SOURCE: "A Photogenic Horror: Lewton Does Robert Louis Stevenson," in Literature/Film Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1982, pp. 25-37.

[In the following essay, Telotte examines the specifically cinematic qualities of Lewton's adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's short story "The Body Snatcher" (1895).]

Before becoming a story editor for David Selznick and then going on to produce his famous series of B-films at RKO, Val Lewton had embarked on a writing career, working first as a reporter and then churning out a broad range of historical novels, romances, and thrillers. That literary background apparently served him well in his film work, for according to his associates he "rewrote everything that his writers turned in; the last draft [of each script] was always his" [Joel Siegel, Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror, 1973]. Perhaps more importantly, he made that literary atmosphere felt everywhere in his productions; as Mark Robson, director of five Lewton films, recalls, "we were sort of brainwashed, in a way—brainwashed into thinking in poetic terms" [quoted in Joseph McBride", "Val Lewton, Director's Producer," Action, January-February 1976]. However, that almost tangible literary quality for which the Lewton films are justly esteemed has often made for a strangely uncinematic evaluation of them. They have been praised as "ambitiously literary," "poetic," and have been lauded for what they did not show, as if their success were largely due to Lewton's prizing literary techniques over established film practices. Certainly he sought to tone down the conventional grotesquery of the horror genre in which he most frequently worked, eliminating the spectacular monsters and ghouls with which his competitors at Universal Studios had been so successful. In place of what he termed those "masklike faces hardly human, with gnashing teeth and hair standing on end" [McBride], Lewton strove for a subtler form of the grotesque; yet it was one which indeed thrived on distinctly cinematic techniques of narrative.

Lewton's adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's story, "The Body-Snatcher," may best exemplify what he added over and above the "literary" and testify to his mindfulness of cinematic practice. In order to bring that Victorian horror story to the screen, Lewton fully reworked the tale's structure and characterization to such an extent that, for one of the few times in his career, he took screen credit for the final script, using the pseudonym Carlos Keith, a name under which he had previously penned several novels. What he had to work from was a complex tale in which an anonymous narrator introduces an older acquaintance named Fettes and then proceeds to relate this character's past history as it was told to him. Distanced by time from the actions he reports, that narrator inexplicably breaks off his account with one horrific scene, the description of a grotesque vision or visitation once experienced by Fettes. While that frame structure involving several time periods, an intrusive narrator, and the single-effect shock ending are devices hardly alien to film narrative, they do present some obstacles in translation to the screen. Flashbacks, voice-over narration, and arresting imagery have long been the stock-in-trade of film story-telling, though each imposes limitations particularly unwelcome for the horror genre. A frame tale most often brackets the grotesque, keeping it at a less alarming temporal remove, just as a voice-over intrudes a "safe," rationalizing buffer between the audience and those horrors it recounts. The shocking image trades on film's immediate visual impact, but almost inevitably at some cost in ambiguity and complexity. The narrative effects found in Stevenson's short piece would, therefore, pose a test of cinematic skill for any adapter.

Although with far greater complexity and to more point, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw employs generally similar elements and narrative structure as does "The Body-Snatcher," and its famous screen adaptation, The Innocents, is quite effective. That film beneficially eliminates both the framework and narrator of James's story, but at the end it capitulates to our curiosity, providing an objective view of one of the tale's "ghosts," and thereby fails to achieve quite the complex and troubling ambiguity of its literary source. Given far less to work with, Lewton fares somewhat better overall with The Body Snatcher, creating a film perhaps less understated than The Innocents, but one more complex and original in conception. Partly because of monetary restrictions and partly because he well understood the cinema's persistent and effective sense of "present tense," Lewton deleted the frame from Stevenson's tale, thus avoiding the necessity of depicting two different time periods; and with that deletion went the anonymous young narrator, whose characteristics Lewton wedded to the figure of Fettes. Knowing too that grotesque visions, given their initial shock effect, cannot stand sustained scrutiny—by the camera or the human eye—that they tend to become "something to laugh at" [McBride], Lewton altered that final horrific scene as well, giving it a pointedly hallucinatory effect. In general, he turned to distinctly filmic methods of telling his story, using complex recurring images, atmospheric and metaphoric settings, paired scenes to generate ironic effect, and identifiable characters to link scenes and plot elements visually. Although Lewton often did not show significant actions, relying instead on the allusive potential of character and setting, those things he depicted and the manner in which he avoided showing others demonstrate the truly cinematic sense which he brought to his many horror subjects.

