Phantom Ladies

Tim Snelson

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780813570426
• eBook ISBN: 9780813575285
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Defying industry logic and gender expectations, women started flocking to see horror films in the early 1940s. The departure of the young male audience and the surprise success of the film Cat People convinced studios that there was an untapped female audience for horror movies, and they adjusted their production and marketing strategies accordingly. Phantom Ladies reveals the untold story of how the Hollywood horror film changed dramatically in the early 1940s, including both female heroines and female monsters while incorporating elements of “women’s genres” like the gothic mystery. Drawing from a wealth of newly unearthed archival material, from production records to audience surveys, Tim Snelson challenges long-held assumptions about gender and horror film viewership.  Examining a wide range of classic horror movies, Snelson offers us a new appreciation of how dynamic this genre could be, as it underwent seismic shifts in a matter of months. Phantom Ladies, therefore, not only includes horror films made in the early 1940s, but also those produced immediately after the war ended, films in which the female monster was replaced by neurotic, psychotic, or hysterical women who could be cured and domesticated. Phantom Ladies is a spine-tingling, eye-opening read about gender and horror, and the complex relationship between industry and audiences in the classical Hollywood era. 

1

Rebecca Meets The Wolf Man at RKO

The Emergence of the Female Monster Cycle, 1942–1943

There’s a new kind of horror picture nowadays—snappy little spook shows full of beautiful girls and sharp dialogue, good food and French lullabies. . . . They show us pretty girls changing into man-killing cats, registered nurses who believe in zombies, and gorgeous lady executives joining screwball societies dedicated to satanic pursuits.

—Barbara Berch, Collier’s (January 29, 1944)

In her article “Gold in Them Chills,” Barbara Berch identifies an emergent cycle of horror films placing women in their central roles. She proposes that the novel characterization and stylistic traits of RKO’s Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and The Seventh Victim (1943) have opened up a new market for horror—beyond traditionally male-orientated grind-houses like the Rialto—in neighborhood theaters associated traditionally with more refined, feminine tastes.1 She explains that these films had generated a “gold rush at the box office—not only in theaters specializing in ‘triple Horror Show Tonight’ but in neighborhood houses where the whole family gathers.”2 In this article, Berch identifies the creation of a cycle, in Rick Altman’s terms, with RKO bringing “a new type of material or approach to an existing genre” to produce a “successful, easily exploitable model” that is, at least initially, associated with a single studio.3

Focusing on the three films Berch identifies here, this chapter explains how the RKO production unit led by Val Lewton developed a new formula for horror through its innovative female Gothic and monster movie amalgam Cat People. The unprecedented box-office success of this film and its follow-up I Walked with a Zombie—conceived by Lewton as a “West Indian version of Jane Eyre” and received by RKO test audiences as “Rebecca in the West Indies”—confirmed a burgeoning wartime market for female-centered horror texts.4 This chapter will analyze the production, mediation, and reception of these films. It will detail the industrial contexts and hybrid generic traditions from which these films arose, the topical narrative and marketing strategies they used to broaden horror’s appeals to wartime audiences, and the mediation over the appropriateness of their generic and gendered appeals in newspapers and trade presses. The box-office and critical success of these films would resultantly inspire studios spanning PRC to MGM to invest in their winning formula. But the story begins at RKO, with Orson Welles’s magnificent flop and belief in a lurid, audience-tested title.

“Showmanship, Not Genius”: Cat People and the Lewton Horror Unit at RKO

A 1942 review in the New York newspaper PM noted that Cat People “indicates that RKO-Radio, which booted Orson Welles downstairs with the fine philistine trade slogan ‘showmanship in place of genius,’ hasn’t yet decided which is which, and which pays.”5 Like this critic, subsequent scholars have stressed the paradox in Val Lewton’s innovative and intelligent B pictures being the cornerstone of RKO’s “showmanship, not genius” policy—the result of the studio’s near bankruptcy, which was unfairly blamed upon Orson Welles’s box-office failure The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).6 The contradictory aesthetic and generic impulses of RKO’s wartime horror films are typically attributed to the creative tensions between Lewton as auteur-producer and RKO’s production chief, Charles Koerner. It is perceived, therefore, that Lewton and his creative collaborators—particularly the directors Jacques Tourneur, Robert Wise, and Mark Robson—succeeded in spite of rather than with the help and support of their boss. In fact, Koerner provided the initial inspiration for the production unit and a number of its films, including Cat People. Furthermore, his widely reported clashes with Letwon seem to be somewhat exaggerated.7 From the outset Koerner, or certainly his marketing department, was alive to the promotional possibilities of accentuating the creative tensions and resultant hybrid appeals of Cat People.

