Night of the Demon: The Runes and the Restraint

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 08:00:00 +0000

There is a famous argument buried inside Night of the Demon (1957), and you can watch both sides of it in the finished film, sitting uneasily next to each other. Jacques Tourneur — the director who, working for Val Lewton at RKO, had taught Hollywood the power of the unseen in Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie — wanted to make a horror film in which the audience is never certain the demon exists at all. The producer, Hal E. Chester, wanted a monster he could put on the poster. The film we have is the wreckage and the triumph of that disagreement, and it remains one of the greatest British horror films ever made, in spite of and because of the fight at its centre.

Cat People (1942): Val Lewton and the Terror You Don't See

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 08:00:00 +0000

In 1942 RKO handed a former story editor named Val Lewton a horror unit, a tiny budget, and a set of lurid titles thought up by the marketing department. The studio’s instruction was simple: make cheap scary pictures with those titles, keep each one under about $150,000, and do not argue. The first title on the list was Cat People. Out of that cynical, penny-pinching arrangement came one of the most quietly revolutionary films in the history of the genre, and the birth of a whole grammar of fear that the industry has been living off ever since.

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Night of the Demon: The Runes and the Restraint

Cat People (1942): Val Lewton and the Terror You Don't See