Stevenson's tale, for much of its length, offers scant potential for those striking images which so easily translate to the screen; its focus is rather on a particular state of mind, that of Fettes who, while working in the dissecting laboratory of Mr. K. … 's medical school, became "insensible to the impressions of a life thus passed among the ensigns of mortality." In retrospect, a narrator tells of Fettes' medical schooling and of his association with a fellow student, one "Toddy" MacFarlane, whose callous example further spurred his downfall: "His mind … closed against all general considerations. He was incapable of interest in the fate and fortunes of another, the slave of his own desires and low ambitions." At this time the bodies used in medical study were often obtained illegally—through grave robbing or even murder—and with only slight prodding from his friend, Fettes learned "to avert the eye from any evidence of crime" for the right reward. Consequently, we follow Fettes' descent into crime as he helps MacFarlane dispose of the body of Mr. Gray, a blackmailer whom he has murdered. Together they then plot to join in the lucrative "resurrection" business, digging up bodies to sell to the various medical schools. On their initial attempt, though, "some unnatural miracle," as Stevenson describes it, transforms the body of a local farmer's wife into that of Gray. With this discovery, "a fear that was meaningless, a horror of what could not be" afflicts the grave robbers, and with this single shocking discovery and the sudden intrusion of the supernatural it suggests, the narrative breaks off. Having achieved this effect, Stevenson never returns to his narrator's perspective, to the frame of his frame-tale. Rather than belabor a rather obvious moral, he simply demonstrates the horror which the unfeeling consciousness of Fettes and MacFarlane has conjured up and allows that image to stand as a striking cautionary note.

Such startling effects might seem the norm for film horror, but they are hardly conducive to any moral complexity. While Lewton's The Body Snatcher is visually rich, it is not with such grotesque images. True, he retains a version of that shock ending provided by Stevenson's tale; however, Lewton brackets that apparition of Gray within an explanatory context and takes one of his characters beyond that simple horrific confrontation. Apparently he was much less concerned with the details of individual degradation than with the various ways in which we try to cloak or explain away those frightful aspects of our natures. He thus strove to create a sense of incongruity and employed numerous ironic juxtapositions to criticize that rationality with which we often unwittingly disguise or explain away the horrors around us. Although concerned with the complexities of human psychology, Lewton was able to fashion a decidedly photogenic horror simply by concentrating attention on the context of his characters' actions. The Body Snatcher suggests, in fact, that the grotesque lurks in our own day-to-day inhumanities and is transferred from one person to another—here from teacher to pupil as he transforms that relationship between MacFarlane and Fettes. His film consequently does more than merely shock; it is an atmospheric piece in which horrors seem almost quotidian and the meaning of being human is left open to question.

As Lewton well understood, horror is most effectively presented when a norm is established against which we may measure aberrance. With the opening specifically he conjures up that appropriate context, the texture of the commonplace, through a wealth of richly detailed images of daily life nowhere found in the original story. This visual detail drew some criticism for the film, several critics seeing in it but another example of Lewton's drift from the pure horror film to the flamboyant period piece. Joel Siegel, for one, finds the opening "too detailed to suit its function," and a further demonstration of Lewton's need for a director with a more discriminating eye, one who "could select and graphically order the screenplay's abundant materials," as Jacques Tourneur did on films like The Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie. While Robert Wise, the film's director, is an admitted "stickler for realism and honesty" ["Robert Wise," Directors at Work: Interviews with American Filmmakers, edited by Charles Neider, Irwin R. Blacker, Anne Kramer, 1970], he is hardly one given, as Manny Farber slightingly suggests, to a "delirious … scenic camera work" ["Val Lewton: Unorthodox Artistry at RKO," King of the B's edited by Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn, 1975]. In fact, his own theory is that careful attention to visual detail more subtly contributes to a film's effectiveness by better evoking proper characterizations. "Maybe some of the details could have been a little less thorough, might have been sloughed off a bit," he allows, "but I believe that the atmosphere that's created by some of those 'unregistering' bits of detail is very pervasive and gets to the actors; it influences them, therefore it influences the whole scene" [Directors at Work].

