AND THE OSCAR DOESN’T GO TO… Val Lewton

Image from TCM

It is perhaps no coincidence the Horror Month’s AND THE OSCAR DOESN’T GO TO… features the very first person that was never nominated for an Oscar, as opposed to the other people featured in this series. Horror does seem to be overlooked by the Academy, then and now, which is a shame. But Val Lewton’s contributions to the genre are not to be overlooked, Oscar nominations or not.

Born in Russia in 1904, he and his family emigrated to the United States when he was five years old. They settled in New York, where Lewton ended up working a number of odd jobs, before enrolling in Columbia University to study journalism. He wrote a number of books, most notably No Bed of Her Own, which was the basis for No Man Of Her Own (1932, dir. Welsey Ruggles), after which he started working as a writer for MGM’s New York publicity branch, before being hired as a publicist and assistant by David O. Selznick. After a number of credits, including the 1935 adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities (dir. Jack Conway) and the Atlanta depot scene from Gone With the Wind (1939, dir. Victor Fleming), he was hired at the head of horror unit at RKO.

Then… came Cat People (1942, dir. Jacques Tourner), I Walked with a Zombie (1943, dir. Tourneur), The Seventh Victim (1943, dir. Mark Robson), The Curse of the Cat People (1944, dir. Gunther von Fritsch and Robert Wise), The Body Snatcher (1945, dir. Wise), among others… He oversaw these productions with an eye for detail that every producer should be striving for, and he did so with a low budget (‘B’ movies). Most of these have since become classics.

1940s horror would not have been the same without Val Lewton. His dedication to and unwavering belief in the genre are well-documented, and his untimely death at 46 from a heart attack in 1951 is one of Hollywood’s great misfortunes. None of his films were nominated for Best Picture, but his stint as a horror producer extraordinaire will go down in history.