[Everson was an eminent film historian, collector, and educator. In addition to the work excerpted here, his other scrupulously researched and enthusiastically written books include A Pictorial History of the Western Film (1969), The Detective in Film (1972), and American Silent Film (1978). In the following excerpt, he discusses The Body Snatcher, Cat People, Night of the Demon (which, though directed by Jacques Tourneur—arguably Lewton's most distinguished collaborator—was neither produced nor written by Lewton), and The Curse of the Cat People.]

Val Lewton produced nine horror films for RKO Radio, all of them aiming at horror by suggestion, rather than statement, and employing intelligent writers (DeWitt Bodeen in particular) and new, young directors, still fresh and full of enthusiasm. Cat People was the first, and probably the best, even though it has been so acclaimed in later years that those coming upon it now for the first time must inevitably be disappointed. One of the perennial problems of "B" pictures is that critics see so few of them; when they do stumble across a good one, they lose all sense of proportion, and extol the film for virtues and intentions which need the sense of surprise and discovery for those virtues to remain intact. A Cat People elevated to the level of The Picture of Dorian Gray no longer retains the same sense of initiative; but to encounter a Cat People on the budgetary and commercial level of a Mad Ghoul is stimulating and rewarding.

The great material of Cat People is all concentrated in its second half, and the literate but very slow first half makes one wonder (at first) what all the shouting was about. The Lewtons were always interesting, though their standards were somewhat uneven. The Leopard Man had a terrifying opening and brilliant individual moments, but a weak climax and sets too often revealed the paucity of budget. Despite its well conveyed atmosphere of claustrophobic evil, The Seventh Victim didn't quite come off, and The Ghost Ship seemed to be striving too hard to turn a psychological melodrama into a horror film, just because it was a Lewton production. The Curse of the Cat People … and the others—Tourneur's Walked with a Zombie and Robson's Isle of the Dead and Bedlam (defeated by its own pretentions and enlarged budget, but still offering some beautifully bizarre moments and some fine low-key photography)—are all much better known.

Sadly, theatrical exhibition of these films in recent years has been virtually non-existent, and a whole generation of moviegoers has grown up knowing them only from television—which, in many cases, is not knowing them as they were at all. Apart from the damage done to such carefully constructed films by breaking them up for commercials, they have been seriously hurt by cutting. The one sequence that is directly responsible for Cat People's being considered a classic—the beautiful and chilling episode in the swimming pool—is almost invariably cut from TV prints, not only because it is a dark sequence that does not register well on television, but also because, while it is a key sequence, it is a little unit in itself. It can be cut in toto without leaving a jagged edge. Since other (though less dynamic) sequences make the same plot point, continuity is not impaired—even though the overall power of the film is dealt a death blow.

The Body Snatcher, however, is quite certainly the equal of Cat People, and possibly its superior, but strangely enough, it is one of the least respected. Even now it is regarded mainly as an example of early Robert Wise, not as a significant film on its own. In England, though audiences at the time were not aware of it, it was carefully trimmed of some of its grimmer scenes. It was still a good film, since it depended more on dialogue and characterization than on visuals, yet it received a very luke-warm reception from the critics, with such phrases as "fair" and "misfire thriller" cropping up with regularity. Perhaps one of its problems was that it sounded like a horror film. For box office reasons, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi were given the best billing, another misleading suggestion that it was "blood and guts" of the old school, and regardless of the fact that it was Henry Daniell who really had the lead, with Karloff in the top supporting role.

Despite the fact that its very theme indicates more "physical" horror than many of the other more psychologically motivated Lewton films, The Body Snatcher is one of the most literate and restrained of all horror films. There are the odd shock effects, to be sure (and so well edited that they remain effective and achieve their attention-grabbing ends even on repeat viewings), and a climax of pure nightmare quality, but the film's finest achievement is the image of latent malevolence created by Karloff as the cabman/grave-robber, acquiring bodies (initially from graves, later more directly) for medical school usage. As a sort of out-side-the-law Uriah Heep, kind to children and his horse, yet persecuting a basically decent man above his own station purely for the sense of power and perverted self respect it gives him, Karloff is superb. How sadly he was wasted in routine horror roles. His dialogue here is beautifully written to begin with, and equally well delivered. That excellent actor Henry Daniell is somewhat overshadowed by Karloff, yet his performance, too, is first-rate, and it is good to see him in a leading role for once.

The whole film reflects all the care, photographic excellence and production ingenuity (not least, in the utilization of sets from bigger pictures) that distinguished the best of the Lewtons. Just how good a film The Body Snatcher really was is emphasized by a comparison with one of the Hammer blood baths from the early 60s—The Flesh and the Fiends—likewise dealing with the days (and profession) of Burke and Hare, but with far less taste and subtlety.

