Lewton was a protégé of David O. Selznick. In that role, he made critical but mostly uncredited contributions to Gone with the Wind. When he came to RKO, he had no burning desire to make horror films, but that was what the studio wanted. They also mandated his first title, “Cat People,” but Lewton took the picture in a radically different direction than the monster movies Universal produced—at a much greater cost.
To stretch his stingy budgets, Lewton often relied on shadows and clever camera work to heighten the atmosphere and suspense. As a result, every clip Jones incorporates is strikingly stylish and vividly evoke the eerie, otherworldly vibe of Lewton’s films. Technically, Lewton never directed a narrative feature, but all his RKO horror films have a similar look and feel.
Man in the Shadows was originally produced for TCM over a decade ago (prior to the release of Jones’ Hitchcock/Truffaut and Letters to Elia, his full-collaboration with Scorsese), so mercifully, there is no apologizing for the subject matter of Lewton’s Caribbean-set voodoo film, I Walked with a Zombie, or his late career western, Apache Drums. In fact, his depiction of zombies is one of the earliest appearances of the genre’s most enduring menaces. The same is arguably true of the Satanic cult in The Seventh Victim.
