[In the following essay, Telotte discusses the ways in which the horror in Lewton's films comes from the undermining of individuals' perceptions of the world.]

The modern horror classic Night of the Living Dead concludes with the protagonist, Ben, survivor of a night of terror, suddenly shot down, as he is mistaken for one of the zombie flesh eaters inexplicably threatening society. Despite the sense of inevitability that clings to the scene, the conclusion is unsettling, particularly since his death occurs just as normalcy seems restored, and it is at the hands of his fellow man, trying to rid his world of those horrors. Ben is simply the victim of a certain "distanced" perspective, as he is glimpsed through the telescopic sight of a rifle; a product of the modern, technological mind, here employed rather irrationally to "kill" the already dead. I recount this scene because it effectively dramatizes a fundamental motif of the horror genre, occurring in both its modern realistic form and that older concern with monsters and an "otherness" that seems to reside threateningly outside of us, in the dark, ever ready to interrupt our normal world.

In this scene a man is confused with a monster, and in the process, that insecure self and the threatening other so clearly become one that our own sense of normalcy is radically disrupted, our view of the human realm disoriented. The means by which this identity is established—that distorted perspective, through a mechanism—insinuates a central thrust of the genre, for Night of the Living Dead, like the recent HaUoween, Hitchcock's Psycho, and especially the films produced by Val Lewton, is implicitly concerned with a transformation that occurs when we view the world and our fellow man in an improper way, as if through a telescope. That distanced perspective, such films suggest, interprets life itself as an otherness against which we must guard; that form of vision, consequently, becomes a sort of murderous glance, which ultimately transforms the viewer into just the sort of monstrous presence he so deeply fears. In light of the recent trend in horror films to manipulate audience perspective, allying it, as the opening of Halloween so effectively does, with that of a killer or maniac at large, this motif seems especially worthy of exploration.

Not only the horror film, but most forms of the fantastic actually operate within the structure of this perceptual encounter with the unknown. As Tzvetan Todorov explains [in The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, 1975], fantasy narratives "essentially concern the structuring of the relation between man and the world. We are, in Freudian terms, within the perception-consciousness system." Despite the great capital it makes from our immediate responses, then, the horror film through its disconcerting images functions in more than a merely gratuitous, anxiety-producing manner; rather, it challenges the way in which we consciously perceive—or, through repression mechanisms, fail to perceive—our world. This confrontation, as R. H. W. Dillard argues [in "The Pageantry of Death," Focus on the Horror Film, edited by Roy Huss and T. J. Ross, 1972], can work "instructively," like a medieval morality play, teaching us to accept "the natural order of things and … to cope with and even prevail over the evil of life." Or, as Robin Wood contends [in "The Return of the Repressed," Film Comment, July-August 1978], such films may serve to visualize our dreams, "our collective nightmares," whose imaging on the screen empowers us to cope with subconscious fears "in more radical ways than our consciousness can countenance." At the same time, of course, this perceptual emphasis invests the genre almost automatically with a metacinematic character as well, by clearly reminding us that what we see is essentially a way of seeing, a perception impressed upon us by the manipulative imagination of a narrator or film-maker, seeking to bring our conscious and unconscious visions and fears together on the screen, as if in a kind of psychological therapy.