For all of its restraint, The Body Snatcher still came up with one of the grimmest climaxes of any horror film. Having stolen the body of a woman from a fresh grave, Dr. MacFarlane (Henry Daniell) is driven to madness by his conscience. Careening along in his coach at the height of a thunderstorm, he becomes convinced that the corpse has changed into that of Gray, the cabman (Karloff), whom he had killed earlier. As he stops to examine the body and make sure, a lightning flash (and a sudden tracking shot into a closeup) reveals the chalky-white face of Karloff. In a panic, Danieli whips up the horses, and the emaciated corpse of Karloff, still half encased in its shroud, slumps over him in an unholy embrace, the sound track repeating an earlier threat of Karloff's ("You'll never get rid of me!") as the coach plummets off a cliff. Subsequent examination of the two bodies reveals that the stolen corpse was, of course, still that of the woman. Yet that one classic image of terror that has invaded all our nightmares at one time or another, to be in the embrace of a dead person, is such an overpowering one that the "rational" explanation of hallucination doesn't altogether settle all doubts.

Apart from being a good horror film, The Body Snatcher is a disturbing one, since the "villains" are both fascinating and even likeable, and the villainy itself is perpetrated for a worthwhile end. The ambiguous, semi-mystical literary quote, with which Lewton liked to end his films, provides a last minute note of upbeat optimism, but certainly doesn't dispel the effectiveness of what has gone before.

Jacques Tourneur, son of Maurice Tourneur—perhaps the greatest pictorialist director of the silent screen—started as an editor, and established himself as a director of note with Cat People and IWalked with a Zombie, the first two of the nine intelligent horror films that Val Lewton produced for RKO Radio in the early 40s. Other subsequent directors included Mark Robson (who edited Cat People) and Robert Wise (an editor on Citizen Kane).

Tourneur's importance to the Lewton unit has often been underrated by critics, although his skill was quickly recognized by Hollywood and he was soon promoted to commercially more important properties. His initial, bigger films reflected some of the pictorial eloquence of his father, and the quality of understatement that was a characteristic of the Lewton films. His big 1946 Western, Canyon Passage, contained only short, spasmodic moments of violence and action, and much of its savagery was merely suggested, while a good deal of traditional action took place off-screen. When, years later, Val Lewton was to produce a Western himself (Apache Drums for Universal), it was fairly obvious that he had seen, remembered and emulated Tourneur's stylized approach. By the early 1950s however, Tourneur, still commercially reliable, seemed somewhat passé in terms of an original and recognizable directorial style. Then, along came The Night of the Demon, which he made in England, to show that in the intervening sixteen years he had lost none of his old cunning.

Considered together, the two films provide an interesting contrast in styles. Both films are related in that they spin tales of the supernatural, and both have a methodical skeptic as the hero. When he is convinced—and scared—despite all the logic he can muster, so is the audience. The utilization of the whole arsenal of film grammar is basically the same in both films: some of the most telling effects are achieved by shock cuts of sound, or picture, or both; or by the delaying or accelerating of anticipated scenes, so that the audience is caught off guard.

But in terms of overall design, the two films are quite different. Cat People, with its totally manufactured variation on the Werewolf theme, eschews all of the standard effects of fog, creaking doors, trick photography, and monstrous changeovers. Working on Lang's old premise that nothing that the camera can show can possibly be as horrible as what the mind can imagine, it shows nothing—and suggests all. (Only once is an actual leopard shown in a supernatural context; Lewton fought against it, but was overruled. However, it does little damage, as the scene can still be interpreted as a subjective imagining on the part of the trapped hero and heroine.) The backgrounds are modern, normal, and unspectacular, unglossy studio reconstructions of New York's offices, museums, Central Park Zoo, and environs. The people are ordinary, even dull and pompous. While the moments of horror are ambiguous and fragmented, the film leaves one with the deliberately uneasy feeling that the only explanation must be an acceptance of the supernatural. The episode in which the heroine, swimming in a darkened hotel swimming pool, is menaced by the unseen presence of the Cat Woman—or by a real leopard—is not only a classic episode of economical screen terror, it works on a second level too, since its symbolic imagery is essentially Freudian. With its basically realistic setting, and its logical use of light, shadow, and distorted sound, it is a perfect example of the Fritz Lang modus operandi, of turning the everyday into a black, nightmare world of unseen menace.

The Night of the Demon, likewise intelligently scripted, goes to the other extreme of showing its Monster. Luckily, its Demon is such a lulu that it lives up to the fear-some descriptions of it (something that most movie Monsters do not). Tourneur, in later interviews, claims that it was never his intention to show the Demon, that he had wanted to follow the pattern of his Lewton films and merely suggest it, and that its graphic physical depiction was included at the insistence of the producer, who wanted real meat in his film. Tourneur made no such protests at the time of release, however, and one wonders whether these latter-day protestations are entirely genuine. Certainly the construction of the film, and the scenes in which the Demon's presence is undeniably felt, even when not visible, leave no doubt at all as to the creature's existence. The whole point of the film, in fact, is not that horrors can be created within the mind, but that some horrors are so unthinkable that the mind must deny them in order to retain its sanity. The final line of the film—the time-honored, "There are some things it is better not to know!"—comes after a materialization of the Demon, which is ambiguous only to those who want it to be ambiguous.