An article printed in a number of regional papers—taken directly from an RKO press release—stressed that “Mr. Koerner, a showman with an eye for a showman’s dollar,” chose “Val Lewton, who used to be story editor for David O. Selznick, to make some quick money via the horrors.” It stressed, however, that Lewton “too, seriously, is sold on horror” and had “concocted” Cat People following a “picnic of research” into “hundreds of books on the occult.”8 The film was presold, therefore, as an amalgam of serious research and quality filmmaking, savvy exploitation and populist appeal. Coming from the exhibition side of the business, Koerner had a talent for exploitation and promotion. By channeling this into a superior product that would sustain business through positive reception and word of mouth, Koerner and Lewton devised a winning formula.9 The lurid titles for the first six of the RKO horror films were audience-tested and mandated by Koerner. RKO was the first studio to commit to George Gallup’s Audience Research Institute (ARI), signing a contract in March 1940 that would furnish sustained research regarding various audience groups’ preferences in story types, stars, and specific title choices. An initial survey for RKO revealed that a quarter of audiences bought tickets on the basis of the film’s title alone, thus explaining Koerner’s commitment to his audience-tested titles.10

Despite its low budget and, arguably, low subject matter, Cat People has a prestige feel about it, one imbued by its expert team experienced in high-profile productions. Previous to his appointment at RKO, Val Lewton was script editor and production assistant for David O. Selznick, most famously helping to package Rebecca (1940) and Jane Eyre (1944), writing sections of Gone with the Wind (1939), and acting as second-unit producer on A Tale of Two Cities (1935). In this capacity he oversaw the second-unit director, Jacques Tourneur (son of the celebrated silent filmmaker Maurice Tourneur), for the storming-of-the-Bastille scene, thus striking up the partnership that would produce Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Man (1943). Lewton also met Cat People’s main scriptwriter, DeWitt Bodeen, whose play on the Brontës, Embers at Haworth, he had seen and admired while working on the preproduction of Jane Eyre for Selznick. Therefore, Selznick was one of the key influences on the RKO unit, not only in terms of introducing its literate team but in nurturing their prestige aesthetic and thematic concerns. As the example of Rebecca suggests, these strategies were geared more toward female audiences. In an interview with François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock bemoaned Rebecca as a “novelette [typical of] a whole school of feminine literature at that period, and though I’m not against it, the fact is that the story is lacking in humor.”11 To the outrage of Selznick, his producer, the director attempted to inject “humor” into the film by inserting scenes of onboard vomiting, which the producer saw as epitomic of Hitchcock’s attempted script changes, ones that he insisted “removed all the subtleties and replaced them with broad strokes.” Selznick stressed that the film’s success relied on engaging the female audience’s empathy with the subtleties of Joan Fontaine’s character, thus capturing the spirit of the novel; he stated that “every woman who has read it has adored the girl and has understood her psychology.”12

Although prestige films of this era such as Selznick’s literary adaptations are often associated with female audiences, Rebecca perhaps more than any other resonated with imagined female spectators as Selznick had hoped. According to Gallup research on the sex composition of 114 pictures released in 1941, while the split between male and female tastes for more recognizable horror tales such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) was fairly equal, the composition of the audience for Rebecca was 71 percent female; it was the film of all 114 that had the largest split favoring one sex.13 A subsequent report revealed that Rebecca was the reissue most demanded by women of any film title in mid-1942, only two years after its initial release.14 This implies an ongoing female demand not just for Rebecca but for other female Gothics, a cycle that would not really be consolidated until after Jane Eyre and Gaslight were released in 1944, but one that was arguably bridged by Lewton’s female Gothic and horror amalgams. These included I Walked with a Zombie, which self-consciously references Rebecca in its dreamlike opening voice-over, as this chapter will move on to explain.15 Despite its less obvious feminine literary intertexts, Cat People replicates many of the thematic and aesthetic subtleties of the prestige female Gothics that bracket its release, particularly the intimations of sexual tension and gender distress experienced by a sympathetic female protagonist.

