The Val Lewton Horror Collection

In the early and middle 1940s, producer Val Lewton turned out the most stylish, literate horror movies made up to that point in time, and did so while being hamstrung by low budgets and occasionally ridiculous titles foisted on him by the studio's marketing division. But it's a tribute to his stewardship—and the creativity of the production unit he assembled—that these films not only still enjoy the respect of fright-film connoisseurs, but also continue to influence new practitioners in the genre. Working at a time when Universal's classic-monster slugfests dominated the field, Lewton and his directors concentrated on mood, atmosphere, and psychological terror—operating on the assumption that what you don't see is often more unnerving that what you do see. And they were right. How else to explain the success of Cat People (1942), with its beautiful girls supposedly turning into murderous panthers, or I Walked With a Zombie (1943), a cleverly adapted (and thinly disguised) version of Jane Eyre? Lewton and his team excelled at making the commonplace menacing, transforming a cozy New York neighborhood home into a haven for a devil-worshipping cult in The 7th Victim (1943) and turning a dusty New Mexico town into a killing field in The Leopard Man that same year. But his scriptwriters employed more genre-friendly locations as well, setting Isle of the Dead (1945) on a sinister Greek island and Bedlam (1946) in an 18th-century insane asylum. He teamed horror icons Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in a neatly scripted adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Body Snatcher (1945) and even filtered the terrors of The Curse of the Cat People (1944) through the imagination of a scared child. There isn't a single weak film in this box (although some clearly are better than others), and having Lewton's entire output in one collection (the other titles in this five-disc set of double features are 1943's The Ghost Ship and the new documentary Shadows in the Dark on Lewton's legacy) will be nirvana for shudder-show devotees. DVD extras include audio commentaries on six of the nine movies. Highly recommended. (E. Hulse)