No single body of horror films demonstrates a greater mindfulness of this perceptual encounter than that produced by Val Lewton for RKO in the 1940s. In place of what Lewton described as those "masklike faces hardly human, with gnashing teeth and hair standing on end" [quoted in Joseph McBride, "Val Lewton, Director's Producer," Action, January-February 1976], the stock-in-trade of his competition at Universal, he demonstrated in films like Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and Isle of the Dead the great effectiveness of controlling perception. As Curtis Harrington pointed out, "Lewton had observed that the power of the camera as an instrument to generate suspense in an audience lies not in its power to reveal but its power to suggest; that what takes place just off screen in the audience's imagination, the terror of waiting for the final resolution, not the seeing of it, is the most powerful dramatic stimulus toward tension and fright" ["Ghoulies and Ghosties," Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 7, 1952-53]. This notion of perceptual control suggests that what we naturally perceive is essentially not dangerous, or at least not truly frightening; rather, it is the withholding of vision or its manipulation that instills dread by filling our imaginations with that that is not-life, only darkness itself, the shadows and boundaries that mark off for both the film characters and movie audience the normal world of light and life. At the same time, it implies that human beings' greatest terrors reside not necessarily within their world, contiguous with their normal environment, but possibly within the mind, which by turns represses them or projects them into that surrounding negative space of darkness and boundary, and which, prodded by its rational demand to know all, to understand and explicate the world around, too readily fills all shadows with visions of its own devising, mirror images, in fact, of that voracious instinct to grasp all things—save the self. That play of light and dark, the seen and the unseen, then, is more than simply atmospheric in Lewton's shadow-filled, lowkey lit films, and by extension, more than merely a conventional trapping of horror. From those dark realms—the city streets of Cat People and The Leopard Man, the cane fields in Zombie, the back alleys of Edinburgh in The Body Snatcher—monsters truly are born; but they take shape from our own inability to dispel the darkness—physical and intellectual—within which we dwell, as Lewton reveals how that very incapacity can, after a fashion, make Frankensteins of us all, creating our own twisted versions of life, as we attempt to fill up the surrounding void with images of our compulsions, "monsters from the id," as the film Forbidden Planet well termed them.

All of Lewton's horror films seek to sidestep our usual concern with monsters or external threats, while at the same time they clearly establish the sort of atmosphere that seems to breed and promise such menacing shapes, prompting us to look for killer cats or zombies in the shadows. In point of fact, though, their central concern is the sort of perspective we bring to that world, a perspective that, if unintentionally, lends a shaping hand to an environment that is neither malevolent nor benevolent, simply ambiguous, unknowable, yet the home of creatures who require knowledge. The greatest threats in the Lewton films, consequently, prove to be those authoritarian and supremely rationalistic figures, such as Dr. Galbraith of The Leopard Man and Dr. MacFarlane of The Body Snatcher, who, despite their great learning, ultimately turn out to be the chief horrors of their landscapes. Isle of the Dead probably most fully develops this horror formula, Lewton's legacy to the genre, for it establishes as a central motif that compulsion to watch over and hence control the human realm; from this impulse there naturally follow tragic consequences, including the literal transformation of man into murderous monster.

The very title of The Leopard Man, like the earlier Cat People, underscores this problem of transformation at the core of the film, although it also automatically misleads audiences accustomed to more conventional horror films. The Leopard Man details a series of similar grisly murders, attributable to two quite different causes: one, an escaped leopard who kills out of fear and hunger, as a product of his natural instincts; the other, one of those "men with kinks in their brains," as he is described, who murders out of some inexplicable mental aberration. The latter is so clever, however, so able to divorce his conscious and unconscious selves, that he nearly succeeds in placing the blame for his own irrational, animalistic actions on that escaped cat. Through this paralleling, then, The Leopard Man points up the presence of a monstrous, bestial element in man that often goes cloaked or unacknowledged, but that can easily surface to render one something less than human and a threat to others.

The human transformation this film recounts begins innocently enough, although in a fashion that underscores the improper mode of vision accompanying, even precipitating the problem. The leopard is originally unleashed on society when a publicity stunt backfires. In order to create an effective spectacle, the nightclub entertainer, Kiki Walker, rents a leopard to help her make an entrance on opening night; in fact, she even plans to wear a particular black dress that she feels will make her look "just like" that dangerous cat. This implicit recognition of a kinship between the human and animal, of a certain bestial force that might be externalized and rendered symbolically, opens onto a greater complexity when Kiki finds she is unable to control the leopard because of its great strength and the fact that, as the local museum curator explains, such animals "are unpredictable; they're like frustrated human beings." Our initial introduction to Kiki, as we see her staring into a mirror, concerned with the image she will present to her audience, suggests that she is concerned largely with appearances and thus gives little thought to the potential danger she might unleash on others. It is that selfish perspective, however, that seems prevalent here and that precipitates that almost willful transformation wherein Kiki makes herself look like the leopard; the subsequent escape of that dangerous beast and the string of murders that follows symbolically denote the threat implicit in a mode of vision that detaches the self from all others.

