Over the Edge/An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

  In his first film, The Cat People, Lewton explored the psychiatric and emotional implications of lycanthropy through the medium of a beautiful young girl who thinks she has inherited the taint of animal transvestism—her alter-ego a panther. It is the foremost of only three films Simone Simon made in this country that can stand today as having been worth the doing. Many have called it a classic.

  In The Body Snatcher, made in 1945, Lewton used the incomparable Karloff to full advantage in a thinly-veiled retelling of the Burke & Hare grave-robbing story. (How did that old tot-terrifier go? “Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief; and Knox the boy who buys the beef.” Well, however, it was the strange story of the doctor who needed cadavers for autopsy purposes, who bought his meat from a pair of unsavorys not above catching the anatomical visual aids while they were still very much alive and kicking.)

  In Bedlam, 1946, Lewton opened with a full-screen medium closeup of Hogarth’s famous painting of the Eighteenth Century English madhouse, dollied in on it to extreme closeup and then did a wax-dissolve to a letter-perfect real life scene, precisely as the painting showed it. The credits on the film nodded to Hogarth, possibly the only time in the history of film that a painting (rather than a play, a novel, a song, or a title) inspired a motion picture. Lewton went on to explore the conditions in lunatic asylums with Karloff, and what later institutional liberals exposed about the criminal conditions in our asylums, was all there for them to see, years before the hue and cry for reforms.

  Of I Walked With A Zombie, Lewton is reported to have said, “They may never recognize it, but what I’m going to give them in I Walked With A Zombie is ‘Jane Eyre In The West Indies’.” (The author must at this time bow in the direction of scenarist De Witt Bodeen, from whose article in the April 1963 issue of Films in Review that quotation—and much of the minutiae of this section on Lewton—emanates.)

  To show the incredible broken-field-running of Lewton as a producer, against odds calculated to produce nothing but merde, I Walked With A Zombie was inspired by a Hearst Sunday supplement series. If you don’t think what he brought forth was remarkable, catch a re-run of this film on a Saturday afternoon tv showing, and compare it (bearing in mind what inspired it) with what horrors of an entirely different stripe have been produced by moviemakers with acrome-galic budgets, e.g., Moby Dick, Cleopatra, Mutiny on the Bounty, King of Kings, 55 Days at Peking, Circus World, Ship of Fools, the list goes on with truly terrifying overpopulation. (I refer, of course, to the most recent incarnations of each of the foregoing films.)

  Praising Lewton has become, in recent years, an “in” game of the “in crowd.” There is no great bravery on my part to single him out as the perpetrator of the ne plus ultra in horror films. Yet in all of these huzzahs, there has never been a satisfactory explanation of precisely what it is in those films of fear that makes them perfect models for the sluggards currently infesting the genre. Nor has there been a rationale for why these films are always referred to as “Lewton’s films” rather than Karloff’s films, or Jacques Tourneur’s films—though he directed three of the finest—or Mark Robson’s films—though he directed four—or Robert Wise’s films—though he did two, of which one, Curse of the Cat People, remains today as one of the most original plumbings of a child’s mentality. They are always called Lewton’s films, and therein lies the secret not only of successfully producing films of fear, but of the art of producing, itself.

  Lewton’s role as producer was anything but that of the stereotyped fat-cat, thumbs hooked in the pockets of his velvet vest, cigar masticated between gopher teeth, eyes on the till and heart of blackest anthracite. He was a creator.

  In a recent conversation with actor Robert Blake (incidentally, another immense talent Hollywood has done ill to ignore), the point was made that in every successful production, whether television or feature film, the presence of one strong man can be seen: whether the lead actor, or the head writer, or the director, or the producer, if there is one man with balls enough to swing his weight in the cause of artistic integrity, what emerges, nine times out of 9.89, is worth viewing, while the reverse proportion holds for those efforts born of Art by Committee Decision. This, I think, is the secret of why Lewton’s films were always Lewton’s films, and why they bore an unmistakable stamp of continuity of talent.