Tourneur, like Lang, takes his thrillers seriously. There is some humor in Night of the Demon in the person of the villain's slightly dotty mother, dabbling in the charades of seances, while her son (another screen incarnation of Aleister Crowley, and extremely well played by one-time rugged, outdoor hero Niall MacGinnis) is the evil central force in a malestrom of witchcraft, conjuring up demons, giant cats, and sudden storms, to demonstrate his powers. But she is there primarily to illustrate the impotency of normalcy against such total evil, just as Hitchcock's master criminals in Saboteur and The 39 Steps were surrounded by loving wives and families. There is a kind of mordant humor in Cat People, too, but it is mainly in the writing of Bodeen. The psychiatrist who thinks to effect a cure by simply telling his patient to go home and lead a normal life is a little hard to take seriously! And the vivacious Negro waitress, who seems to serve her customers according to their personalities—Bavarian Cream for one, and, somewhat contemptuously, "The apple pie for you" to the cloddish hero—underlines in a very lighthearted way that everyone is, in a sense, a captive of his own destiny, type-cast by life. But there is no constant undercurrent of humor, as there always is with Hitchcock. He, for example, would doubtless have extracted some visual humor from the disturbing scene in which the Cat Woman enters a pet store, only to have the normally docile cats and birds screech in terror until the whole store is in an uproar. Tourneur means you to believe in and take seriously all that he is showing you. When he borrows, significantly it is more from Lang than from Hitchcock.

Much of Night of the Demon takes place at night, and two sequences in a deserted forest are very reminiscent of the climactic chase from Lang's The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. Even drab old Clapham Junction Station—one of the most unpromising of locations—seems almost to take on the fatalistic characteristics of one of Lang's unreal way-stations between life and death. Tourneur's inability to spoof (or more likely, his lack of interest in so doing) was shown by his much later Karloff-Rathbone-Lorre horror satire Comedy of Terrors, which, in Tourneur's hands, emerged as leaden burlesque.

Night of the Demon, which borrowed many touches and individual moments of cutting from the earlier Cat People, increased and sustained its pattern of chase and suspense. It is undoubtedly a better (and more genuinely frightening) film than Cat People, and, more importantly, it is the last genuine horror "classic" that we have had. In the 16 years that have elapsed since it was made, one or two films have come close to it—most particularly, Burn Witch Burn (its similarity stressed by its British release title, The Night of the Eagle)—but none have quite equaled, let alone surpassed it. In time, it may well prove to be not only the apex, but the climax to the genre of "thinking" horror films introduced by Val Lewton over a decade earlier.

The Curse of the Cat People was handicapped by the double misfortune of a title that tried to pass off a fairy story as a horror yarn, and by being touted as a sequel to the original Cat People. As such, it could hardly fail to disappoint the traditional horror fanciers, nor could it reach those who would most appreciate it, and its distribution was slight. Apart from reemploying some of the same characters, it is really only the vaguest kind of sequel to the original. Indeed, to explain how a malevolent supernatural Werecat could become, after death, a kindly and protective spirit friend to the child of her former husband, the original writer (Bodeen) had to insert several explanatory lines of dialogue which falsified and distorted the events of the original. In only one sense was there real continuity: the father (Kent Smith in both films), originally an unimaginative dullard, proved to be even less successful as a father than he had been as a husband. His attitude throughout is one of stupid condescension, and even at the film's fadeout, he is still lying to his much more imaginative daughter.

The menace in The Curse of the Cat People (which contains neither curses nor Cat People) is nebulous and deliberately vague. Nothing more horrifying occurs than the hair-raising telling of the "Headless Horseman" legend to a frightened child by a half insane, old actress—and the disturbed child's later belief (when lost on a country road at night) that she is about to encounter the ghost. Yet the moments of terror, built by imagination out of nothing—as the majority of a child's fears are—reach heights equal to those of the scratching from within the coffin in Isle of the Dead, the sealing up alive of Karloff in the asylum walls in Bedlam, the sudden stopping of the bus with the catlike hiss, in Cat People, or the sobbing in the deserted village and the terrifying journey to the Voodoo village in I Walked with a Zombie. And, as in all good fairy tales, poignancy and beauty walk hand in hand with fear. It would be exaggerating to say that Curse of the Cat People approaches the beauty of Cocteau's Le Belle et la Bête, or Autant-Lara's Sylvie et le Fantome, but it does have the same kind of beauty.

One suspects that no one was quite sure whether this film should have been complete fantasy or complete horror film. The film was also not helped by a split directorial credit; Gunther Fritsch started the film, and relinquished to Robert Wise when he was called to service with the Army. The effects of compromise and indecision show. Certain scenes were shot a number of ways. In one version of the climax, for example, the ghost of the former Cat Woman played a far more positive and melodramatic role, including the unlocking of a jammed closet door to enable the child to hide from the crazed woman who seeks to kill her. In the final release version, this element was eliminated and fairy tale magic won out over prolonged suspense, a preferable solution. Despite the occasionally uneven quality throughout, one feels that this is one of those rare cases where the fussing was justified, and where the final version was not a "butchery" of what might have been.