Sunday, October 23, 2011

Two Lewton Productions

I'm jumping aboard the October Horror Bandwagon.

I kicked things off last night with a Val Lewton double feature.

I had seen I Walked With a Zombie several years ago. I was definitely enriched this time by having seen Jane Eyre (the 2011 edition) first. This is the movie that Jane Eyre always should have been.

I can't do any better than this ringing contemporaneous endorsement from the New York Times:

With its voodoo rites and perambulating zombie, "I Walked With a Zombie" probably will please a lot of people. But to this spectator, at least, it proved to be a dull, disgusting exaggeration of an unhealthy, abnormal concept of life. If the Hays office feels it has a duty to protect the morals of movie-goers by protesting the use of such expressions as "hell" and "damn" in purposeful dramas like "In Which We Serve" and "We Are the Marines," then how much more important is its duty to safeguard the youth of the land from the sort of stuff and nonsense that their minds will absorb from viewing "I Walked With a Zombie"? ? ?


Next up was The Body Snatcher. Some slow development is paid off richly once we get to the menacing Karloff scenes. The film's horror is distinctively non-supernatural.

Both films have easily earned a way into my Top 50 Horror Films of All Time. Now, I've only got 48 to go! :)

Just kidding. I'm not the Horror Hater that Brandon makes me out to be. I pretty much have the same taste in (pre-1960s) Horror that he has. I just haven't seen as much.

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