  What he thought about his work, and how he conveyed these thoughts to men like Tourneur (still another fine talent who, while he works regularly, has been denied access to top production directorial chores that would have placed him with the best in the field), was the cornerstone of Lewton’s success, the vitality that brought more than animation to his creations—that brought life to them. One example:

  In The Bad and The Beautiful, Kirk Douglas, playing a producer who has been advised his first film will be a horror film (very much like The Cat People) convinces his staff that blatant visualizations of horror must be avoided by the simple expedient of flicking off the lights in his office, and telling them the story in the dark. It is a remarkably effective scene, and the strongest cinematic argument ever made for subtlety and indirection in film-making. He is thoroughly convincing, of course.

  This incident was precisely what Lewton did with his staff on The Cat People. The story became Hollywood legend, and has now been preserved as fiction.

  Thus, portrait of a producer.

  Producing, I submit, is not primarily a matter of budgets, schedules, manipulations or politics (though in the latter stages no producer succeeds in this arena without knowing how to move them pieces around the board). It is, in the gestation period, a matter of instincts, insights, the eye of Art—and I’ll damned well use the cap “A” every time—and gonads. The producer whose sole concern is “product” is doomed merely to make money.

  Pause, while the fat-cats chuckle on their way to the bank. Yeah, we know that bit. Nice talking to you, fellahs. Move on, so we can get back to the business of creating, as opposed to producing.

  Lewton typifies the creative producer, with an instinctive love and appreciation of form, grace, direction, and message. His films were never polemics, nor were they studiedly “arty.” But they were always meaningful, had something important to say about people and the Times, and they were always artistic.

  Much of this, I contend, came from the fact that Lewton was filming fear and terror and horror, and that way lies a touchstone for the motion picture audience.

  Since the first night of Man, hunkered down hairy and hungry by the primeval lightning-borne food fire, fear has been the prime mover. Forget momma love and posterity and man’s unquenchable curiosity. Fear is the primary mode of locomotion of homo sapiens, as Mel Brooks suggests. Show hairy Man a pair of yellow eyes just outside the ring of light thrown by that first fire, and within twenty minutes he’ll have invented the crossbow, the arbalest, the mace, Thompson submachine guns and klieg lights to chase that mother away.

  We walk through all the days and nights of our lives terrified. Of the world that surrounds us, of one another, of the unknown, of ourselves. Fear is the hammer that leaves us stunned and speechless. Fear is the goad that sends us to places we fear to be in, to find out things we’re scared witless to know. Fear.

  Of this simple fact, Lewton was a master.

  He knew there was more monstrousness in the sound of a killer cat slinking through the branches of a tree that brushed the top of a graveyard’s stone wall, than all the Godzillas or Rodans ever pulled by puppet strings. He played like a Landowska on the stops and keys of the psyche. He let you build the monsters in your mind, in that terrible nightland of individual torment no studio special effects man could ever visit. It was the visual application of the secret of old-time radio. (What some call the sense of wonder. The reason why no tv can ever rival a radio program for opulence of sets.)

  It was suggestion, the use of the power of the mind, that made Lewton’s films so terrifying. It was an instinctive regard and respect for the imaginations and mentalities of his audiences�
�as he respected his own imagination, intellect, and originality—that led Lewton surely and surefootedly to the one infallible path of fear. He thought he could make intelligent films for intelligent people. This is a concept largely ignored in Hollywood, these days, by producers of the Stanley Shapiro/Ross Hunter cadre, who make movies as intellectually demanding as a Giant Golden Book, and who seemingly visualize their audiences as microcephalics fit only to salivate over the constantly-imminent deflowering of Doris Day, or the shade of puce in a Jean Louis gown.

  Lewton did not merely invite the filmgoer to use his gourd, he demanded it. He led them up to the door of terror and commanded them, “KNOCK!”

  As with all work that either approaches or becomes Art, there is a specific and enormous demand on the observer, by the very nature and dimensions of the work itself, to commit; to participate; to bring something very individual and personal to the work, to expand it, in effect. To add to it. To enlarge it. To color it and intensify it, to personalize it, if you will.

