of normality in horror films typically plays into cultural fears of the disruption of the everyday by some uncanny Other. Wood finds that normality in horror films, like the everyday of bourgeois capitalism, is "in general boringly constant: the heterosexual monogamous couple, the family, and the social institutions (police, church, armed forces) that support and defend them" ("The American Nightmare," 71). The nature of the Monster, however, comes to be embodied variously in different historical/cultural contexts, often by contemporary expedients (e.g. the common association of Monsters with the "Red Menace" in many American horror/sci-fi films of the fifties—e.g., Them! [1954]). The horror film, then, may be the surest place to find patriarchal capitalism's abiding anxieties at different historical junctures, its various imaginings of what constitutes a threat or a bogeyman to the status quo.

Though historical specificity always plays a significant role in interpreting the horror tropes of different "cycles" of the genre (e.g. [but not exhaustively], the mad scientist films of the 30s; the Lewton films of the war years; the nuclear age horror films of the 50s; the women-targeting slasher films prominent in the 70s, 80s, and

90s; the torture films of the 00s), Wood's analysis of the genre asserts that there are basic motifs in the way "horror" is conceived and constructed, true to all of the cycles. What becomes especially interesting and crucial for Wood is that, in horror films, capitalist society repeatedly dramatizes fears of itself. This idea is emphasized when a horror film allows "the recognition of the monster not as external threat but as other-side-of-coin, normality's mirror-image" (Wood "World of Gods & Monsters," 80 77); the Monster as "Other" is seen, essentially, to be already a part of the self.

This should not be given to mean, in a general sense, that all human beings possess

"good" and "evil" selves, but more radically that what is taken for monstrous in countless horror films—whether sexuality (e.g., albeit in different respects, both

Lewton and Paul Schrader's Cat People [1942; 1982]); femininity (e.g. Attack of the

50 Foot Woman [1958]; Teeth [2007]); gender-subversion (e.g. Psycho [I960];

Sleepaway Camp [1983]), etc.—corresponds precisely to what is repressed in capitalist society's unconscious. Horror films can then become the site of capitalism's own fantasized "exorcisms," its attempts to confront and eliminate through an artistic medium the repressed energies buried beneath it, which endanger its existence and prosperity. The more reactionary films will typically see this "exorcism" as necessary, desirable; the more progressive ones will view it as impossible, undesirable, and even monstrous in its own way. I hope to show later in this chapter that Lewton's films fall squarely into the latter category.

Wood's association of Monsters with a return of the repressed points to the fact that what lay repressed in the capitalist unconscious is, in its purest articulation, inherently threatening, something ultimately incompatible with and undermining of patriarchal capitalist norms. When horror films make a Monster of a liberally sexual female, for example, the implication is that female sexual independence, typically repressed in patriarchal society, is something fearsome in the context of the "normal" functioning of patriarchy. Obviously, the equation of women's sexuality with a monstrous return of the repressed can be, and has been, taken in different ideological 81 directions by horror films. In Adrian Lyne's horror/thriller Fatal Attraction (1987), the sexual self-determination and independence of Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) warps into homicidal madness, at which point Alex exacts monstrous revenge on her lover

Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) and his stay-at-home wife Beth (Anne Archer) by invading their bourgeois sphere to kidnap their child, boil their pet rabbit and, in the climactic moments, attempt to murder the Gallaghers with a butcher knife. Though the valuable assertion that a liberated female sexuality fundamentally undermines the functioning of the bourgeois patriarchal family is made palpable by Fatal Attraction, the film ultimately engenders a reactionary response to this threat by placing its sympathies predominantly with Dan rather than Alex (through, among other strategies, glossing over Dan's at least partial responsibility for Alex's "madness" in order to make him—and his family—the true "victims" of the tale), and by enacting

Alex's annihilation, not once, but twice, at the hands of first Dan, then Beth—in the process validating the film's anti-feminist agenda (in line with so many reactionary

Hollywood films of the 80s1) through the participation of both bourgeois man and woman in the suppression of liberated female sexuality.

The profoundly anti-feminist climax of Fatal Attraction, its restoration of the patriarchal household over the twice-killed Alex, points up the particular relevance of closures to a horror film's politics. There is perhaps a built-in conservatism to the finales of films like Fatal Attraction, which evoke something feared and monstrous at

1 See Wood's essay "Images and Women" in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan for insights into the reactionary, anti-feminist politics in several popular Hollywood films of the 1980s. 82 the core of patriarchal society, only to banish it once again for the sake of the happy ending and prosperity of the "normal" protagonists—effectively "exorcising

(society's) demons." Yet this is not to imply that conservatism always follows from positive, "closed" endings, or conversely that the only progressive horror films are those which refuse optimistic outcomes or closure of any sort. Assertions about a film's ending can only be made when close attention is paid to the cultural and social tensions at work throughout the film, with careful analysis of the nuances attending character development and representation, identification techniques, narrative action, etc. Deciphering the reactionary bent of Fatal Attraction's restorative ending therefore requires, in part, one's understanding how and why the film constructs a fundamental rivalry between Beth and Alex, based on binary social roles of

"good/sane" wife and "evil/crazy" mistress, with the former destined to be victor.2

To use an example from the opposite end of the political spectrum, George A.

Romero's Day of the Dead (1985) is made legibly progressive, up to its relatively optimistic denouement, through its own complex rendering of character tensions, founded in political, social, and cultural values. Romero opts for an almost upbeat

2 The film's famous alternate ending (available as a bonus feature on the 2002 Paramount DVD) has Alex kill herself and frame Dan for her murder. The revised double-annihilation ending in the final cut was supposedly demanded by test audiences, who—naively or not—felt that Alex deserved a comeuppance, being no more than a homicidal maniac. Adrian Lyne, for his part, felt the original suicide ending signified "two hours of foreplay with no orgasm" (qtd. in Keesey 51). Lyne has also not done his film any favours by stating that women like Alex "are sort of compensating for not being men. It's sad, you know, because it kind of doesn't work. You hear feminists talk, and the last 10, 20 years, you hear women talking about fucking men rather than being fucked, to be crass about it. It's kind of unattractive, however liberated and emancipated it is. It kind of fights the whole wife role, the whole childbearing role. Sure you got your career and your success, but you are not fulfilled as a woman" (qtd. in Keesey 51-3). 83 ending to his film—summoning an island paradise retreat for his surviving protagonists—but not to assure one, as Lyne's film does, that all has returned to

"normal," that everything can be as it was before the threat of the Monster descended.

Indeed, there is no conceivable way back for the human survivors of the zombie apocalypse in Day of the Dead; by the film's end, the protagonists have not successfully suppressed the zombie threat, and, at least temporarily, seem to have given up hope of doing so. Yet the mere fact that these survivors are clearly unsympathetic to the former operations of patriarchal capitalist society, by dint of their race, attitudes, and gender—the survivors being a black man, a white woman, and a white male intellectual, all at various points in the film expressing opposition to the fascist-patriarchal control of the military outfit they had until recently been stationed with—lends Romero's ending a positive, and progressive, orientation: it looks forward beyond patriarchy and its oppressions. Hence, the relative happiness enjoyed by Day of the Dead's survivors is diametrically opposed in political connotation to the sense of relief/release experienced by the husband and wife survivors at the end of Fatal Attraction.