Even Selznick was alive to the potential exploitation angles of Rebecca and other prestige productions. Following Orson Welles’s controversial Halloween broadcast of War of the Worlds (1938), Selznick sold him the radio rights to Rebecca and instructed Lewton to investigate the resultant Mercury on the Air adaptation for potential inspiration for his screen version.16 Selznick, like Lewton, acknowledged that showmanship and genius were not mutually exclusive. In a memo dated December 14, 1942, Selznick, who had just seen Cat People, explained that he was very proud of his protégé Lewton, particularly for his overturning of generic and aesthetic expectations. He commended Lewton on “an altogether superb production job [that] is in every way better than ninety percent of the ‘A’ products I have seen in recent months. . . . Indeed I think it is one of the most skillfully worked out horror pieces in many years.”17 The film’s ambiguous status, between high and low cultural forms, is mirrored in Val Lewton’s eclectic personal history.

Before Cat People’s success Lewton was most widely recognized as the author of a series of pulp novels dealing with the seamy underbelly of New York life. The best-known of these was No Bed of Her Own (1932), a socially conscious tale of a girl’s struggles during the Depression that was bought by Paramount but transformed into a romantic comedy for Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, No Man of Her Own (1932), following objections from the censors.18 Much of the inspiration for Lewton’s books came from his work as a journalist and pornographer in Manhattan. Therefore his literariness was complemented by a less readily acknowledged propensity for low genres and sensational subject matters, a dialogism that would inform his best work. In fact, Lewton’s twin inspirations for Cat People were his own short story “The Baghetta” (1930) for Weird Tales magazine, which details the hunt for a mythical shape-shifting cat woman, and “a series of French fashion designs . . . drawings of gowns worn by models with the heads of cats.”19

Although later accounts by critics and some of Lewton’s colleagues have pointed out the producer’s dissatisfaction at some of the audience-tested titles, it is unlikely that he would have left his mutually beneficial association with Selznick if he had been as perturbed by the prospect of producing horror films. RKO made it clear following the success of Universal’s new horror cycle—one instigated by the re-release of Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931) on a 1938 double bill—that the studio wanted only horror movies, with budgets limited to $150,000 for placement on double bills in lesser theaters.20 The film that sealed RKO’s decision to start its own horror unit was The Wolf Man (1941), which proved very popular with audiences, returning over a million dollars, despite being considered “a dubious booking under present war strain” by Variety, because it was released only four days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.21 Cat People’s subtle approach certainly provides a corrective to some of The Wolf Man’s more lurid details, but the films also have a great deal in common. Both narratives revolve around a doomed romance focusing on a troubled yet sympathetic outsider who cannot escape a hereditary fate, and formally they share a number of stylistic features and set pieces. Lewton assimilated the motif of footprints changing from animal to human, the nightmare montage, and animals’ fear of the shape-shifter, as well as the reversed human-to-animal transformation at death.22 As Kim Newman and Rick Altman respectively suggest, Lewton was seemingly “less concerned with finding original material than he was with tackling it in an original manner” or bringing “a new type of material or approach to an existing genre.”23

Despite these parallels with The Wolf Man and other Universal precursors, Cat People marks the realization of the shift of horror narratives to the reality of the American present, which would become the dominant setting of the horror genre during the war. The Wolf Man occupies a liminal positioning between old-world mythology and the modern world; it is set in an unspecified time, with a mise-en-scène combining modern cars with horses and carts, and an eclectic set of architectural referents intimating a more general historic Europeanness than modern-day Wales, where the film is supposedly set. Part of Cat People’s resonance with audiences, according to critics, was due to this decision to bring the horror closer to home, both geographically and epistemologically. The trade press pinpointed the film’s originality in being set “in New York of today,” focusing upon “a group of normal, rather common place people,” and confining its horror to “psychology and mental reactions, rather than transformations to grotesque and marauding characters for visual impact on audiences.”24 PM went further, centering its innovation in its sympathetic female protagonist—“a very real, up-to-date character who even goes to a psychiatrist.”25 The reviewers saw the film’s distinctiveness as stemming from its engagement with the reality of home-front audiences, allowing them to engage with its central pant...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Horror on the Home Front
• Chapter 1. Rebecca Meets The Wolfman at RKO: The Emergence of the Female Monster Cycle, 1942–1943
• Chapter 2. Series, Sequels, and Double Bills: The Evolution of the Female Monster Cycle, 1943–1944
• Chapter 3. A-Class Monsters: The Escalation into Prestige Productions, 1944–1945
• Chapter 4. From Whatdunit to Whodunit: The Postwar Psychologization of Horror, 1945–1946
• Conclusion: Only for the Duration
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author