Most fittingly, it is the person who seems most detached from these events, Dr. Galbraith, curator of the local museum and, ironically, the sheriff's expert consultant on the "cat murders," who turns out to be the killer. Perhaps not even fully conscious that he is speaking of himself, Galbraith can clinically dissect the possible murderer, explaining that he would "be a hard man to find … especially if he were clever. He'd go about his ordinary business calmly, except when the fit to kill was on him." In his case, the reasons for that murderous instinct go largely unexplained, are simply deferred by Galbraith's own comment on how little we know "about the forces that move us, and move the world around us." That a scientist could so easily fall prey to these violent, animal instincts, undergo such a complete transformation, and yet so effectively hide those irruptions of the unconscious, though, seems an unsettling enough comment on our normal rational pretensions. Rather than simply leave us with this iconic commentary on the darker possibilities of the self, the film depicts a similar transformation in the character of Raoul Belmonte, boyfriend of one of the murder victims. As Galbraith finally confesses to the murders, we watch Raoul's reaction, and in close-up see his eyes as they take on a frightening gleam, similar to that previously noted in close-up shots of the leopard. His sudden murder of Galbraith does, of course, represent a kind of justice, but it ultimately affords a discomfiting glimpse indeed of how easily those transformations can occur and that sense of humanity become lost.

If the metamorphosis lying at the core of The Body Snatcher is less radical than that of The Leopard Man, it is for that reason probably more disconcerting. This adaptation of a Robert Louis Stevenson story describes the problems of the medical profession in nineteenth-century Scotland, focusing especially on the many obstacles to the advance of medical knowledge in that era. The eminent Dr. MacFarlane, a surgeon and teacher of distinction, explains for his student assistant, Donald Fettes, how "ignorant men have dammed the stream of medical progress with stupid and unjust laws. If that dam will not break, the men of medicine will have to find other courses. As for me, I'll let no man stop me when I know I'm right." That rhetoric reveals much about the speaker, particularly MacFarlane's headstrong and self-righteous attitude, which allows him to place himself above the law in all questions of scientific research and application. While he voices a plea for the liberal attitude necessary for the advance of human knowledge, then, he also points up the underlying reason for such repressive laws, as a check to the possible dangers that may surface from that Faustian desire for knowledge that seems to haunt all men. MacFarlane's subsequent reminder to Fettes, that "if you're a real man and want to be a good doctor, you'll see it as I see it," suggests the dangerously autocratic nature of that point of view he maintains, as well as the will to transformation that subtly moves it, seeking to work its way upon others-—as we saw after a fashion in the conclusion of The Leopard Man.

MacFarlane's plea for more liberal laws and a more tolerant perspective on the quest for knowledge springs from his difficulties in obtaining bodies for dissection and instruction in his medical school. To his mind, a human corpse is nothing more than a potential object of study, and a municipal council that disputes that view and regulates access to the dead he sees as demonstrating "the stupidity of the people, the idiocy of their laws." Having worked this initial transformation of the human body in his own thinking, then, he need take only a short step to transgress those "stupid" laws and contract with Mr. Gray, an old acquaintance, to rob graves and attain cadavers by any means possible—and with no questions asked. When a small girl, Georgina Marsh, needs spinal surgery so that she might walk, MacFarlane delegates to Fettes the task of obtaining a similar specimen so that he might perfect his technique before performing the delicate operation; and his student goes to Gray, as he normally does, to place an order. With no appropriate corpses available, Gray simply murders a young street singer to accommodate his customers. It is a poor bargain indeed, that one girl must die so another might walk—murder thus facilitating medical research—and it precisely points up the danger in MacFarlane's abdication from a true concern for others in his work. At the same time, of course, this episode also hints at the sort of gradual and almost imperceptible transformation the teacher has already begun to work in the consciousness of his pupil, eroding his humanistic ideals and prompting him to wink at the actions of his confederates; as Fettes later notes, MacFarlane started him on "a road that led to knowledge, not to healing." It is a knowledge that, given free reign, can eventually transform an individual, as we see when MacFarlane himself becomes a murderer, killing Gray when that henchman tries to blackmail him, and then excusing his act by noting that with him out of the way, "I'll be a new man and a better teacher." That "new man," however, is no better than a ghoul, as he presses Fettes to assist him in stealing bodies from the graveyard; "We can do our own dirty work," he informs his student with some satisfaction.