That philosophy marked Wise as a director largely in agreement with Lewton, and the success of their collaboration, I feel, is actually nowhere better attested than in those highly detailed opening scenes—all carefully laid out by Lewton in his screenplay. More than merely establishing a period setting, that opening montage—shots of a road leading to a castle, the cobbled streets of Edinburgh, and an avenue leading to an imposing estate—and the following detailed scene of a single street subtly establish an important metaphor for the film, that of the various roads of life, and firmly convey a solid sense of civilization. The camera lingers to depict a bookstore, bootery, public house, police kiosk, and strolling shoppers, all of which suggest that here "In Edinburgh in 1831," as the opening title carefully announces, a sedate and civilized society routinely goes about its daily business. That serene atmosphere is under-scored for ironic effect, though, both to establish a normalcy out of which unexpected horrors might later more strikingly emerge and to allow for a truly stark contrast to the film's closing scene—another road, but this one winding through a dark, craggy landscape as a storm rages. By that careful and parallel visual detailing, Lewton could thus move his characters from order to chaos, from all the appearances of civilization into a turbulent and threatening natural world. As we move with them, we seem to approach nearer some essential truth which his films continually explored. In Stevenson's tale that immersion into the unknown and horrific is basically a function of the narrative frame which plunges the reader into a time and place removed from the narrator's more "civilized" world, there to discover misdeeds and encounter that horrible apparition. For Lewton that remove would have been superfluous, for the civilized, mundane present he employs throughout the film renders the realm of horror precisely coterminous with ordinary society, thereby making that everyday world bear a greater burden than Stevenson was wont to impose, but one which more closely approximates Lewton's vision of reality. In fact, it is this attitude which closely links a "costume" picture like The Body Snatcher to his customary modern setting horror films. Here that civilized order carries the weight of those murderous actions which it has both unknowingly inspired and effectively disguised from full view.

Those opening scenes therefore prepare for a complexity which succeeding images will more fully develop. We enter a world bustling with commerce, good intentioned, and seemingly innocent, one initially evoking the typical Hollywood vision of a quaint Victorian England. At the same time, though, it is a world of frustration at the limits of human knowledge, of pain both treated and caused by the doctors of the day, and of murder for hire. The infamous Burke and Hare, who obtained specimens for the medical schools, have been caught and punished, but their spirit lingers, as the dead and living alike still prove salable commodities in the lucrative business of aiding the advance of medical science. The film thus generates a tension between that mundane surface and these darker depths, between those everyday images of civilization and that unsettling reality seldom seen or acknowledged.

Lewton fittingly dramatizes both that world's complexity and our ignorance of its nature through his central character, Donald Fettes. Stevenson's character—lacking even a Christian name—is essentially one-dimensional, but he is sharply defined; working in the dissection laboratory, he "understood his duty … to have three branches: to take what was brought, to pay the price, and to avert the eye from any evidence of crime." The manner in which Lewton introduces his protagonist speaks much more ambiguously, though it ultimately underscores his character's quite different naivete. We first see Fettes seated atop a fresh grave in the city cemetery, incongruously eating his lunch, heedless of those "ensigns of mortality" around him. His attitude is made clear—an important fact, since this image later finds its counterpoint in a similar view of the cabman Gray—by the appearance of an old lady visiting her son's grave. She tells Fettes of her fear that grave robbers will steal her son's body and of her disdain for the doctors who encourage that practice. Fettes is incredulous, defending the medical profession he hopes to join and assuring her that there is "not much danger here … I wouldn't think, not right here in the heart of Edinburgh." Rather than close the scene on this note of naive confidence, though, Lewton intrudes a questioning image. In an extreme long shot of the cemetery, metaphorically a more encompassing view than that enjoyed by Fettes, we see a mysterious carriage slowly pass the gate. It is a commonplace image, but due to the context and oblique camera angle, it seems unnaturally eerie and inspires little confidence in Fettes' statement. That feeling is soon substantiated as we learn that it is the coach of Gray, the "resurrectionist" who supplies bodies to the young man's teacher, the illustrious Dr. MacFarlane.