To be sure, it is often the case that hopeless or resolutely pessimistic endings in horror films are, however paradoxically it may seem, the marks of a strong progressive sensibility, though again this should not be counted as an a priori rule in terms of the politics of the genre. Wood pays special attention to the "apocalyptic" sub-genre in his writings on the horror film. He remarks that Richard Dormer's The

Omen (1976) is resoundingly negative by its finale, imagining no way out of the 84 threat imposed by the coming of Satan in the form of the young child Damien (by the film's end, with both his adopted parents dead, Damien has been taken in by the

President and First Lady of the United States). Yet one finds the film as a whole, including its ending, to be reactionary in character, for Damien takes the form of

"pure evil," the literal spawn of Hell, giving the film over into religious fanaticism and keeping its apocalypse and Monster a relatively safe distance from implications in social reality. According to Wood, "[t]o identify what is repressed with 'evil incarnate' (a metaphysical, rather than a social, definition) is automatically to suggest that there is nothing to be done but strive to keep it repressed" ("Introduction," 23).

Though it envisions an apocalypse of bourgeois normality, dramatizing its impending demise, The Omen finally does nothing to question this normality; rather it seems to affirm that "even if 'our' world is ending, it was still the good, right, true one" (Wood

"The American Nightmare," 79).

Progressive apocalyptic horror films tend to flout the moral bifurcation of

"good" normality/society and "evil" Monster, and work to create a more politically grounded pessimism out of the destruction of capitalist society. Such is the case in films where the repressed Monster's threat to capitalist normality and its institutions is seen to emanate from within society (not in some external "evil), and where no way out of the threat is posited because, in some significant respect, capitalist society is incapable of countenancing the threat, its own self-imposed destruction:

the 'apocalypse', even when presented in metaphysical terms (the end of the world), is generally reinterpretable in social/political ones (the end of the highly specific world of patriarchal capitalism). The majority of the most 85 distinguished American horror films (especially in the 70's) are concerned with this particular apocalypse; they are progressive in so far as their negativity is not recuperable into the dominant ideology, but constitutes (on the contrary) the recognition of that ideology's disintegration, its untenability, as all it has repressed explodes and blows it apart. ("Introduction," 23)

Romero's zombie cycle is the popular example of a group of progressive horror films that imagine an apocalyptic, point-of-no-return scenario for capitalism and its institutions—where children of the nuclear family literally devour their parents

(Wood "Apocalypse Now," 93), shopping malls are overrun by brain-dead zombies, and, recurrently, the only chance for humanity's future rests in the hands of survivors

(at least potentially) unsympathetic to capitalism's ends.3 Wood devotes a great deal of attention to another, less celebrated genre-auteur, Larry Cohen, whose works of the

1970s offer variations on several "apocalyptic" themes—chief among them the self- imposed, irreversible collapse of the nuclear family, in Bone (1972) and the It's Alive films (1974;1978; 1987); and "the overthrow of the entire structure of patriarchal ideology [itself]" ("Normality and Monsters," 94), headed by a sexually ambiguous messiah/demon figure in God Told Me To (1976). Wood insists that, like Romero,

3 Not only the aforementioned Day of the Dead, but also its precursors Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Night of the Living Dead (1968) end by placing their last hopes in female and/or black protagonists— though in the latter film the black protagonist Ben ends up being mistaken (?) for a zombie by a roving posse, who kill Ben and throw his body on a pile of burning zombie corpses. In Land of the Dead (2005), the majority of the human survivors of a zombie attack on Pittsburgh belong to the oppressed lower classes of the city, while the wealthy capitalists who have sequestered themselves in a luxury apartment complex at the center of the city are all targeted and devoured by the zombies (the ostensible leader of whom is black). Romero's most recent entry in the zombie cycle, Diary of the Dead (2007), ends in the survival of a female student and her university professor, but the film's true living hope lies in the video document of the zombie attacks made by the student protagonists and uploaded to a YouTube-like video-sharing website. It is this document that dispels the obfuscations of the American media and government regarding the zombie attacks, and affirms the democratic potential of the Internet to coordinate grassroots movements against the abusive and dangerous control of information at the institutional level in America. 86 Cohen denies any solutions to the threats of his Monsters and the apocalyptic scenarios they engender, insofar as any solutions can be found "within the [Western capitalist] system"; rather, says Wood, "the conflicts are presented as inherent in that system—fundamental and unresolvable" ("Normality and Monsters," 91). We might say, finally, that the difference between the pessimism found in Romero and Cohen's films and the negativity evinced in The Omen, is that the former is defined according to specific social issues, showing the apocalypse as an outgrowth of American corruption, while the latter relies on moral generalizations and foreign "evil" in envisioning society's collapse, making the apocalypse, as curious as it sounds, safety external, resolutely Other—a matter of "us" versus "them/it," reminiscent of the "Red

Scare" sci-fi movies of the 1950s.

Lewton, Wood, and The Seventh Victim

Val Lewton's horror cycle nowhere contains "apocalyptic" themes, but it does evince a marked pessimism in its—I would argue progressive—treatment of the formula "the monster threatens normality," a pessimism which casts doubts on

American society's ability adequately to confront its own "horrors." Lewton as an artist was never very interested in optimism; perhaps continuing the trend of the bitter finales found in so many of his novels (e.g., 4 Wives; A Laughing Woman; No Man of

Her Own, etc.), uncomplicatedly happy endings in Lewton films are notably hard to come by. Of the nine films in the Lewton horror cycle, arguably only one of them,

The Ghost Ship, ends on an extended, seemingly "restorative" note, with all the 87 problems raised in the film apparently resolved. Yet even this film yields to pessimism when placed under close scrutiny.

The Ghost Ship climaxes in the rescue of the lead protagonist Tom by his shipmate the Finn, who dashes in at the last moment to fight off the demented, knife- wielding "Monster" Captain Stone just as he's trying to finish off Tom. An ostensibly optimistic epilogue follows, wherein the mute Finn, in an internal monologue, pronounces the restoration of Goodness to the ship (the Finn is shown literally at the ship's helm), and Tom meets up with a girl at the port, possibly to start a romance. In their very artificiality, these closing scenes are suspect to begin with; for instance, the fact that the final romantic meeting is depicted only through the characters' shadows cast against a wall seems enough to imply Lewton's disinterest in affirming the couple (it also doesn't help that shadows are mainly suggestive of "horror" in the

Lewton cycle). More noticeably, the high moral tone of the Finn's monologue feels as tacked-on and didactic as the final montage in Lewton's non-horror film at RKO

Youth Runs Wild, which blandly preaches the need for Americans during the war to reaffirm the family bond and build youth centres in order to combat home front juvenile delinquency (this ending was imposed by the studio, and was one reason

Lewton asked to have his name taken off the film's credits—he had originally envisioned a patricide to bring the film to a more troubling close). Yet even if we are to accept the Finn's monologue as part of Lewton's affirmative design, there is still a sense of disquiet to be derived from the fact that the monologue is an internal one, delivered by a mute character—it is not communicable to any of the other characters. The moral satisfaction in "Goodness" thus only echoes in the head of this single character, who has furthermore been an outsider throughout the entire film, visually isolated from the other characters in numerous scenes.

