The Shadows Await You

Earlier this weekend, a friend of mine – who’s also a subscriber to this very newsletter, hi Mike! – texted me a photo from Lincoln Center, where the mobile Criterion Collection experience had set up shop and the line to visit the traveling closet was reportedly three hours long. And that was a quiet moment.

So, yeah. Physical media is alive and well in the heart of Manhattan. (Also, next month will mark five full years since I’ve set foot in New York and that thought makes my soul sad, but that’s not important right now.)

Olivia Abercrombie’s first-person piece for the newly revitalized AV Club captures something about what getting to go into the closet means to those of us who love the movies enough to build a shrine to them in our hearts.

Full disclosure: I’ve been to the Criterion offices a couple of times over the decades but never managed to visit the actual closet, and while I probably wouldn’t be willing to stand in line for ten hours – as Abercrombie did – for three minutes in heaven, I can certainly understand the appeal of hanging out in line with a bunch of strangers, talking about favorite selections and debating whether this or that title truly belongs in the canon. I work for a film festival, after all.

And if you were wondering which three titles I’d choose? Ruling out upgrades of Criterion titles I already own, I’d go for the Blu-ray of David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and the 4K editions of Todd Solondz’ Happiness and Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. And I'd make sure I took my time choosing them, so the crew I’ve hired to heist the whole damn truck can do their job.

Because you can never have enough Criterion editions, and I say this as someone who owns about two-thirds of the catalogue. What other label would use its access to major-studio libraries to resurrect a double-feature of ancient Val Lewton creepers for Halloween in the year of our lord 2024?

That brings us to this week’s twofer of I Walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim, two of the projects produced under Lewton’s tenure as head of RKO’s horror unit in the ’40s.

Both pictures arrived in 1943, a year after Cat People had demonstrated the effectiveness of Lewton’s suggestive, evocative approach to monster movies. He wasn’t interested in the shock of spotting a rampaging creature than the but lumbering mummies or rampaging wolf-men, but the chill of knowing something awful is stalking you – something you can’t quite make out in the dark.

Lewton knew the value of a jump scare – the sudden roar of a city bus is genuinely shocking in Cat People, and there are a couple of jarring images in Zombie, too – but his real goal was to send you back into the world with a week of bad dreams ahead of you.

Sometimes the movie did the dreaming for you. Directed by Jacques Tourneur on the heels of Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie is an atmospheric story of a young American nurse (Frances Dee) who arrives in the Caribbean to tend to a woman in a coma, and finds herself trapped in a haunted landscape of spirits and spells, where the sins of the past echo in the present.

It’s unique among Lewton’s productions for its willingness to drift away from conventional narrative into something more abstract and confounding; it’s barely 70 minutes long, but it contains moments of eerie, impressionistic stillness that feel like they could stretch into infinity.

The Seventh Victim is a different proposition. The first feature directed by Cat People editor Mark Robson, it’s a much more straightforward mystery story about young Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter, in her first film role) who arrives in Greenwich Village in search of her vanished sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks).

But the mystery is stranger and more elaborate than audiences at the time might have expected, and queer as hell, too; the coded relationship between Jacqueline and her former employee Frances Fallon (Isabelle Jewell) feels almost brazen for its time, and the mechanics of the conspiracy behind Jacqueline’s disappearance is loaded with the language of depression and suicidal ideation. The Seventh Victim doesn’t employ the surrealism of I Walked with a Zombie, but still feels just as bizarre, a psychological thriller about the power of ideas and charisma that predates Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure by half a century.

Both Zombie and Victim were included in the Val Lewton DVD sets released by Warner in 2005, but Criterion’s release improves on them considerably. New 4K masters, sourced from the original nitrate negatives, reveal more detail and depth than any previous edition, especially in the case of Zombie’s misty, deliberately obscure vistas. The more quotidian sets of Victim are just as well-rendered, but they’re not as evocative as Tourneur’s film; Victim is set in a recognizably real world, while Zombie takes place … somewhere else.

The Seventh Victim suffers slightly from the fact that sections of the negative were riddled with mold after eighty years in storage; extensive digital work has removed the damage but left those scenes looking a little darker and grainier. I see that as an affectionate reminder that these restorations are the product of real labor and care – something else that’s baked into the Criterion brand after all this time.

Criterion has carried over the supplements produced for the DVD editions: Audio commentary on Zombie by Kim Newman and Stephen Jones, and on Victim by Steve Haberman, and Constantine Nasr’s excellent hour-long documentary Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy, which Haberman co-wrote.

New extras include an interview with critic and historian Imogen Sara Smith, “audio essays” about the making of both films excerpted from Adam Roche’s Secret History of Hollywood podcast, and a segment of Emily Zarka’s PBS web series Monstrum on the history of the zombie. (You can find that last one here; it’s worth a watch!)

If you treasure your Criterion edition of Cat People, this is a double-feature worth owning. Now all we need are new BDs of the remaining titles in the Lewton box … though that might be too much to hope for. I’m not sure The Leopard Man is going to hold up, to be honest.

I Walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim are available now from the Criterion Collection in a 4K/BD combo, and also in individual Blu-ray and DVD editions. You know what to do.

Up next: My weekly What’s Worth Watching column for paid subscribers rolls out tomorrow, and a quartet of Korean ghostbusters come up against the limits of their knowledge in Jang Jae-Hyun’s Exhuma. Upgrade that sub so you don’t miss a single mailing!