Gray's coach is itself a fine example of Lewton's cinematic approach, for it serves as a visual link between the introduction of Fettes and MacFarlane, and it suitably suggests the full complexity of this world. The next scene opens with that coach pulling up in front of MacFarlane's magnificent house. It brings a crippled girl, Georgina Marsh, to the doctor to request that he operate on her spinal injury. When he refuses, claiming to be "more dominie than doctor," the image of the helpless child provides an immediate emotional indictment of his cold, theoretical concerns in medicine. Even Gray initially comes across much more sympathetically than MacFarlane, as we see him bearing Georgina in his arms, helping her from his carriage and smiling as he lifts her up to pet his horse. Disarmed by that image and the seemingly genuine feelings displayed there, we almost inevitably find our next view of Gray quite jarring. That night, following Georgina's interview with MacFarlane, Gray appears as a silhouette—suggesting the darker side of his character not seen before—against the cemetery wall. There he unhesitatingly kills a small dog guarding its master's grave, which he then plunders, whistling while he "works"—and ironically it is the same grave Fettes had earlier attested to the security of. With that shift from day to night, from light to shadows, and from manor house to graveyard, The Body Snatcher effects a full transformation in our perspective, one which points up the complex and ambiguous nature of the world depicted here. Gray's carriage, as we see, by day transports the living, and by night the corpses he has stolen, while Gray himself is a figure disturbingly able to blend in with that world of common day, then prowl the cemeteries and streets at night, stealing or, if necessary, murdering to obtain those valuable specimens for the dissecting tables.

The paradoxical nature of his character is most clearly expressed in a later scene composed to recall Fettes' introduction. Gray murders MacFarlane's servant Joseph who has attempted to blackmail him, and as he sits astraddle the corpse, he strokes his pet cat and speaks lovingly to it. That incongruous composition evokes the scene of Fettes eating his lunch, oblivious to the fresh grave on which he sits, though here all notion of naivete is dispelled by the horrifying heedlessness which is implied. The discordant note thus sounded affords a key to the film's horror formula; it starts a fear that every neutral image or benevolent appearance might only mask some unseen, unimagined terror, that the clear, rational light of day might simply serve to disguise those dark, irrational elements of the human situation.

Though with more subtlety, this same approach is used to delineate MacFarlane's character. As the most eminent surgeon in Edinburgh, he presents an impeccable appearance. His house, over which the camera seems to linger pointlessly, effectively serves to visualize his true character. Before he is introduced, we see several interior shots of his home as Georgina and Mrs. Marsh enter. Angled shots and a dimly lit interior create an eerie effect, and the high angle view of mother and daughter from atop the staircase, making them seem small and insignificant, foreshadows the condescension and air of detachment which the doctor displays. The very layout of the house hints at MacFarlane's attitudes, for it suggests the doctor's tendency to compartmentalize his life. His lodgings occupy the second floor and part of the first, his office and examination rooms the remainder of the first, and his medical facility, including the dissection tables, lecture room, and storage facilities, is confined to the basement. This arrangement leads us to suspect that MacFarlane feels he can simply shut out the more unpleasant aspects of his profession with the closing of a door or figuratively hold himself above those troublesome concerns he has relegated to his basement school and delegated to his assistant Fettes and his henchman Gray.

