Label: Criterion

Reissued 2024, Originally released 1943

HORROR / DRAMA / MYSTERY - Terror lives in the shadows in a pair of mesmerizingly moody horror milestones conjured from the imagination of Val Lewton, the visionary producer-auteur who turned our fears of the unseen and the unknown into haunting excursions into existential dread. As head of RKO’s B-horror-movie unit during the 1940s, Lewton, working with directors such as Jacques Tourneur and Mark Robson, brought a new sophistication to the genre by wringing chills not from conventional movie monsters but from brooding atmosphere, suggestion, and psychosexual unease. Suffused with ritual, mysticism, and the occult, the poetically hypnotic I Walked with a Zombie and the shockingly subversive The Seventh Victim are still-tantalizing dreams of death that dare to embrace the darkness.