The flawed perspective that underlies this transformation is particularly underscored in the film's final scene, in which MacFarlane and Fettes return from exhuming the body of an old woman. As they ride off with their prize, the corpse repeatedly topples onto the doctor's shoulder, and he gradually begins hallucinating that the body is actually that of Gray, returned to haunt him. Confronted by this imagined sign of his crimes, a long-repressed guilt suddenly unleashed on his consciousness, MacFarlane seems to go mad and drives his carriage over a precipice. Fettes, thrown clear of the careening coach, then inspects the wreck, holding up a lamp (symbolic of his own clearer vision) to the corpse that had so frightened his tutor, and affirms that it was indeed simply the body of an old woman. The guilty vision that effectively frightened MacFarlane to death, we understand, was an image of his own distorted perspective, a projection of that internal horror he had long denied and repressed under a guise of respectability and scientific purpose.

With Isle of the Dead, the faulty perspective precipitating such human transformations becomes the key motif, literally framing the tale with its various formulations. It first takes shape in the character of General Pherides, known as "the watchdog" of Greece and the "guardian of his country." As the film opens, the general summarily court-martials a subordinate, ordering him to take his own life, despite the fact that he is an old friend. Immediately established is the general's desire to maintain order in his army by closely overseeing every action. The other emblem of that dangerous perspective is the recurring image of Cerberus, literally the watchdog of the ancient gods, guarding the gates of Hades, which here takes the form of a statue that greets all who land on the island where the story's main action occurs. A similarity between these two figures is immediately established when the war correspondent, Oliver Davis, notes for the general, "There's another watchdog for you." Pherides disavows the likeness, though, and points up his own belief in the correctness of his perspective, reminding Oliver that Cerberus "only guards the dead; I have to worry about the living." Like the general, however, the figure of Cerberus seems ever present, watching over the action of the film, serving as a key transitional device, and providing the narrative's closing image. What those recurring shots of that mythic watchdog suggest is just how closely death lingers in this world, and how hellish human beings can make their environment by misfocusing their perspective on it and fellow human beings.

Vision for the general, we understand, is associated with warding off danger and preserving the laws of his home-land. What he sees around him is a world of chaos, of constant threats he must notice as soon as they take shape in order to counter them. One form this attitude takes is his rigid enforcement of the law, even to the point of collecting taxes from the native villagers with field artillery; he could fire on his own people, he admits, because the law dictated it, and anyone "who is against the law of Greece is not a Greek." While Pherides earnestly keeps watch, then, it is through a transforming filter, the conceptualizations afforded him by a rigid and inhuman system of laws that so clouds his true perceptions that he can deny the very nationality of his countrymen.