If Lewton feels sympathy for the Finn, allowing him the final heroic act, he does not allow that the Finn's monologue, in its misguided way, has any resonance for the other characters—or that it in any way "speaks for" the film as a whole. For one, the "Goodness" declared by the Finn, his faith in humanity, is complicated by

Lewton's treatment of the supposedly "Evil" (by implication of the Finn's speech)

Captain Stone, who, despite his fascistic temperament with his crewmen, is given several introspective scenes in which he grapples with his descent into tyrannical madness. More interestingly, it is also possible to read Stone's madness as the distorted externalization of repressed homosexuality—"a return of the repressed." To drive home The Ghost Ship's homoerotic subtext, Harry M. Benshoff points out the plentiful "beefcake" among the sailor characters; the phallic symbols abounding in nearly every scene (knives, cigars, needles, giant swinging hooks); and the racy, revealing innuendo in the dialogue—e.g., one sailor tells another that Captain Stone's law is so absolute onboard the ship, "Why, he can even marry you!"—to which the other replies: "Not me. I have a wife." Furthermore, says Benshoff, Captain Stone's avowed attraction to Tom Merriam goes beyond the paternal: it is rather "a courtship of sorts ... with thinly veiled homosexual implication," as Captain Stone grooms his pupil Tom in his own image, evoking "[t]he narcissism implicit in psychoanalytic models of homosexuality" (107). In light of all this, it becomes very difficult to 89 ignore the connotations of repressed homosexuality in Stone's encounter with

Ellen, a woman with (unreciprocated) romantic longings for the Captain. Stone tells

Ellen that he cannot be with her, that she should keep her distance; he has lately feared for his own sanity, unexplainable urges having possessed him: "I've done things I couldn't remember doing. I've had moments when I felt that I was on the verge of losing control—of doing terrible, stupid, ugly things. This morning when

[Tom] testified against me, I could barely keep my seat." One can read Stone's anxiety-ridden speech to Ellen as a conflation of his homosexual desires with monomaniacal, pathological instincts: Stone compensates for his fear of expressing his homosexuality with a violent, phallic drive for domination. Far from revealing a reactionary tendency in the film, Stone's monstrous response to his sexual desire only redounds on his repression: "It is the keeping of secrets, not necessarily the secrets themselves, which leads to [his] destruction" (Benshoff 104). Finally, the humanity of

Captain Stone—his genuine anguish and confusion about himself—seems to challenge the Finn's moral monologue, suggesting that even the "Evil" Monster of the film warrants sympathy: by dint of the social implications of his madness, Stone was in his own way a victim, too—a victim of repression. The death of Stone cannot be plainly seen to restore Goodness, as the Finn says, for the problems that plagued

Stone resonate as problems of "Good" socio-cultural normality as well: repressed homosexuality, in addition to domineering, oppressive phallic power.

The endings of other Lewton films take a more unambiguously negative tack.

The Seventh Victim is most forthright in eschewing a happy, restorative resolution: its 90 title character commits suicide at the close of the film, doing so in fact just after we

have witnessed hopeful scenes featuring the other characters, which appear to affirm patriarchal institutions: religion, embodied in the Lord's Prayer ("Our Father"); hetero-normative romance. The significance and irony of Lewton's juxtaposition of hope and suicide will be taken up in a close reading of The Seventh Victim in the

coming pages. Suffice it to say for now that I hope to show Lewton's negativity in this film is not an empty nihilistic gesture, but one laden with social significance, and remarkably critical of patriarchal capitalist oppressions/repressions.

Not only The Ghost Ship, but also The Seventh Victim and other movies in

Lewton's cycle take an ambivalent attitude towards Monsterhood, making it very

difficult for one to impose moral binaries on his films. For his part, Wood finds that pinpointing the Monster in any Lewton film is in fact quite difficult, and this too contributes to Lewton's progressiveness. To make his point, Wood argues that the horror genre's previous preoccupation with inciting horror through explicitly foreign

figures (e.g. Dracula [1931]; Island of Lost Souls [1932]; The Mummy [1932]) is problematized in the 1940s by Lewton's more pervasive, all-encompassing sense of horror:

the best of the [Lewton] series are concerned with the undermining of such distinctions [between foreign evil and domestic normality]—with the idea that no one escapes contamination. Accordingly, the concept of the Monster becomes diffused through the film (closely linked to the celebrated Lewton emphasis on atmosphere, rather than overt shock), no longer identified with a single figure. ("The American Nightmare," 77) 91 Wood cites / Walked with a Zombie as a particularly compelling example of how

Lewton tends to complicate easy dichotomies between foreign/evil and (North)

American/good. As Wood writes, "[the film] is built on an elaborate set of apparently clear-cut structural oppositions—Canada-West Indies, white-black, light-darkness, life-death, science-black magic, Christianity-voodoo, conscious-unconscious, etc.— and it proceeds systematically to blur all of them" ("The American Nightmare," 77-

8). In the case of the film's Monster, Wood finds that, despite its featuring scenes of ominous voodoo rituals and an imposing Monster-esque figure in a towering black zombie named Carre-Four, "/ Walked with a Zombie explicitly locates horror at the heart of the family, identifying it with sexual repressiveness in the cause of preserving family unity" ("The American Nightmare," 77). As "threats" or symbols of horror go, the explicit zombies of the film take a back seat to Mrs. Rand (Edith Barrett), the mother of Paul and Wesley Holland (Tom Conway and James Ellison), who claims to have co-opted the locals' voodoo to induce a catatonic trance on Paul's wife, Jessica

(Christine Gordon), whose presence had threatened to rend the family apart (it is revealed that Jessica was also Wesley's mistress). In an article on the film and its accurate depiction of the Voudon religion, Gwenda Young helpfully points out that,

"If Mrs. Rand has zombified Jessica then she is simply conforming to the traditional practice of zombifying those who have offended the community in some way. It was generally accepted that the victims of zombification were usually transgressors of some kind—either of social, sexual or religious taboos" (115). Thus not only Mrs.

