31 Days Of Horror Day 30: Someone Asked Me To Be An Expert In Something Part 7

(Previous Somebody Asked Me To Be An Expert In Something were part of a Film Noir and then Neo Noir series that I was asked to help program and host. Starting with this entry, I am now the sole programmer, and the films will no longer be just crime films. Once again this is written for speech so I apologize for any irregularities of cadence)




Of all the films I’ve had the opportunity to show in this series, I Walked With A Zombie is the one I’m most excited about.

Out Of The Past, which was also directed by Jacques Tourneur was actually the first film I screened for this series, almost a year ago now. And as much as I truly love that film, I couldn’t help but be just a little sorry that I wasn’t showing this one.

This movie is a product not just of Jacques Tourneur but of Val Lewton, who in the forties produced a series of horror films which are among the finest ever made. Tourneur only made two films with Lewton. Though the two were lifelong friends and knew each other from years before when both worked for the legendary producer David O. Selznick. Saying the two influenced each other doesn’t’ seem quite strong enough. The other film the pair made was Cat People. Of the two Cat People remains the more well known, popular, and certainly more influential of the two.

But I would argue I Walked With A Zombie is the better film.

I Walked With A Zombie contains many elements usually found in Lewton. The literary allusions, with much of the film culled from Jane Eyre. His central female characters. What has been called his figure of beautiful sorrow. His level neutral view of the occult. The kind of darkness that led him to snap at one studio executive who claimed that his films had to many messages, “I Only have one message. And that is Death Is Good.”

But even among Lewton’s films I Walked With A Zombie stands apart.

Saying a movie is one of a kind is usually a trap. No matter how odd a movie may appear chances are there’s something that is at least a bit like it somewhere. But I can honestly say I don’t believe anything quite like this movie has been ever made before.
There is a rhythm and flux to this film that is unlike any I have ever seen. The possible exception being Night Of The Hunter. Calling a movie dream like is usually an easy out, but I Walked With A Zombie carries with it all the dread and poeticism of a real dream.














I don’t want to delve too deeply into the plot or individual scenes, incase this would turn out to be your first experience with the film. I will only say of Lewton in general, that Horror is usually derived from a source of physical revulsion, while Terror comes from a source of mental revulsion. As someone suggests in Martin Scorsese’s superlative documentary on Lewton, From The Shadows. All of Lewton’s films are terror films.

Which is why I think Lewton’s films have held up so well. While so many older horror movies, say the films produced by Lewton’s rivals at Universal at the time, are watched today as camp or at the very least through a heavy filter of nostalgia, Lewton’s remain as cutting as the day they were released.

So please sit back and enjoy I Walked With A Zombie. I don’t think you’ve ever seen anything quite like it.

POST SCRIPT So, I'll be showing I Walked With A Zombie later this afternoon. Then racing down to LA to go see The Aero Theater's Fifth Annual Dusk Til Dawn Horrorthon. Which has for five years, proven to be the best night of horror filmgoing LA has to offer. As well as my personal favorite night of movie going of the year. Aside from the great programming and wonderful prints, The Aero creates a found Footage montage between each film that will drive men to madness and have you screaming "THE POSSIBILITY OF ME WORKING IS REMOTE!!!" At the top of your lungs. At four AM.

I wouldn't miss it For The World.

So if you're an LA Reader and you're not going to The Aero, well what the fuck is wrong with you? And if you're an LA reader and you are going to The Aero, please say hello. I'll be the one wearing the "Camp Crystal Lake Counselor" T-shirt, Pea Coat, and mainlining as many stimulants outside the theater on breaks as possible.

As I will be spending Halloween afternoon and possibly night with some LA friends, I hope you'll forgive me if Halloween's post goes up a bit later then normal.

If some disaster does strike though, let me take a moment to thank you for reading through 31 Days and wish you a Happy Halloween. There's some great stuff coming up this November. Including a few more horror films that I couldn't quite fit into 31 Days but couldn't stand the idea of not writing about. As well as a some great new stuff I'm really excited about.

So stay sick, stay scared. And Don't go trick or treating without your boomstick!

Someone Asked Me To Be An Expert In Something Part 1: Out Of The Past

So when I'm not blogging I also serve as a critic for the local weekly. I have a column where I basically get to write about what ever film I want as as long as it clocks in a 500 words or under everybody's happy. Anyway this somehow led to me programming the first half of a film noir festival and today I get to tell a bunch of people why Out Of The Past is awesome. I've had tougher jobs. So I thought I'd go ahead and post my introduction for you fine people. Forgive me if the cadences are a bit off, they're written for speech after and the editing I did on them was minimal.

When I was first asked to pick a film for this screening the one that leapt to mind before any others was Out Of the Past.