The advent of a truly invisible threat, the plague, as a consequence of the general's latest military victory serves both to underscore this attitude and to illustrate effectively its danger. In fact, with the plague comes a literal transformation in the general's character, from protector to destroyer, which serves to comment upon the perspective he brings to this world. Although of peasant origins, Pherides sees himself as a representative of a new order, a Greece that has abandoned the ancients and their superstitious ways; "These are new days for Greece. We don't believe the old, foolish tales anymore," he boasts. In place of those myths he describes as "nonsense" the general pays homage to a rational perspective, putting his faith totally "in what I can feel, and see, and know about." When the plague strikes, therefore, he turns to modern science, embodied in his subordinate, Dr. Drossos, to halt its spread and keep it from devastating his army. All that Drossos can counsel, however, is sanitary precautions and patience while the disease runs its course. Since a favorable wind might rid them of the fleas that spread the plague, the doctor does raise a pennant, in part to keep track of the wind's shifting direction, but more to distract the vision of those under his quarantine; as he readily admits, it is "better to watch the wind and hope that it changes than to watch each other and have no hope at all." What Drossos thereby admits is the complexity and even futility of that watching process, an activity that simply transforms human beings into potential victims of the devastating and uncontrollable forces they unwittingly evoke.

When Drossos's precautions fail to stop the plague's progress—the disease even taking his life—Pherides gradually returns to the long-repressed fears and beliefs of his folk heritage. From that collective unconscious, Madame Kyra, the old housekeeper, dredges up a superstitious explanation for the disease: the notion that a vorvolaka, or evil spirit inhabiting a human form, has brought about this affliction. Since, as he notes, "every-thing—every human remedy" has failed, Pherides embraces this explanation and turns his attention to the servant girl, Thea, who, in the midst of the plague, inexplicably remains healthy, beautiful, and, as one character notes, "full of life." Pherides and Kyra, therefore, mount a constant watch over Thea, even at night while she sleeps, in hope of catching her in some evil act; he justifies the transformation he has worked on her character by asking her if "a vorvolaka in human form can remember the evil that she did at night," and he vows that "until I know, I must watch you." That constant surveillance and the suspicion it denotes deeply affect Thea, undermining her view of herself, even bringing her to question whether she has, in fact, become possessed by such an evil influence. Consequently, the general's watching, initially prodded by his desire to save his fellow human beings, becomes less a protective activity than an injurious one, as he isolates Thea from the others, especially Oliver who is in love with her, and forces her into a desperate self-doubt, as she too lives in fear of those forces lingering beneath her consciousness, threatening even those she loves. Because of the perspective the general brings to his world, then, a human being has arrived at such a state that the beautiful can be thought a disguise for evil, love can be denied, and the human spirit can be suspected of the most sinister motivations.

What the narrative repeatedly underscores is just how much remains invisible, though, and thus how unavailing that watchfulness must ultimately prove to be. When the British Consul, St. Aubyn, dies, his wife asks for some proof, since, she asserts, "the breath can stop; the heart can stop. It still doesn't mean death." Visible signs, she knows from experience, can be most deceptive, for there is a history of catalepsy in her family, of trance-like states that give the illusion of death; consequently, she has always feared being buried alive. When she is apparently stricken with the plague, though, that sanitary im-pulse precipitates a hurried burial, and she is entombed alive, a symbolic reminder of the dangers of our limited perspective and of that mode of vision the general has brought to bear on those around him—a vision that readily sees death even in life, pestilence in the natural order, and danger in the harmless. The darkness in which all of the subsequent action takes place serves only to emphasize the difficulty of those visual judgments Pherides so precipitately makes, while allowing for the note of irony Lewton injects by repeatedly depicting Thea carrying a lamp or candle to dispel that darkness in which those around her dwell, enabling them to see circumstances all the more clearly.

