Aeronautic Primates and Other Delights

This week's horror theme was Val Lewton! Val Lewton was a B-movie producer for RKO between 1942-1946 who, based on some attention-getting titles provided to him by management, made nine works of melodrama that can, for the most part, only loosely be called horror.

Movies I've seen previously are in italics.

Cat People (1942)
I Walked with a Zombie (1943)
The Leopard Man (1943)
The Seventh Victim (1943)
Curse of the Cat People (1944)
Isle of the Dead (1945)
The Body Snatcher (1945)
Zombieland: Double Tap (2019)
Bedlam (1946)
The Haunting (1963)
Rifftrax Live: Octaman (2019)
Ghost Ship (1943)

Of the Lewton films that I watched (and I watched all nine thrillers he made), Ghost Ship was the only one that I hadn't seen before. It took me the entire week to watch it. I watched the first half, then decided the film wasn't to my taste and stopped. At the very end of the week, I decided to be a completionist about it and finished the movie. It's not very good and I can see why it's taken me so long to watch it.

The Body Snatcher is probably my favorite of the films, followed by Cat People, but after that I have a hard time really ranking the films. They're all very different from one another.

Zombieland: Double Tap is a nice, frothy bit of zombie action-comedy. Weirdly, for a film that's ten years separated from its predecessor, it assumes you're familiar with the original and doesn't really bother re-introducing things like character names at first.

The Haunting is directed by Robert Wise, who directed 1.5 Lewton films (he took over Curse of the Cat People halfway through production, then did The Body Snatcher). It's a film that has a huge reputation but always fell flat for me. I decided to give it another shot in honor of my Lewton week. I turned off all the lights and tossed away my phone. I still found it underwhelming. Maybe it's that the film regularly relents on its tension, maybe it's the incessant internal monologue from the main character. I just didn't find it terribly interesting or scary. Again.

This next week's theme is supposed to be foreign horror, but I'm finding few of them in my collection that are 90 minutes or less (which is the time I have to watch a film before and after work). We'll see how it progresses.