  Fear is undeniably a subjective affection. It is personal. What scares you, may not scare me. Fear of spiders. Fear of drowning. Fear of immolation, being buried alive, suffocation. Fear of snakes. Fear of needles. In 1984, Orwell’s Winston Smith is finally broken by being led to Room 101 of the Ministry of Love, the room containing that which most easily can break a man—the thing he secretly fears most. In Smith’s case…rats. Each of us has his own Room 101 (which was, in many ways, what Orwell was trying to say in his novel) and each of us can find himself as insensible, as useless as a bag of shattered toys, if the proper subjective stimuli is employed. This was Lewton’s secret for terror.

  He was, in many ways, a consummate student and applicator of gestalt psychology. He opened all the doors to all the rooms numbered 101.

  But Lewton employed a much more mature and subtle approach to the concept of fear. His was a second-level psychology, different from the typical “sharp noise” or “sharp movement” of most horror films, where you are momentarily frightened by a (for instance) hand suddenly jumping into the frame. He must have had knowledge of the reversal-of-impulse concept, either unconsciously or by study. To explain:

  From Köhler on fear: “When a sudden event is felt to cause fright, a very strong impulse to move away from the event arises at the same time…Does anyone believe that the child feels his fear of the object, and the impulse to withdraw his hand, as two unrelated experiences? Or that, in his fear, the child might just as well feel a tendency to embrace or to swallow the disturbing object? [Italics mine.]…Just as an impulse of withdrawal arises directly from certain situations, so the opposite tendency is felt to be adequate in other situations.”

  Thus, when confronted by Lewton’s horrors, we cover our eyes. And peek.

  In The Cat People the fiancée of the hero is trapped in a swimming pool by a creature we do not see. It circles the pool, and she screams again and again. We are petrified with fear, but we are drawn to the scene inexorably. For long moments as the very long scene is played, we do not breathe. And not once do we see what it is we fear. The child in us walks to Room 101 and stares in numbed terror at the darkness beyond.

  This was Lewton’s secret, and the thread that made of his tapestries works of Art rather than just momentarily amusing cartoons. The fears inside us, the fears of the dark, of youth, or of the unknown. The modern terrors that outstrip all the werewolves, vampires and ghouls Transylvania ever exported.

  Explaining what terror is becomes a bore. It is akin to dissecting humor or honesty or love. Easy enough to cite examples of each, but murder trying to explain why they work.

  Lewton’s films worked. Nothing more need be said. They were the heartmeat of fear. The apotheosis of true mortal terror. What we get these days is something that exists elsewhere, and does not work in the same way, nor nearly as well. I have gone into some detail on Lewton, to set the reader up for the tirade that follows, for without knowing what a critic stands for, it is impossible to validate what he is against.

  I am for Lewton’s brand of terror.

  I am against what Polanski did in Repulsion, in many ways. But between the two poles, there lies a no man’s land of films that should have employed terror, and did not, and before we reach Polanski, I beg your indulgence for a brief detour through counties not generally considered haunts of terror.

  For in the traveltalks we may suffer through these unfamiliar counties, we may discover something not only of the nature of failure in current Hollywood fear-films, but of the general nature of boredom and failure in much of the cinema we get these days.

  Onward.

  2

  Let’s shake ’em up a little:

  King Rat, as a film, is a failure. The Loved One, as a film, is also a failure, but for entirely different reasons. Bunny Lake Is Missing is the biggest failure of the three, again for different reasons.

  And all three fail because they were lousy films of fear.

  Fear? King Rat a film of fear? The Loved—what the hell is he talking about? Are they reeling? Let’s hit them a little harder.

  Bunny Lake is a cheat, from start to finish. King Rat is a wretched bore. The Loved One not only cheats and bores, but is in execrable taste, but not in the way its campy makers intended. It’s just a very sick series of private jokes, and misses vivisection of the horrors it originally intended by at least six feet deep. And all three of them could have profited from Lewton’s rules of terror. From which point—as we departed from section one of this triptych—we invade the Country of the Blind. Namely, the big fear moviemakers.