In his discussion of this plague motif in literature, René Girard points out its archetypal characteristic and suggests that we should see in its narrative recurrences "a disguise for an even more terrible threat that no science has ever been able to conquer" ["The Plague in Literature and Myth," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 15, 1974]. The shape of that threat appears most clearly here in the final transformation Pherides undergoes when he is himself stricken by that disease he has sought to ward off. Taunted by Madame Kyra that "you stayed your hand and now the plague punishes you," he decides to murder Thea, believing that he will thereby vanquish the vorvolaka she harbors within and appease the anger of the ancient gods. In effect, he becomes with this decision precisely the sort of evil and threatening spirit he seeks to remove from this human realm. Trans-formed into a raving maniac, he stalks Thea, only to be stopped at the last moment by the intervention of Mrs. St. Aubyn, who has escaped from her premature entombment where she has apparently undergone a similar transformation. In her own madness, then, she kills both Pherides and Kyra, visits their fears upon them, before throwing herself off a cliff. Oliver earlier warned the general of a danger far greater than the plague: "There is something here more dangerous than septicemic plague … and that's your own crazy thoughts." His point is simply that human beings often become their own worst enemy, har-boring within the potential for their own destruction, their own monstrous shape or madness, usually repressed or lost in the unconscious, but waiting to be evoked. Fittingly, the particular form of the plague that strikes and elicits that delirious state in which the general can attempt murder is an internal disease with no visible marks, other than, as the doctor notes, a change of behavior in its final stages. Septicemic plague, it seems, eats away at the vitals, particularly the bloodstream, and etymologically suggests a rotting from within. In short, it seems carefully selected to denote the sort of internal, cancer-like danger to which we are prone, an internal violence that defies watchfulness and points up our own complicity in those threats that often seem to erupt in our world.

Lewton ends Isle of the Dead with a most telling juxta-position, one that underscores the connection between that failure of vision and the terrible events that accompany it. A close-up of the dead Pherides's face, his eyes open and staring, still keeping their frightful vigil, even in death, dissolves to a long shot of Oliver and Thea leaving the island, taking their love out of this land of the dead so that it might prosper. Their departure, however, is haunted by these events, as a close-up of the statue of Cerberus is superimposed, the three snarling heads of that monstrous watchdog recalling the dangers of a vision whose only purpose is to control life.

That final image well sums up this genre's concerns with both internal and external threats, with human anxieties and those monstrous presences that often provide the objective correlatives for our vague and unformulated fears. One of Lewton's great achievements, in fact, was that he consistently managed to dramatize how interwoven these concerns ultimately are, how fully the unconscious must influence the conscious world. Like the more conventional examples of the genre, his films explore that very common fear we have of otherness, but at the same time they reveal how it may prompt us to distance ourselves from other people and to abdicate participation in that human realm we necessarily inhabit. Nietzsche's warning in Beyond Good and Evil that "whoever battles with monsters had better see that it does not turn him into a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you" hints at just this sort of transformation to which we are prone when we lose an essential human perspective, the ability to look within as well as without. An improper mode of vision, such as the sort that enables us to abdicate our human responsibility or see in our fellow human beings that otherness we almost instinctively fear, in the end engenders that very monstrousness from which we initially and naturally recoil.

What the horror film in its various formulations has ide-ally sought to do is to prod us into a more comprehensive perspective, to engender, as it were, a morality of seeing. Recent work in the genre, it has been suggested, has essentially abdicated that moral function by forcing an identification between the audience and some aberrance, through a subjective camera placing a "killer's center of consciousness in the audience" [Roger Ebert, "Why Movie Audiences Aren't Safe Any More," American Film, March 1981]. Even if poorly controlled and mis-guided, though, that effect derives from and points back to a most important impulse in the horror genre. A major legacy of the Lewton films, more recently found in the work of Hitchcock, Brian DePalma, and John Carpenter especially, is to call attention to that frame of reference to which we normally and unconsciously cling, a frame-work that allows us to see marked distinctions between the self and a threatening otherness, but that may also blind us to a similar duality within the self. Our experience of the horror film clearly prompts us to perceive the world differently when we emerge from the theater, to find a new potential—both a frightening and an exhilarating one—in that world we normally inhabit. This is one transformation we sorely need, though, for the ways in which we see the world and the self are mutually depen-dent. Those formulas that help to foster that vision, consequently, serve a vital function, promising to make us more human, if paradoxically by forcing us to recognize a monstrous potential within.