Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows (2007)

(On Cable TV, October 2022) It was both necessary and a challenge to make Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows, a documentary about Val Lewton, a legend in the field of classic Hollywood horror films. Lewton was, on the one hand, a writer-producer behind some of the greatest, still-effective horror films of the 1940s: Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim alone would be an impressive filmography for anyone, but his was much longer than that. The challenge comes in that Lewton was apparently never captured on film—we have still pictures but no record of his voice. This feeds into the documentary’s assertion that Lewton acted in the shadows as a writer and producer, but not as higher-profile director or actor. Nonetheless, as narrator Martin Scorsese tells us, Lewton leaves behind quite a legacy, and a body of work that approaches auteur status despite never having been the credited director. While the film itself is average in terms of style, the substance proves to be interesting. We are not exploring an actor or a director, but a more elusive kind of Hollywood insider, and perhaps a far more powerful one. After his string of horror hits, Lewton’s biography takes a sadder turn as his career quickly flames out after WW2. He dies not much later at the early age of 46 after two debilitating heart attacks. In some ways, Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows complements and contextualizes the body of work Lewton leaves behind, and humanizes a figure that may not be of obvious interest to anyone not deeply interested in the history of horror films.