That effort at compartmentalization, however, only rein-forces a sense of entrapment which pervades the film, as it suggests how little able MacFarlane is to ever break free of that life. Even while he sleeps upstairs, for instance, Gray steals into his basement and leaves Joseph's corpse as a suitably shocking surprise which the doctor must then hurriedly dispose of to avoid a scandal. He finds himself in that situation because, on the one hand, the pursuit of knowledge forces him to traffic with men like Gray, with ghouls and murderers who obtain the bodies he needs for study. And on the other, he is haunted by his own past, especially his associations with Gray when he was a young student like Fettes and forced into unscrupulous methods of gaining the specimens his teacher wanted. As his mistress Meg explains, there has always been "the shame of the old ways and the old life to hold him back" from a glorious career. The house and Gray's continual appearances visually affirm his entrapment in that round of sordid actions and explain his warning to Fettes that, given an initial accession to evil, one cannot easily turn back: "the more tilings are wrong, the more we must act as if everything is right." Gradually we come to see that the essential difference between the esteemed Dr. MacFarlane and the lowly Gray is not a deeper understanding or moral sensibility, but mainly a greater ability to make things seem "right," to present a more natural and civilized appearance to the world. And it is the haunting presence of Gray which increasingly promises to collapse that fragile facade of propriety. The development of this disparity between what we see and what really is represents one of Lewton's major additions to his source, and it injects a distinctly cinematic sense of tension between those deceptive appearances and their underlying reality.

The characters of MacFarlane and Gray especially are developed far beyond Stevenson's original conception in order to suggest this tension. In their contending alter egos, they seem much like the two skeletons which MacFarlane's students arrange in fighting postures in the laboratory. As Gray tells the doctor, "you and I have two bodies, … very different sorts of bodies, but they're closer than if we were in the same skin." Like MacFarlane, Gray has become caught in his situation, particularly by his past association with Burke and Hare, and finds himself preyed upon by the blackmailing servant Joseph, just as he has sought to manipulate MacFarlane. Having previously accepted a bribe to hide MacFarlane's complicity in their activities, Gray now resents the fact that the doctor's appearance of respect-ability seems so much at odds with his own lowly situation. Like a bothersome conscience, then, he bedevils MacFarlane, finding in that relationship some small consolation for his station: "I'm a small man, a humble man, and being poor, I've had to do so much that I did not want to do. But so long as the great Dr. MacFarlane jumps at my whistle, that long am I a man—and if I have not that, I have nothing. Then I am only a cabman and a grave-robber."

That disparity in appearance is visually underlined by Gray's lodgings which, located in the rear of a barn on a dead-end street, contrast markedly with MacFarlane's manor. In those dark, meager quarters, he seems similarly trapped and ever reminded of his situation. When Fettes comes to Gray's place with an urgent request for a specimen, that sense of hopelessness translates into a series of telling compositions. After Fettes leaves, for instance, we see Gray in long shot, a small figure framed first in the doorway of his apartment, then, as the camera tracks back, through a viewport on his door. Diminished and confined by those multiple frames, he seems almost pitiable, yet firmly locked into that round of gruesome activities he has made his life. Fittingly, as Gray harnesses his horse in preparation for his mission, we watch him through the bars on the side of the horse stall; it is a composition which affirms this self-imprisonment, even as it suggests an internal tension, a reluctant resignation to the way of life he has entered into.

Through this visualized tension, Lewton established a truly troubling atmosphere of moral ambiguity. He could thus depict a world in which the best intentions can lead to evil deeds, and those same, apparently quite frequent misdeeds are excused or covered up by a human penchant—perhaps even a need—for rationalization. In Stevenson's story Fettes and MacFarlane are simply fellow students brought to their crimes by the lure of easy money and pleasures. As in his previous film The Ghost Ship, Lewton here fashioned almost a father-son relationship between the two characters, thereby imparting to his narrative a greater moral imperative. MacFarlane, with his technical brilliance but lack of a truly humanistic sense, provides a sharp contrast to the idealistic young medical student Fettes. Both, though, display a quite similar failing. MacFarlane, singlemindedly concerned with the advance of medical knowledge, complains that "Ignorant men have damned the stream of medical progress with stupid and unjust laws. If that damn will not break, the men of medicine … have to find other courses." In his case, that means dealing with men like Gray and winking at their methods—including murder. Lest we judge MacFarlane too hastily, though, Lewton offers a parallel case in Fettes, demonstrating how easily and unwittingly our moral concerns can be put aside by expediency. In his zeal to help the crippled Georgina, Fettes presses MacFarlane to operate and demands that Gray quickly obtain a specimen for the doctor to study in preparation for the delicate surgery. His urgings, however, precipitate Gray's murder of a young street singer, whose body Fettes immediately recognizes. Her corpse visually drives home the moral complexity of the world Fettes inhabits; as he perceives, it is one in which murder can be accidentally—even profitably—used to promote life, where even the most humanitarian concerns can be twisted into rationales for murder and violation of the dead.

