Val Lewton dies

By Peter Bowen

When Val Lewton died from a heart attack at Los Angles’ Ceders-Sinai hospital in 1951, he was only 46 years old. Yet despite his young age, he’d already made a huge contribution to American film. And this primarily during the four years, from 1942 to 1946, he headed up RKO’s horror department. During that period, he produced 8 films that would change the shape of horror. Born in Yalta, Ukraine as Vladimir Ivan Leverton, he became Val Lewton when he immigrated to the United States in 1909.  After studying journalism at Columbia, Lewton took to writing fiction and non-fiction, often confusing the two. On several occasions he was fired from newspapers after he fictionalized a story. When his 1932 novel No Bed of Her Own was adapted into a film for Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, Lewton moved to Hollywood. Hired originally as a writer, he became a story editor and was eventually tapped to take over the horror unit at the cash-strapped RKO Pictures. The job was hardly a Hollywood power play. He could exercise creative liberty, as long each film came in under $150,000, ran 75 minutes, and was created from titles fed him by the marketing department. “They may think I'm going to do the usual chiller stuff which'll make a quick profit, be laughed at, and be forgotten,” Lewton told friends, “but I'm going to fool them . . . I'm going to do the kind of suspense movie I like.” What he liked was sophisticated thrillers fueled by psychological terror. For his film, Cat People, Lewton recruited a crew of talented artists, including director Jacques Tourneur and screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen. Ironically, Lewton suffered from gatophobia, an irrational fear of cats, so he used his own nightmares to craft a stylish tale of feline fear that also made money. Costing only $134,000 to make, Cat People pulled in over $4 million. Lewton pushed his team to inspire fear through suggestion rather than gore. The stories he produced," explained Bodeen, "are dramatizations of the psychology of fear…That which he cannot see fills him with basic and understandable terror." As RKO handed him one sensational title after another––I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, The Body Snatcher, Isle of the Dead, Bedlam––he would create something unexpected. Given the title I Walked with a Zombie, for example, Lewton turned to Jane Eyre for inspiration. In the end, Lewton became a victim of his own success. Pushed to do more A-list films, he floundered, missing the improvised creativity he found in B-movies.