The documentary on film producer Val Lewton narrated by Martin Scorsese premiers tonight on Turner Classic Movies at 8 p.m.
It is called "Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows" and it was directed by Kent Jones.
The documentary depicts the producer as one of the few
producers on
His works includes horror movies like: “The Curse of the Cat People,” “The Leopard Man,” “I Walked With a Zombie” and “Isle of the Dead” which were seen as B-movies for their low budget. Due to the human dramas of the characters the movies endured the test of time.
At the time they were made the movies weren’t seen as horror movies because of their lack of monsters or blood spilling.
In the 1940s he worked for the RKO Studios and produced 11 horror movies with a low budget in four years.
Lewton was a Russian immigrant, Vladimir Levinton on his
real name, whose mother and aunt had successful careers as actresses in
He worked in the 1930s as the assistant of David O. Selznick who got the idea from him for the scene where Scarlett O’Hara has to walk through the “field” of wounded soldiers.
The RKO studio wasn’t satisfied with “Cat People” because it lacked the monsters, and that was very important for a horror movie, but even so the movie played for 13 weeks.
“Cat People” told the story of a woman who turned into a panther every time she felt a sexual urge.
Lewton used tension as a horror feature in his movies thus playing with the vulnerability of those in the film.
At the end of the documentary we find out that he died in 1951 at the age of only 46, due to a heart attack.
After the documentary, TCM scheduled a marathon of ten of his movies. The documentary is filled with insights of producer’s life from his son, producer Roger Corman and Japanese director and fan Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
Lewton succeeded, as Alfred Hitchcock did too, to depict horror and terror in his movies without giving a face to it, a vision few directors bother these days to approach.