Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy

For many average film-goers the name of Val Lewton means absolutely nothing. For genre enthusiasts(in horror)the name begins to have greater meaning, and if you are a horror fan of the the horror films of the 30s and 40s - then Val Lewton is not just an important name but a giant. Val Lewton was a producer that produced a group of atmospherically charged, elegantly filmed, subtly contexed films from a period roughly from 1942 to 1945 or so. These films were horror films that were meant to help dig RKO out of the mire that Orson Welles had put them in with his Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. RKO would give Lewton a title and he would assemble the script, the director, the crew team, the actors, and then blend them all together to make not only viable box office hits but some of the most powerfully symbolic, metaphorical, suggestive horror films ever made. Included in these films were Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Body Snatcher, and The Leopard Man. Shadows in the Dark chronicles Lewton's impact in the genre and gives us some information about his life. It is a short(53) minutes that goes by very pleasantly and leaves you wanting to know more about the man and his films. Horror icons and writers such as George Romero, William Freidkin, Richard Matheson, and so on give their takes on the legacy of Lewton and his films. Val Lewton's son is on hand to probably give the best insights into the world of his father. This is a wonderful documentary that comes with the five disc set released in 2005 with 9 of Lewton;s films. Although the documentary is very engaging and has lots of information in it I had not realized, I had wished that they would have examined each film in a bit more depth. It certainly left me hungering for more.

Shadows in the Dark (2005)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

Another wonderful documentary from Warner, this time covering the career of Val Lewton and the nine horror films he made for RKO. The documentary does a great job at showing how Orson Welles pretty much destroyed RKO and how Lewton's horror films saved the studio from going out of business. As usual there's a lot of historians and fans talking about the films, which is always fun to see. It's also nice to see these horror films get their due on DVD. The one downfall with the film is that there's really not too much known about Lewton so this leads to a lot of questions not getting answered.

Documentary about the great 1940s horror movie producer Val Lewton, featured on the 2005 DVD release "The Val Lewton Horror Collection."

You will learn how Lewton saved RKO by making successful B-movies between 1942 and 1946. How he opposed the idea of "Gone With the Wind", which was a mistake on Lewton's part. How he inspired Richard Matheson to write Lewton a letter, and thus change the history of horror cinema... no Matheson, no great horror of the 1960s!

John Landis calls Cat People's ethics "demented" and sees a lot of sexuality in the plot. Was it there? Maybe. Others have commented on the sexuality and homosexuality of Lewton's films, including "Cat People" and "The Seventh Victim". Was he a more clever script writer than already given credit for?

Serviceable rather than outstanding documentary (close to one hour in length) about Val Lewton, the celebrated producer of a series of nine classic - and highly influential - horror films made at RKO in the 1940s; it's part of Warner's 5-Disc THE VAL LEWTON COLLECTION Box Set (included as a double-feature with THE SEVENTH VICTIM [1943]).

Apart from the films themselves (which are dealt with in more detail - though not all of them! - in the individual Audio Commentaries on their respective discs), it touches upon his entire life and career. Therefore, I was somewhat disappointed to find that CAT PEOPLE (1942) takes up a lot of the running-time - having been the first film in the series - while THE GHOST SHIP (1943) and ISLE OF THE DEAD (1945) are once again overlooked; in fact, the three Boris Karloff films are discussed simultaneously - with, for instance, BEDLAM (1946) cited as being Lewton's best film but with no proper context provided to back up such a statement (with which many would argue to begin with, myself included)!

Still, all the participants - including film-makers such as Joe Dante, William Friedkin, John Landis, George A. Romero and Robert Wise (at the time, the sole surviving member of Lewton's "Snake Pit" unit), as well as the critics/writers who contributed to the various Audio Commentaries (it was especially nice to be able to see the face behind the voice) - are clearly well-informed, enthusiastic and reverential about their subject, so that, in the end, the documentary proves well worth viewing (if not the penetrating look at the man himself - what really made him tick, essentially - one would have wished for).

With a collection of Hollywood horror big guns talking about the films they love, this documentary on the life and career of Val Lewton is bound to make make you want to dive into his best known horror films.

Focusing on the nine horror films that Letwton made for RKO this film is as much about what is scary and the horror film's changing face as it is about its subject. Lewton, he produced the films and had input on the scripts, pretty much changed the face of horror as we know it. Gone were the monsters we could see, killed mostly due to budgetary considerations, and in their place we were given monsters of the mind, with horrors we never saw, only imagined. The films ended up being scarier as a result because the monster could be what ever we imagined it to be and not a man in a suit. Lewton's work foreshadowed the films of the 1960's including Hitchcock's Psycho.

This is a breezy 53 minutes that really only suffers in that you don't want it to end. Packaged as part of a DVD box set of the films, I'm hard pressed as when to say you should watch the film, before you dive into the films or after. I don't think it matters so long as you see it.