Rand, but also Jessica can be viewed as a disruptive (i.e. "monstrous") force: after all, 92 Jessica nearly severed the family's ties by courting both Paul and Wesley's affections, instigating their jealous rivalry. Moreover, at one point in the film Jessica takes explicit characteristics of the "Monster," lurking in the shadows and "stalking" her nurse Betsy (Frances Dee), although this turns out only to be a false scare, as

Jessica is merely sleepwalking in her trance. Still the implied threat of Jessica here resonates in a later scene when Betsy, who has fallen in love with Jessica's husband

Paul, suggests an insulin shock treatment for Jessica's catatonia that may potentially kill her—thereby subtly betraying her own status as "threat" in a romantic rivalry with Jessica for Paul's attention. One may conclude it is the possessiveness of not only Mrs. Rand, but also of Betsy, Jessica, and the brothers Holland, that produces the bulk of whatever "horror" can be said to body forth in the film. / Walked with a

Zombie all but eliminates the singular Monster in place of a group of characters with the potential to undermine each other, deny each other, even destroy each other (as

Wesley tragically does to Jessica at the film's end, before killing himself). If the strange voodoo magic of the island plays some inexplicable role in securing these characters' destinies, it is finally seen as less harmful a threat than the petty and destructive jealousies of the bourgeois characters and their struggle to maintain familial and romantic "normalcy."

Though the idea of the Monster may be dispersed to many characters in several of the Lewton films, there is value in isolating how certain solitary figures of

Monstrousness recur, in order to highlight some particularly key themes and motifs 93 that point up the social-political progressiveness of the cycle as a whole. Many of

Lewton's films, for example, are preoccupied with the theme of woman as Monster or crazy person contra the "normal" social order. Martha Nochimson argues that "by far the source of greatest fascination to Lewton in his RKO output is the utility of the horror idiom for representing the cultural obstacle course that women must travel"

(14). Cat People initiates this fascination. The film's lead character Irena (Simone

Simon) has trouble adjusting to married life because of a (not-irrational) fear that she will turn into a panther upon becoming intimate with her husband Oliver (Kent

Smith). Irena is made to feel ashamed of her condition (and of her own Serbian roots, from which she derives her fear of transformation) as her husband sends her to a psychiatrist, while he indulges a burgeoning romance with a more tame and conventional woman at his office, Alice (Jane Randolph). The psychiatrist, Dr. Judd

(Tom Conway), ignores Irena's genuine anguish and believes she can be domesticated—or, subjected to the will of men. Judd implies he will have Irena institutionalized when she does not submit to his own sexual advances. When Irena finally transforms into a panther and slays Judd, it comes as a "return of the repressed," a violent expression of the sexual energies Irena has been too afraid to express, and that patriarchal society has sought to suppress in women/wives. In the exchange with Judd, Irena is impaled on the psychiatrist's cane/sword(/phallus), and, finding her way to the city zoo where the panther cages are kept, finally collapses and bleeds to death, once again taking human form. Oliver and Alice come upon her corpse; intuiting that Irena had in fact transformed into a panther, Oliver remarks: "She never lied to us. In paying tribute to Irena's honesty, Oliver admits that he has, in a symbolic sense, underestimated the power of Irena's untamed sexuality. The film, if not Oliver himself, mourns Irena's demise as something implicitly necessary to patriarchal society—her death making way for Oliver and Alice's more "normal" union, resulting as it does in marriage and a child in the film's sequel, The Curse of the Cat People.

To compare the treatment accorded Irena in this film with that given to Alex in Fatal Attraction forty-five years later is to bear witness to the remarkable regressions Hollywood is capable of from film to film, and era to era. Cat People, in distinction from Fatal Attraction, very clearly sympathizes with its sexual "Monster,"

Irena (e.g., by treating her death as tragic), and contrasts her fierce individuality

(which ostracizes Irena and costs her her life) with the altogether unexceptional nature of Alice (which makes Alice a better, less threatening choice of wife for

Oliver).4 As Linda Rohrer Paige frames it, "the quality of transformation not only casts women into the realm of the supernatural, but also it catapults them to the margins of society, 'outside' its norms. In contrast, women who lack the ability to transform pose no threat to patriarchy; it cultivates their passivity" (292). The film's ostensible sequel, The Curse of the Cat People, centres on another female character in

4 John Berks has written an interesting article arguing that not only Irena, but also Alice can be seen as a "monster." Berks explains that Alice's infiltration of the male work force in the film, common as it was for women during the war, symbolizes a socially "monstrous" hybrid: "the working woman" (38). However, that Alice represents a threat to Oliver or the basic operations of society is less vividly illustrated in the film than is Irena's threat. If Alice is a threat to anyone, she is to Irena, since the two women are rivals for Oliver's affections; in winning this rivalry, Alice ascends into the position of wife, and by the film's sequel., has turned to domestic living within the nuclear family. 95 danger of being marginalized for her "irrationality." Amy (Ann Carter), the young

daughter of the now-married Oliver and Alice, leads an active fantasy life (perhaps

the product of an extrasensory gift) that is met with the disapproval of her father—as

Oliver tells his wife, "There's something moody, something sickly about Amy. She

could almost be Irena's child." Irena reappears in the sequel as "imaginary" friend

and spiritual guide for Amy, providing the young girl comfort and encouraging her

creativity—things of which her father (and presumably mother: Alice is never given

much influence in the narrative) are incapable.

Lewton's final film at RKO, Bedlam, completes the cycle's sympathetic

treatment of women as "monsters" under patriarchy. In this film, nosy social reformer

Nell Bowen is brought before an all-male Commission of Lunacy (!) on charges of

mental instability. The Commission is nonplussed by Nell's insolent replies to their

interrogation, and are particularly unable to comprehend the account of her chewing

up and swallowing a bank note (a bribe) as anything but evidence of sheer madness

(Lewton's subtle jab at the sanctity of money under patriarchal-capitalism?5).

Forthwith, the Commission judges Nell legally insane and locks her away in Bedlam

asylum. Nell becomes just one "Monster" amongst many in the chambers of Bedlam,

but it is important to note how her Monsterhood, her ostracization, is a category

5 Nell's insouciance here could also be a reference to Casanova's Memoirs, one of Lewton's favourite books. In his pulp The Laughing Woman, Lewton alludes to Kitty Fisher, a character from the Memoirs "who had once eaten between two pieces of bread a bank note for five thousand pounds" (225), precisely as Nell does in Bedlam. imposed on her by an oppressive male-dominated society, thereby tying her to several female protagonists in the Lewton cycle.

The Seventh Victim is perhaps the least understood of Lewton's damning exposes of patriarchy, though it very vividly illustrates the oppression of women under this system. The film takes place in a noirish New York City, where a young woman, Mary (Kim Hunter), ventures out among the claustrophobic urban shadows to find her missing sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks). Mary discovers that Jacqueline has been leading a haunted, suicidal existence in the city and has recently gotten herself mixed up with a cult of upper-class devil-worshippers in Greenwich Village.

We learn that the cult had been keeping Jacqueline locked up in a room at her salon, until she made her escape into the protective "care"—i.e., the locked rooms—of Dr.

Judd (this is the very same character from Cat People, played by Tom Conway, though not quite so lecherously here).