This sort of horror might seem to defy visualization, though, since it seems so integral a part of human psychology. It is what we might term an internal grotesquery that lurks beneath the proper appearance MacFarlane presents and is often displaced into the character of Gray, that alter ego he tries to suppress. Because of this tension, almost everything the doctor says ultimately imparts an ironic edge to that proper image, and he seems singularly given to an irritating rhetoric—to mouthing platitudes to justify his actions. Stevenson's original character lacks this dimension; his philosophy is distressingly simple and straightforwardly naturalistic: "there are two squads of us—the lions and the lambs. If you're a lamb, you'll come to lie upon these tables .. . if you're a lion, you'll live and drive a horse like me, … like all the world with any wit or courage." In the film, though, he is a figure obsessed with his sense of right, one who consistently feels compelled to explain himself to Fettes. On three occasions he reasons his assistant out of quitting the medical profession and into helping him with his work, pointing to "the stupidity of the people, the idiocy of their laws" as a suitable rationale for continuing in their own questionable activities. That ready ability to turn reason to such ends, however, is itself unsettling, as Lewton underscores through the image of the young street singer. In one of The Body Snatcher's most effective scenes, she disappears into a dark alley and is followed by Gray and his coach; after some moments her singing is abruptly cut off, suggesting that the cabman has done his work. When she turns up on one of his dissection tables, MacFarlane attempts to explain away her sudden death for Fettes by surmising that she may have been an epileptic who, in a fit, had fallen and hit her head. "All the pieces fit," he says, but that implausible explanation hardly convinces even the gullible young student. It simply has a jarring effect, as it undercuts MacFarlane's pretensions to a truly humanitarian concern and calls into question the rational basis for so much of his conduct.

Lewton fashions an even more pointed indictment of this ethic and MacFarlane's kind of medical practice in his depiction of the operation on Georgina Marsh. It is shown as a kind of performance in which the doctor demonstrates correct surgical procedure to his students who are admiringly gathered around, praising his technique. And after this surgery the child still cannot walk, despite the fact that, as he avows, "everything is in place." This result demonstrates to MacFarlane that there are yet things he "can't define, can't diagnose." With his philosophy thus undermined, MacFarlane goes to the public house and there drinks with Gray, the eminent doctor and the murdering cabman, for all their disparity in appearance, seeming mirror images of each other. It is ironically from Gray, that reflection of his darker side, that the doctor learns an important lesson, that "you can't build life the way you put blocks together." As that displaced ego amplifies, MacFarlane has "a lot of knowledge … but no understanding"; it is only "the dead ones" he knows.

