- Roger Corman: There are many constraints connected with working on a low budget, but at the same time, there's certain opportunities. You can gamble a little bit more. You can experiment. You have to find a more creative way to solve a problem or to present a concept.
- Narrator: Val Lawton gave everything he had to make movies. And without any self-consciousness or pretense, he put a lot of himself into his work and his characters. It's interesting that many of those characters are women, young women, receiving quick, brutal educations in the ways of the world.
- Narrator: The old world eclipsed by the new. There's always a world beyond, haunting Lewton's characters, reminding them of who they are. One of the many things that was so distinctive about his pictures.
- Narrator: He was publicly modest and privately ambitious. He may have lacked the temperament for the movie business, but he had the temperament for movies. He preferred to stay in the shadows.
- Narrator: Lewton took his cue from Selznick and supervised absolutely everything. Casting. Set design. Costumes. The directions. The editing. And he rewrote every script himself either without credit or under a pseudonym. He found his own style of visual storytelling. And to a certain extent, you could say that he pre-directed his pictures on paper.
- Self - Author of 'Psychiatry and the Cinema': That's a point that Lewton wants to make. We all are potentially evil murderers. Some recognition of the dark forces that move all of us despite our best efforts to banish them.
- Jacques Tourneur: Horror is created in the mind of the spectator. It's necessary to suggest things. In all my films you never saw what caused the horror.
- Narrator: Lewton's films became known for their creative use of sound and for their set pieces where much is made from little - and where the seen and unseen converge.
- Self - Author of 'The Phantom Empire': It totally goes against horror movie logic. It goes in very different direction - into her suffering. These beautiful, luminous patterns and sensuous shadow forms, it's just intensely pleasurable. The unsettling scenes are also soothing. He manages to combine these opposite qualities.
- Self - Author of 'The Phantom Empire': Lewton's artistic ambitions are very directly communicated. He is trying to make a beautiful film, using everything he knows about photography and about music - and about writing.
- Jacques Tourneur: It's very curious because Val Lewton was an idealist. His head was in the clouds. He would come up with impossible ideas. With me it was the opposite, I had my feet on the ground. That was why we complemented each other so well. That was a very happy period in my life because it gave me a measure of poetry which I hadn't had - which I kept and applied elsewhere later.
- Narrator: Lewton and Tourneur films sometimes reached a hypnotic level - taking us to the edge of another darker reality.
- Narrator: Lewton gave us something quite different from what's now known as Hollywood craftsmanship. You can say that he presented us with a parallel world - in which everything feels both real and a little unreal, familiar but strange. The characters and the viewer slip into a mysterious, troubling gray zone - where real life and dream life come face to face - and where beauty and destruction merge. Lewton and Tourneur, together, really created a new kind of cinematic beauty.
- Roger Corman: It's hard to say how the concept of the unconscious plays out for the viewer. I think the film-goer is probably not aware of exactly what is happening, but they're aware of the result. If you're playing with the film-goer's unconscious, they react to it without really knowing why they are reacting to it.
- Self - Author of 'The Phantom Empire': Death is constantly evoked and evoked in a very curious way. People are always longing for death and expressing a kind of erotic yearning.
- Roger Corman: As you get into big budget films, you're subject to more studio influence or interference - and the film because less your own and more a corporate film.
- Narrator: It's tempting to say that the movie business killed Val Lewton. That he was no match for its toughness. But is that the real story? His melancholy, his dissatisfaction, the pressure he put on himself, they're part of what made his poor, simple, lucky little films, as he called them, so great.
- Narrator: All along, Lewton had been trying to accomplish something impossible: to satisfy the demand for horror and transcend it at the same time. But the conventions of horror were exactly what allowed him to open a door onto the dark side of existence.
- Narrator: You see things in his films that you don't see in most other films of the era - even other horror films. Human harshness and callousness, irrational impulses, real fears and disturbances. His films touch on these elements, lightly, but clearly - and acknowledge them as a part of life.
- Narrator: He was able to speak from a place of darkness during a dark time - to give presence to loss and oblivion.
- Narrator: It's not too hard to see Lewton as he must have seen himself: behind the story of a woman, under attack from all sides, by brutes, rogues, scoundrels.
- Kiyoshi Kurosawa: They're all very different. Hidden behind them all, an individuality shines powerfully.
- Narrator: If Val Lewton had been a happier man, a more confident man, he probably wouldn't have been so drawn to the darkness, the shadow world - and he wouldn't have wanted to take us with him.
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What is the English language plot outline for Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows (2007)?
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