  King Rat was taken from an excellent novel by James Clavell. It should never have been a movie. The fat-cats live in constant trepidation; it is the climate of Hollywood. You are only as good as your last film. Ergo, insure the next one. Pick something that was a success on the legitimate stage, or a best-selling novel, or a remake of something popular. (Because of this last, we have been “treated” to such displays as new versions of classics like Mutiny on the Bounty, Three Coins in the Fountain and Rashomon [as The Outrage; a film made purely for money, so plagiaristic in execution that it could not even be redeemed by calling it the sincerest form of flattery]. And we can look forward to a remake of Stagecoach with current lightweights of the Ann-Margret school mocking parts made memorable by Claire Trevor, John Wayne and Thomas Mitchell. One day soon we must discuss the venality and stupidity of producers who have the temerity to revamp films done to perfection the first time, merely to cash in on their perennial popularity.)

  Thus, every novel that sells over sixteen copies becomes a film, without artistic regard for the suitability of a property for translation to the visual medium.

  (And occasionally we get winners like Sex & The Single Girl, made from a title. How lucky we are.)

  There are some books that were born to be read, not filmed. LORD JIM was one of these. SHIP OF FOOLS was another. Even Welles, in filming The Trial, came a cropper; and though he produced a film of excellence in his own vision, the mass of criticism leveled against him was based on the fact that it was not Kafka’s version or attitude. That’s tough, for the critics. They were not flexible enough to understand that THE TRIAL was not a book to be filmed, but a book to be read, as conceived by Kafka. But of the recent crop of “sure-fire money-making properties” translated by emasculation and amputation into second-rate films reaping box-office disaster, and deservedly so, King Rat is the prize example. It was a helluva book; it was a terrible film. Terrible, because it commits the one crime no work of art or entertainment should be allowed to commit unpunished.

  It bores. It bores! Jeezus, to tears, it bores!

  Now how—he asks, with incredulity in his voice—could a film about men suffering privation and each other’s basest moralities in a Japanese prison camp, be boring?

  The element of fear was missing.

  Ah. Back to the point. Roundabout, but back, nonetheless.

  The scene is Changi Prison, 1945. A prison whose bars a
nd locks are invisible, yet no less binding than those of cast iron, for Changi’s topological features are such that to escape is to die. There is no place to go. In the compound live ten thousand men who eke out a minimal existence by their wits and the tenacity to go on breathing just one breath longer, chiefly because it’s built into the machine. But there is King. He lives high. He is an entrepreneur, he is a mover, he is a provider, and in that strange way that only asserts itself in times of deepest tribulation, a leader and molder of men. But King wants only to make it for himself. He wheels, he deals, but he does not crawl on his belly like a reptile. He trades with the enemy for favors, and for the best of all reasons, Bryan Forbes’ intention to make him loathesome to us, fails completely. He is the only smart one in the pack. He wants to do more than subsist, he wants to live with a certain style, and a great deal of comfort. Most of the men (if not all) hate him, but they serve him, for the residue favors that are left behind when King has had his fill. Now from this intrinsically exciting and emotionally ineluctable situation, it would seen impossible to derive anything but a film of tension and passion and importance.

  But it was a novel of complex inner motivations, on a personal level, and to portray merely the outward, physical actualities of these dark drives, was to strip a story of psychological imperativeness down to the level of a shadow-play. All chiaroscuro. For in playing the story at the skin-level, Forbes and his cast eliminated the one thing that was dominant in the book: fear.

  Because of the fact that Changi was a prison in which no one could contemplate escape, there was never the omnipresent fear of the brutal Japanese guards, nor of imminent death. It became a study of men merely trying to hang on. Now that is a reasonable subject for a novel, in which we penetrate the skulls of the principals, and experience the terrors to which they were heir, day by day, moment within moment. But eliminate that internal fear, all the Room 101’s, and we are left with a landscape devoid of motivated, fearful particulars. All we have is an empty carcass.