That apparent failure to heal Georgina finally disillusions Fettes with his teacher, as he comes to realize that MacFarlane "taught me the mathematics of anatomy, but he couldn't teach me the poetry of medicine." With that disillusionment, the implicit father-son relationship of the two men also fails, but to good purpose. MacFarlane has been seeking more than just approval from his student all along. Childless and with a low-born mistress he is ashamed to acknowledge as his wife, the doctor seeks an extension of himself, someone who will continue his work and "see it as I see it." Lewton subtly summarizes this theme in the climactic scene which echoes another failed father-child relation already developed. Three years earlier, we know, Georgina Marsh was crippled and her father killed when his reckless driving caused their coach to overturn. MacFarlane and Fettes are now placed almost symbolically in a similar position. Having murdered Gray, MacFarlane promises that he will be "a new man and a better teacher" with that haunting presence gone, and thus convinces Fettes to join him in digging up a corpse to supply the school. Having done their "dirty work," the pair set out in a coach, the body propped between them as the doctor drives wildly through a suddenly stormy night. The metaphoric weight of the scene is fairly obvious. Fettes, at the mercy of a morally reckless "father," faces a fall just as did Georgina, though he risks a far less remediable injury, a crippling not of the body but of his sensibilities, if he follows the path laid out by MacFarlane. In a swift series of medium and close shots, we observe MacFarlane's self-control rapidly erode as the corpse repeatedly topples onto his shoulder. Finally he hallucinates that it is, in fact, the body of Gray, who has returned to haunt him. This vision, shared by MacFarlane and Fettes, climaxes the Stevenson story, but Lewton, in keeping with his parallel tale of the Marsh family, limits this guilty vision to the doctor who is killed as the coach lurches out of control and careens over a precipice, while his student is thrown clear and saved. Fettes then holds up a lamp—symbolic of his clearer vision—to that corpse which so frightened MacFarlane and affirms that it was simply the body of an old woman. The horror which effectively frightened the doctor to death is thus revealed as a product of his own disordered mind, a projected image of that internal horror which he long tried to repress or cloak under the guise of respect-ability and scientific purpose.

Lewton's final addition to Stevenson's story underlines this pattern of visual revelation, dispelling that disparity between appearances and reality with which his film has dealt. In extreme long shot we see Fettes leave the site of that accident and begin walking back to town, lighting his way with that lamp he used to inspect the bodies. As he does, a rather didactic title is superimposed: "It is through error that man tries and rises. It is through tragedy he learns. All the roads of learning begin in darkness and go out into the light." That bit of moralizing affirms that the cycle of grave robbings and murders in the name of science may be halted, that Fettes at least will not follow that path laid out by this strange "father." The final image, though, more effectively conveys this message, as it harkens back to those opening shots of the cobbled, well-lighted, and bustling city streets of Edinburgh, so mat these two scenes may effectively bracket and comment upon the story of MacFarlane and Fettes. While the body of the film has demonstrated the deceptive nature of those initial images of civilization, this final scene, emphasizing the dark dirt road which winds through a rough, craggy landscape, suggests some element of that truth which Fettes has discovered. In that vista he seems a small, very fragile figure, though one who, we perceive, now carries a deeper understanding of both his world and himself—a knowledge which, like the lamp he carries, hopefully will light his way along the hazardous paths he has yet to travel. This suggestive combination of light and dark, man and nature, direction and disorder makes for what is arguably the single most striking image in Lewton's films and an effective coda for The Body Snatcher. It denotes a frightening world, though one often made so by man himself, even as it demonstrates man's ability to hold up a lamp to that darkness in which he dwells and, at least for a time, to dispel it.

The Body Snatcher provides no easy resolution for the problems it has revealed, but it does offer a complex vision of the world and a reminder of our complicity in its make-up. In this respect alone it demonstrates a great advance over Stevenson's far from subtle story. In order to adapt that tale to the screen, Lewton clearly had to make a number of changes, foremost of which was the elimination of its frame narrative; but the consistent visual richness and finely textured sense of reality which result seem more than adequate compensation. It is, finally, that very visual texture which carries the crucial weight of this film. That sense of the commonplace, of the everydayness of all we witness, could easily overwhelm what we normally think of as the material of horror; while corpses abound in The Body Snatcher, they seldom appear out of place or truly shocking. Instead, they suggest those internalized, half-hidden horrors of the human situation which Lewton has sought to lay bare. What makes his film all the more effective, then, is this understated horror which seems to emerge quietly from that veneer of normalcy. As a result, Lewton has crafted a grotesquery more subtle, yet also more truly photogenic, than that found among the ghouls and monsters which so populated the genre during the 1940's. In focusing our attention on man and his actions in all their ambiguity of motivation and unintended effect, Lewton put on display those more unsettling horrors which come from within, manifestations of those ghosts with which we commonly haunt our own lives. That is Lewton's greatest accomplishment and best evidence of his true cinematic sense.