The Leopard Man
A lipstick and makeup mirror slip from fear-frozen hands, a sack spills corn flour along a grassy trail, a ball floats atop a geyser of water, the rattlesnake whir of castanets, blood seeps in from below a heavy door: The Leopard Man (1943), the third in auteur producer Val Lewton’s cycle of low-budget horror films for RKO, and his last collaboration with the great B-movie director Jacques Tourneur, brims with such haunting, often eerily erotic sounds and images.
The Seventh Victim
Though it’s perhaps not as widely known as the other B-horror films that Val Lewton produced for RKO between 1942 and 1946, The Seventh Victim is the cycle’s poetic pinnacle.