Much to her misery, Jacqueline is continuously treated as an exotic creature to be rounded up and caged in the film, and her pursuers/captors are repeatedly the men who claim to care for her: Dr. Judd, her dull husband Gregory (Hugh Beaumont).

Gregory does not seem to understand his wife's suicidal melancholy, attributing it to a "fantasy" in her mind (echoing sentiments expressed by men regarding Irena in Cat

People and Amy in The Curse of the Cat People). As Gregory cannot keep Jacqueline subdued and under his protection for long, his affection shifts to her young, inexperienced sister Mary. After a climactic sequence in which Jacqueline narrowly 97 escapes the pursuits of a knife-wielding man from the devil cult, the film ends with

Jacqueline finally taking her own life.

Martha Nochimson contends that, "There is nothing so concrete as racism, class, or male hierarchy that defines what is wrong [with Jacqueline]. Rather, the film continually resonates a nothingness in the modern urban vista, lacking flora or fauna, constructed of commercially created concrete, glass, and plastic surfaces, its deserted

(wonderfully lit) urban spaces framed in original, off-kilter images" (16). While

Nochimson is astute to recognize Jacqueline's emptiness mirrored in the film's visualization of the city, I disagree that Jacqueline's condition cannot be attributed to a socially specific cause (aside from, as Nochimson's argument seems to imply, the soullessness of modern commercialized living). To wit, I argue The Seventh Victim can be read coherently alongside Lewton's other treatments of the oppression and alienation of women under society's patriarchal structure of power. I hope to show that Jacqueline indeed belongs to the category of "Monster," ambivalent as it is in the

Lewton cycle, insofar as she embodies a significant threat to the "normality" of the patriarchal society reinforced by the other protagonists. I also aim to show that the negativity, even nihilism, of Jacqueline's suicide is quite socially and politically resonant—it registers as the hollowing out of Mary and Gregory's hopeful romantic ending and as the problematization of Hollywood's sacred notion of "America as the land where everyone is or can be happy; hence the land where all problems are solvable within the existing system" (Wood "Ideology," 719). Furthermore, in horror genre terms, the suicide is at once a consequence of patriarchal oppression (the 98 "Monster" must die), and a lasting defiance of it (something significantly denied

Alex in the revised ending of Fatal Attraction). A closer look at The Seventh Victim is necessary, of course, before one can reach any of the above conclusions.

The coupling of Gregory and Mary, which appears to be innocuously implemented in The Seventh Victim, takes on dimensions that unsettle one's perception of Hollywood's standard patriarchal romances. Joel E. Siegel observes that

Lewton's films are chronically disinterested in "normal" couples (156). In a late scene in Victim, Gregory and Mary's vows of love are indeed depicted in a perfunctory manner, but it is nonetheless important to note how this scene suggests a troubling side to Hollywood's "happy couple." Gregory professes his love for Mary, and she dutifully reciprocates, but they acknowledge the encumbrance of Jacqueline

(or their sense of "loyalty" to her) and vow to put their love on hold. This love scene is very abruptly followed by the scene of Jacqueline's suicide. Robin Wood finds that

"The Seventh Victim has strong undertones of sibling envy and sexual jealousy (the structure and editing of the last scene suggesting that Jacqueline's suicide is willed by her 'nice' husband and sister rather than by the 'evil' devil-worshippers) ..." ("The

American Nightmare," 77). The apparent innocence of Gregory and Mary's love should fool no one, for as Tony Williams writes, here and elsewhere in the Lewton cycle, "'Clean' and 'honest' embody sinister qualities" (63). Gregory and Mary's

"wholesome" romance is apparently founded on patriarchal principles: early in the film we find Gregory treating Mary like a child, buying her a glass of milk at a bar, for example; when Mary protests that she does not like being treated as a child, 99 Gregory treats her as a romantic object instead, and by their last scene, Mary will be seen to respond very obediently to his advances, restoring the power (im)balance of the adult-child relationship in the romantic union of man-woman. Lewton reminds us quite forcefully that Gregory and Mary's union finally comes at a rather nasty price: it will be sealed only once the threat to this union is exorcised—i.e., once

Jacqueline is dead and out of the picture (the resemblance to the fate of the love triangle in Cat People is unmistakable here).6

Mary is an ideal mate for Gregory because she is cooperative, whereas

Jacqueline, like Irena before her, has resisted domestication. For Gregory, Jacqueline has not turned out to be "[t]he ideal female: wife and mother, perfect companion, the endlessly dependable mainstay of hearth and home" (Wood "Ideology," 719).7

Gregory is capable of being intensely attracted to Jacqueline, but she does not make for much of a wife. He speaks of Jacqueline as if she is still a stranger, some curious object to him: "A man would look anywhere for her, Mary. There's something exciting, unforgettable about Jacqueline—something you never quite get hold of—

6 In a line of dialogue deleted from the final cut, Mary says, about her missing sister, "It's terrible to say—but if she were dead it would be easier. There would be some certainty about it" (Reel 2, Val Lewton Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). 7 A telling exchange of dialogue from the film's original shooting-script unfortunately did not make it into the film: GREGORY: I thought I might close up the apartment—maybe get a place in Connecticut. MARY: You'd love that, Jackie. Remember that last summer with Mother in the Berkshires? You used to help the gardener. JUDD: Yes. You could become a country wife—fool around with petunias and pullets. MARY: It will be fun meeting Gregory every night at the station. Jason looks at her. JACQUELINE: No. (Reel 2, Val Lewton Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.) 100 something that keeps a man following after her." Consider how Gregory's words take on a foreboding character in light of the film's climactic scene, in which a man with a switchblade stalks Jacqueline relentlessly across the city. This sequence portrays the violent, oppressive side of men's desire to possess Jacqueline, but also the "thrill of the hunt" they experience. At one point the stalker clutches her by the wrist, a lascivious grin fixed on his face. Jacqueline escapes her predator by stumbling upon a troupe of actors in an alleyway. "There's a man following me!" she pleads. One of the actors replies, cheerfully: "I shouldn't wonder babe, I shouldn't wonder!" Here Lewton suggestively imbricates murderous desire and hetero-male lust/possessiveness.