Out Of The Past in so many ways isn’t just a film noir, it’s the film noir. All the elements we think of when we think of the genre, the classic stars, the moody shadow drenched style, and doom laden story are all present and accounted for in Out Of The Past. Keeping that in mind I’d like to share two quotes that to me sum up Film Noir better then any other.

The author James Ellroy put it pretty simply when he said “Film Noir, means you’re (blanked).” Scorsese put it a bit more eloquently when he said, the essence of Film Noir was “No matter which way you go Fate sticks out its foot to trip you.”

It’s fitting then that the director of Out Of The Past, Jacques Tournier, knew a little something about fate. Today he is best known for his horror films; particularly those he made with Val Lewton. Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie, The Leopard Man, as well as Night Of The Demon which he made after their partnership but which shared many similarities with his earlier work. All four of these excellent films, deal with fate as a conscience malevolent force. From their opening frames there’s no doubt that the film’s could end any other way except the way that they do. No way for its desperate characters to escape what fate has in store for them. Film Noir so often narrated by the dead, or dying shares this concept, and Tournier applies it masterfully here.

Like Ellroy and Scorsese said, the main conceit of Film Noir is that you’re doomed. This is in direct contradiction to most Hollywood films of the time, and indeed today, with their basic message that everything is going to work out for the best. That fate is kind. The message of Film Noir is that everything is not going to work out OK, Fate is not only uncaring it is actively malevolent.

As Ebert said in his essay on the film, “Most crime movies begin in the present and move forward, but film noir coils back into the past. The noir hero is doomed before the story begins -- by fate, rotten luck, or his own flawed character. Crime movies sometimes show good men who go bad. The noir hero is never good, just kidding himself, living in ignorance of his dark side until events demonstrate it to him.” Mitchum’s certainly charismatic, but he’s a man with no qualms about working for a mobster and no problem with screwing over his partner and client. Once he gets a whiff of the woman in question it’s not his brain he’s thinking with.

Out Of The Past provides us with one of the greatest Noir casts of all time. Mitchum has such dynamic that we can actually fool ourselves that he might get away for a little. Kirk Douglas is one of Noir’s great villains, his cool malovelence is scarier then then his rage ever could be, he never even raises his voice.

But the real key to the movie is Judy Greer as Kathie, as Ebert notes, “Mitchum and Douglas think the story involves a contest of wills between them, when in fact, they're both the instruments of a corrupt woman.” The Femme Fatale in her purist form. However, The crime writer Ed Brubaker… and if you like crime fiction (and if you’re here I’m assuming you do) and you’re not reading Brubaker you’re missing out. Has a different view “Kathie has often been called the ultimate Femme Fatale, but to me she’s so much more then that. Because I can understand Barbara Stanwyck’s motivesin Double Indemity –she wants out of her loveless marriage and she wants to be rich- but Kathy Moffett remains an enigma. Why is Kathie doing any of the things she’s doing? What made her so alone and so afraid that she’ll turn on almost anyone, even trying to murder the people she loves.” It’s that beautiful chaotic desperation that elevates Moffett and Out Of The Past to a level most noir films never achieve. Kathie’s only motive appears to be survival and yet with Jeff, she finds both happiness and passion, as well. That she’s wiling to give the latter up for the former is her undoing. But it’s a particular kind of human failure and one again which comes from desperation. Long after any viewing of Out Of The Past I will find myself wondering where that desperation comes from.”

Desperation is really the key word in Out Of The Past. Everyone in it is desperate for something, Mitchum’s trying to escape his past, Douglas is trying to keep control of his empire and the only woman he’ll never be able to keep, and Greer is desperate to get away from whatever terrible thing is driving her. Of course none will get what they want, the trap is already been sprung, the only thing anyone can hope to do is “Die Last” as Mitchum says late in the movie.

In closing I’d like to take another quote from Brubaker’s essay “Good noir often has an element of disability layered inot it. It’s symbolism and character all at once – the old man in the wheelchair who hires Bogart in The Big Sleep, the Professor’s sexual hang ups in Asphalt Jungle, the reporter with two canes in Lady From Shanghai the GI with shell shock in The Blue Dahlia, just to name a few off the top of my head. Noir is showing us a fractured world full of damaged people, who nonetheless try to survive, but who mostly fail… The mute kid that Jeff Markham befriends fits that noir theme here, serving as both a supporting character and as a symbol for Jeff’s need to keep his past a secret. That alone would have been a great noir beat., to hit, but the final stroke of genius of this film is that only the mute boy and the audience ever know the truth about Jeff and why he does the things he does. No one else in the film does, not even the girl who loves him. The silent pact between movie and viewer echoes long after the final credits have rolled.”

And that to me is what Noir is, a dark secret that reaches out past the decades, coming for us always Out Of The Past.