The History of Horror: The Cinema Part II

1940s: World War II and the Cold War

During World War II, real life horror was playing across the silver screen in newsreels delivering word back to Americans from the homefront. The holocaust, whose extent of true horror was not revealed until after the war ended, made cinematic versions pale in comparison. Yet during this period, Hollywood continued to churn out horror films to audiences' delight. Two such filmmakers who created some of the classic horror films of this period were Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton. Russian born RKO producer Lewton teamed up with French director Tourneur to create such suspenseful films as The Cat People (1943), I Walked with A Zombie (1943), and The Leopard Man (1943). Though Lewton and Tourneur's films tended to be more suspenseful psychological dramas rather than straight out horror, the chills they created had far more impact on the cinematic imagination. In the classic The Cat People, for instance, horror is conveyed through what is implied and not what is shown. The film is about a young woman who is transformed into a black panther whenever she is overwhelmed by sexual desires and jealousy, leading her to stalk the young heroine who has fallen in love with her husband. One of the film's most frightening sequences occurs when the heroine is stalked by a panther while swimming in a local pool. We don't see the panther crawling in the darkened pool room, but only its shadow and its growling. Other films such as the Uninvited (1944) starring Ray Milland and the gentle ghost love story Portrait of Jennie (1948), starring Joseph Cotton, were films that were also depended on atmospherics to deliver their chills.

The 1950s and 1960s: Repression and Revolution