Jacqueline is treated like an animal throughout the film, alternately prey and pet, further pointing up men's oscillating desire to hunt and possess her. (The fur coat

Jacqueline wears in several scenes visualizes this animal quality, providing another implicit link to Irena in Cat People.) Dr. Judd, for instance, tracks down Jacqueline and keeps her locked away, caged in rooms—under the guise of his fearing for her well-being. Late in the film, with Jacqueline under his care, Judd is able to beckon her like a pet. At the sight of her husband Gregory, Jacqueline suddenly recoils into

Judd's arms as if she has been hypnotized or trained. Dr. Judd evidently takes advantage of his position as Jacqueline's "physician" to become her master, exploiting her mental anguish as a means of possessing her. Judd, we remember, pays with his life when he attempts this same practice with Irena in Cat People. Like Irena, Jacqueline is the Other in The Seventh Victim, perhaps the film's central "Monster," and our sympathy extends to her in much the same way it does to Irena. One can intuit the Otherness of Jacqueline just by looking at her:

Jacqueline's outre appearance—her pitch black dress and striking Cleopatra hairstyle set in high contrast to her ghostly white face—is a crude way of imparting the

"strangeness" of the character, her difference. How it is that Jacqueline becomes the film's "Monster" is a matter requiring more careful consideration. It is certainly worth mentioning that Jacqueline is the only character who actually kills anybody in the film: not just herself, but also, by accident and out of fear, Irving August (Lou

Lubin), the private eye hired by Mary to find Jacqueline. August's death is at first a mystery: he is stabbed in the shadows while searching Jacqueline's old workplace with Mary (it is in fact Mary who prods August to go down a shadowy corridor to open the door to the room where they believe Jacqueline is being kept). When later we learn that Jacqueline is the one who stabbed and killed August, she is retrospectively implicated as Monster: she was the "menace" lurking in the dark for

August and Mary.

There is, however, a more subtle, complex way in which one might view

Jacqueline as Monster. Recalling Wood's horror formula—"normality is threatened by the Monster"—we may find that Jacqueline, even more than the Palladist devil cult, embodies the film's most significant threat to normalcy. We have already seen how Jacqueline's presence disrupts the operations of the patriarchal system, how the formation of the "normal" couple depends on her eradication. Jacqueline also carries 102 the mark of the Monster (again in line with Wood's analysis) in that she personifies what is repressed (by necessity) in patriarchal society: the film repeatedly

implies that Jacqueline is bisexual. When asked if she knows Jacqueline, a woman at

a party tells Mary, "Know her! My dear, we were intimate! The times we used to

have together! I bet she never told you about that—you're too young ... When she took up with Louis Judd she went out of circulation, like that!" The film elsewhere hints at a lesbian relationship between Jacqueline and a co-worker. Harry M.

Benshoff finds that Jacqueline's allegiance to the Palladists is also a tip-off to her

sexual orientation, for this Satanist cult "can easily be read as gay and lesbian,

especially since they are pointedly living in Greenwich Village. Fashions, hairstyles, and behavioural mannerisms further distinguish these people as being not quite

'normal'" (102). As I have stated, however, the Palladists cannot be truly seen as the

"Monster(s)" of the film: they are not as significant a threat to normality as they

initially appear. Late in the film, the Satanists are confronted by Dr. Judd and the poet

Jason Hoag, who shame the cult by intoning sections from the Lord's Prayer. It seems

from this that the Palladists, through their apologetic, humbled demeanour, are once again reclaimed within the bounds of "normal" morality. Jacqueline refuses this morality and faith in humankind by hanging herself mere moments after Judd and

Jason's sermon with the Palladists. Her "threat" to normality is extinguishable only in death (at her own hand), and thus appears much more resistant to normal patriarchal conditioning than the Palladists'. 103 What are the specific terms of Jacqueline's "threat"? Jacqueline's implied liberal sexuality is an affront to patriarchal dominance; Judd's control of Jacqueline specifically aims to put a stop to it—he takes her "out of circulation," keeping her locked away for himself. As Wood writes, "[t]he otherness and the autonomy of the partner as well as her/his right to freedom and independence of being are perceived as a threat to the possession/dependence principle and are denied" ("The American

Nightmare," 66). Jacqueline's potential happiness (says one of her lesbian partners:

"the one time I was happiest was when I was withj>ow!") is quashed and oppressed by patriarchal structures of control: i.e., marriage, Judd's psychiatry—the latter of which seems to have the occasional effect of "taming" her. Yet Jacqueline wants to resist these forms of oppression; when she is kept locked away, she is restless, miserable: near the beginning of the film Judd comes back to his apartment to find that

Jacqueline has escaped without his permission. In another sense, her perpetual, suicidal unhappiness throughout the film underscores her desire to get away from the oppressions of her life, and ensures that neither Gregory nor Judd can "cure" her, restore her faith in the world.

Thus, if the bisexual freedom of Jacqueline (her freedom to happiness) is mostly oppressed in the movie, the outgrowth of this oppression, Jacqueline's despair, itself becomes "monstrous," Other. Jacqueline's suicide is indeed her most

"monstrous" act: it confounds the happiness and hope of the other characters—Jason and Judd's prayer to the Palladists and Mary and Gregory's love are both undercut by

Jacqueline's abrupt negation of life. That her suicidal inclinations are stoked by 104 patriarchy becomes obvious when we learn early in the film that Gregory has full knowledge of the "suicide room" in which Jacqueline ultimately hangs herself; in fact, Gregory says, he helped her rent it out. But the final act of suicide, the will to negation, is Jacqueline's own, and something beyond Gregory's comprehension:

"People who commit suicide don't talk about it. That room made her happy in some strange way I couldn't understand. She lived in a world of her own fancy. She didn't always tell the truth. In fact—I'm afraid she didn't know what the truth was." In lieu of freedom, Jacqueline seeks comfort in death—on her own terms (says a cult member trying to will Jacqueline to kill herself: "You were always talking suicide, of ending your life when you wanted to"; Jacqueline: "Yes, when /wanted to").

Jacqueline's will to end her life is her personal form of truth, flouting the "truth" that life is worth living within the confines of social (and sexual) "normality."

The events immediately leading up to Jacqueline's suicide deserve a closer inspection. To my knowledge, critics have failed to note the fact that Jacqueline does not initially intend to kill herself when she arrives at the apartment building at the end of the film. Having just escaped the assassin on the streets, she walks exhaustedly up the stairs to the hall of her apartment building, and finds she has two rooms to consider: one is being rented by her sister Mary, with whom Jacqueline is currently staying; the other is the "suicide room" Jacqueline has been renting out (with the help of Gregory), behind whose door is simply a chair and a noose. Jacqueline seems wearily to decide on her sister's room when she notices another woman emerging from an apartment across the hall. Jacqueline goes to talk to the woman: JACQUELINE: Who are you? MIMI: I'm Mimi... I'm dying. JACQUELINE (abruptly): No. MIMI: I've been quiet, oh, ever so quiet. I hardly move yet it keeps coming all the time ... closer and closer. I rest and rest and yet I'm dying. JACQUELINE: And you don't want to die ... I've always wanted to die. Always. MIMI: I'm afraid. I'm tired of being afraid ... of waiting. JACQUELINE: Why wait? MIMI: I'm not going to wait. I'm going out. . . laugh, dance ... do all the things I used to do. JACQUELINE: And then? MIMI: I don't know.

JACQUELINE (softly, to herself): You will die.

It is this final exchange that summons in Jacqueline the resolve to kill herself: reflected in this woman Mimi is Jacqueline's knowledge that to sit and wait (locked away in rooms, say) is a form of dying, and that even when one takes carefree pleasure in life, it will quickly be swallowed up by more of the same: death. When

Jacqueline says "I've always wanted to die," it reads as a condemnation of everything this life has to offer; it is her conclusion about existence: "Your sister had a feeling about life," Gregory tells Mary, "that it wasn't worth living unless you could end it."

In this supremely nihilistic statement, Jacqueline asserts her will against the unhappiness of existence; that this unhappiness is itself the product of Jacqueline's estrangement from her social surroundings emerges in what the film reveals about her life prospects: either she is confined in locked rooms, or murderously stalked out in the streets. Either way, patriarchal control denies her the right to live freely; thus she embraces the right to die freely. Jacqueline's final words, spoken in ghostly voice- over after we hear the noose drop behind her door, come from John Donne's "Holy Sonnet I": "I runne to death, and death meets me as fast, and all my pleasures are

o like yesterday." More bittersweet words were perhaps never spoken by a film character.

Conclusion

There is a seeming impasse one reaches in considering Val Lewton's RKO films as "progressive." Lewton does not submit many alternatives to the social horrors he so frequently summons up (as Romero, for instance, does by allowing counter-ideology survivors to his zombie apocalypses). Alexander Nemerov invokes

"Lewton's predilection for tragedy over progress," and observes that, for example,

"Racial emancipation was finally less interesting to him than racial injustice" (156).

The tragedy of Jacqueline's suicide is by all appearances not a progressive response to the injustices of patriarchy; her suicide seems initially to do no more than drape a nihilistic fog over the entire film. Yet even nihilism, one might argue, can begin to break a path to more progressive ways of life.9 If, as Robert Sklar writes, "It was feared [by progressives], with considerable justification, that whatever challenge movies presented to the more straightlaced traditional norms, Hollywood's contribution to American culture was essentially one of affirmation" (196-7),

The film erroneously attributes this quote to Donne's "Holy Sonnet VII." 9 Nietzsche, for example, believed nihilism could motivate "new philosophers ... strong and original enough to give impetus to opposed valuations and initiate a revaluation and reversal of 'eternal values'" (91). 107 Lewton's negativity must then be seen as a key contribution to the progressive culture in 1940s Hollywood.

This negativity, in Wood's phrase, "is not recuperable into the dominant ideology" ("Introduction," 23). Lewton makes it plain in his films that life is not worth living for every one of his characters, that society has in some fashion contributed to certain characters' (often his Monsters') terminal unhappiness. More generally, Lewton's films serve to convince us that behind many genre "fantasies" lay horrifying social realities. Thus, Lewton's horror films fit the very description of a cultural practice that by design unsettles the ideological workings of the ruling

Establishment. Faced with patriarchal capitalist society and its crippling institutions,

Lewton's films (and novels) resolve to err on the side of negativity, despair, and tragedy. This "progressive pessimism" no doubt contributes immensely to the special appeal of Lewton's work: it is the haunting philosophy of a great, humanist outsider. Appendix A: Val Lewton's Productions at RKO Radio Pictures

Cat People (Dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1942)

/ Walked with a Zombie (Dir. Tourneur, 1943)

The Leopard Man (Dir. Tourneur, 1943)

The Seventh Victim (Dir. Mark Robson, 1943)

The Ghost Ship (Dir. Robson, 1943)

The Curse of the Cat People (Dirs. Robert Wise and Gunther von Fritsch, 1944)

Mademoiselle Fifl (Dir. Wise, 1944)

Youth Runs Wild (Dir. Robson, 1944)

The Body Snatcher (Dir. Wise, 1945)

Isle of the Dead (Dir. Robson, 1945)

Bedlam (Dir. Robson, 1946) 109 Appendix B: Val Lewton's Pulp Novels

Improved Road (Collins and Sons [Edinburgh], 1925. Never published in the United

States)

The Cossack Sword (Collins and Sons, 1926. Published in the United States by

Mohawk Press as Rape of Glory, 1931)

The Fateful Star Murder (Mohawk Press, 1931. Under pseudonym H. C. Kerkow)

Where the Cobra Sings (Macaulay Publishing Co., 1932. Under pseudonym Cosmo

Forbes)

No Bed of Her Own (Vanguard Press, 1932. Re-published by Kingly Reprieve

[Glasgow], 2006)

Four Wives (Vanguard Press, 1932. Under pseudonym Carlos Keith)

Yearly Lease (Vanguard Press, 1933)

A Laughing Woman (Vanguard Press, 1933. Under pseudonym Carlos Keith)

This Fool, Passion (Vanguard Press, 1933. Under pseudonym Carlos Keith) 110 Works Cited

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Apache Drums. Prod. Val Lewton; dir. Hugo Fregonese. Perfs. Stephen McNally,

Coleen Gray, Willard Parker. Universal International Pictures, 1951.

Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. Dir. Nathan Juran. Perfs. Allison Hayes, William

Hudson, Yvette Vickers. Allied Artists Pictures, 1958.

The Bad and the Beautiful. Dir. Vincente Minnelli. Perfs. Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner,

Walter Pidgeon. MGM, 1952.

Bedlam. Prod. Val Lewton; dir. Mark Robson. Perfs. Boris Karloff, Anna Lee, Billy

House. RKO Radio Pictures, 1946.

Behind the Rising Sun. Dir. Edward Dmytryk. Perfs. Margo, Tom Neal, J. Carrol

Naish. RKO Radio Pictures, 1943.

The Black Cat. Dir. Edgar G. Ulmer. Perfs. Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, David

Manners. Universal Pictures, 1934.

The Body Snatcher. Prod. Val Lewton; dir. Robert Wise. Perfs. Boris Karloff, Henry

Daniell, Bela Lugosi. RKO Radio Pictures, 1945.

Bombardier. Dir. Richard Wallace. Perfs. Eugene L. Eubank, Pat O'Brien, Randolph

Scott. RKO Radio Pictures, 1943.

Bone. Dir. Larry Cohen. Perfs. Yaphet Kotto, Andrew Duggan, Joyce Van Patten.

New World Pictures, 1972.

Cat People. Prod. Val Lewton; dir. Jacques Tourneur. Perfs. Simone Simon, Kent

Smith, Tom Conway, and Jane Randolph. RKO Radio Pictures, 1942.

Cat People. Dir. Paul Schrader. Perfs. Nastassja Kinski, Malcolm McDowell, John 116 Heard. Universal Pictures, 1982.

Citizen Kane. Dir. Orson Welles. Perfs. Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy

Comingore. RKO Radio Pictures, 1943.

The Curse of the Cat People. Prod. Val Lewton; dirs. Robert Wise, Gunther von

Fritsch. Perfs. Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Ann Carter. RKO Radio Pictures,

1944.

Dawn of the Dead. Dir. George A. Romero. Perfs. David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott H.

Reiniger. United Film Distribution Company, 1978.

Day of the Dead. Dir. George A. Romero. Perfs. Lori Cardille, Terry Alexander,

Joseph Pilato. United Film Distribution Company, 1985.

Detour. Dir. Edgar G. Ulmer. Perfs. Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake.

Producers Releasing Corporation, 1945.

Diary of the Dead. Dir. George A. Romero. Perfs. Michelle Morgan, Joshua Close,

Shawn Roberts. The Weinstein Company, 2007.

Dracula. Dir. Tod Browning. Perfs. Bela Lugosi, Helen Chandler, David Manners.

Universal Pictures, 1931.

Earthquake. Dir. Mark Robson. Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, George Kennedy.

Universal Pictures, 1974.

Fatal Attraction. Dir. Adrian Lyne. Perfs. Michael Douglas, Glenn Close, Anne

Archer. Paramount Pictures, 1987.

The Ghost Ship. Prod. Val Lewton; dir. Mark Robson. Perfs. Richard Dix, Russell

Wade, Skelton Knaggs. RKO Radio Pictures, 1943. 117 God Told Me To. Dir. Larry Cohen. Perfs. Tony Lo Bianco, Deborah Raffin,

Sandy Dennis. New World Pictures, 1976.

Gone with the Wind. Prod. David O. Selznick; dir. Victor Fleming. Perfs. Vivien

Leigh, Clark Gable, Olivia de Havilland. MGM, 1939.

Hitler's Children. Dir. Edward Dmytryk. Perfs. Tim Holt, Bonita Granville, Kent

Smith. RKO Radio Pictures, 1943.

Home of the Brave. Dir. Mark Robson. Perfs. Jeff Corey, James Edwards, Lloyd

Bridges. United Artists, 1949.

Island of Lost Souls. Dir. Erie C. Kenton. Perfs. Charles Laughton, Richard Arlen,

Leila Hyams. Paramount Pictures, 1932.

Isle of the Dead. Prod. Val Lewton; dir. Mark Robson. Perfs. Boris Karloff, Ellen

Drew, Marc Cramer. RKO Radio Pictures, 1945.

It's Alive. Dir. Larry Cohen. Perfs. John P. Ryan, Sharon Farrell, James Dixon. Larco

Productions, 1974.

It's Lives Again [a.k.a. It's Alive II]. Dir. Larry Cohen. Perfs. Frederic Forrest,

Kathleen Lloyd, John P. Ryan. Larco Productions, 1974.

It's Alive III: Island of the Alive. Dir. Larry Cohen. Perfs. Michael Moriarity, Karen

Black, Laurene Landon. Larco Productions, 1987.

/ Walked with a Zombie. Prod. Val Lewton; dir. Jacques Tourneur. Perfs. James

Ellison, Frances Dee, and Tom Conway. RKO Radio Pictures, 1943.

King Kong. Dirs. Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack. Perfs. Fay Wray,

Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot. RKO Radio Pictures, 1933. 118 Land of the Dead. Dir. George A. Romero. Perfs. Simon Baker, John Leguizamo,

Dennis Hopper. Universal Pictures, 2005.

The Leopard Man. Prod. Val Lewton; dir. Jacques Tourneur. Perfs. Dennis O'Keefe,

Margo, Jean Brooks. RKO Radio Pictures, 1943.

Mademoiselle Fiji. Prod. Val Lewton; dir. Robert Wise. Perfs. Simone Simon, John

Emery, Kurt Krueger. RKO Radio Pictures, 1944.

The Magnificent Ambersons. Dir. Orson Welles. Perfs. Joseph Cotton, Dolores

Costello, Anne Baxter. RKO Radio Pictures, 1942.

The Mask oJFu Manchu. Dir. Charles Brabin. Perfs. Boris Karloff, Lewis Stone,

MyrnaLoy. MGM, 1932.

The Mummy. Dir. Karl Freund. Perfs. Boris Karloff, Zita Johann, David Manners.

Universal Pictures, 1932.

My Own True Love. Prod. Val Lewton; dir. Compton Bennett. Perfs. Phyllis Calvert,

Melvyn Douglas, Wanda Hendrix. Paramount Pictures, 1949.

No Man oJHer Own. Dir. Wesley Ruggles. Perfs. Clark Gable, Carole Lombard,

Dorothy Mackaill. Paramount Pictures, 1932.

Night ojthe Living Dead. Dir. George A. Romero. Perfs. Duane Jones, Judith O'Dea,

Karl Hardman. Walter Reade Organization 1968.

Peyton Place. Dir. Mark Robson. Perfs. Lana Turner, Lee Philips, Lloyd Nolan.

Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, 1957.

Please Believe Me. Prod. Val Lewton; dir. Norman Taurog. Perfs. Deborah Kerr,

Robert Walker, Mark Stevens. MGM, 1950. 119 Psycho. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perfs. Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles.

Paramount Pictures, 1960.

The Omen. Dir. Richard Dormer. Perfs. Gregory Peck, Lee Remick, David Warner.

Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, 1976.

Rebecca. Prod. David O. Selznick; dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perfs. Joan Fontaine,

Laurence Olivier, George Sanders. United Artists, 1940.

The Sand Pebbles. Dir. Robert Wise. Perfs. Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough,

Richard Crenna. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, 1966.

The Seventh Victim. Prod. Val Lewton; dir. Mark Robson. Perfs. Tom Conway, Jean

Brooks, Hugh Beaumont, Kim Hunter. RKO Radio Pictures, 1943.

Sleepaway Camp. Dir. Robert Hiltzik. Perfs. Felissa Rose, Jonathan Tiersten, Karen

Fields. Anchor Bay Entertainment, 1983.

The Sound of Music. Dir. Robert Wise. Perfs. Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer,

Eleanor Parker. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, 1965.

A Tale of Two Cities. Prod. David O. Selznick; dir. Jack Conway. Perfs. Ronald

Colman, Elizabeth Allan, Edna May Oliver. MGM, 1935.

Teeth. Dir. Mitchell Lichtenstein. Perfs. Jess Weixler, John Hensley, Josh Pais.

Roadside Attractions, 2007.

Them!, Dir. Gordon Douglas. Perfs. James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon.

Warner Bros. Pictures, 1954.

This is Cinerama. Dirs. Merian C. Cooper, Gunther von Fritsch, Ernest B.

Schoedsack. Cinerama Releasing Corporation, 1952. Valley of the Dolls. Dir. Mark Robson. Peris. Barbara Parkins, Patty Duke, Paul

Burke. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, 1967.

West Side Story. Dirs. Robert Wise, Jerome Robbins. Perfs. Natalie Wood, Richard

Beymer, Russ Tamblyn. United Artists, 1961.

The Wolf Man. Dir. George Waggner. Perfs. Claude Rains, Warren William, Ralph

Bellamy. Universal Pictures, 1941.

The Woman on the Beach. Dir. Jean Renoir. Perfs. Joan Bennett, Robert Ryan,

Charles Bickford. RKO Radio Pictures, 1947.

Youth Runs Wild. Prod. Val Lewton; dir. Mark Robson. Perfs. Bonita Granville, Jean

Brooks, Glenn Vernon. RKO Radio Pictures, 1944.