The decade begins with war and monsters.

Universal’s legacy of horror produces sons and ghosts and returning fiends. Perhaps the last of the great monsters is born in 1942 with Lon Chaney’s The Wolfman, joining Bela’s Dracula and Boris’ Frankenstein monster as the third member of the holy terror trinity. The B studios continue to spawn minor horrors but the emphasis is shifting away from monsters to other kinds of dread.

MGM makes a new Jekyll and Hyde with Spencer Tracy and a stunning, stylish version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, a big studio nod to the trend, though the trend is fading fast.

At RKO studios, where film noir is busy being born, a young producer named Val Lewton presides over a small stable of visionary directors and creates some of the finest films of dark imagination ever made, but despite their titles, full of cat people and zombies, these are not monsters movies. 

The monsters have worn out their welcome and we have, perhaps, had enough of horror for a time.

We will require new wellsprings to entertain us in the dark.

Angela's Pick: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)

Another tough decade!  The 40’s are filled with great horror movies. I would highly recommend The Wolf Man, and the original Cat People (with the gorgeous Simone Simon) or any of Val Lewton’s wonderful movies.  Drake is covering my favorite film from the decade, but The Picture of Dorian Gray is my pick for the 40’s.

Based on the book by Oscar Wilde, the story is set in Victorian England. We are introduced to the suave, almost impossibly handsome Dorian Gray, whose outward appearance houses a stained soul.  When his portrait is painted by an artist friend, Dorian makes a wish that he never age – that the portrait should take on the ravages of time and not his face or body.

And so the portrait does – but that is not all it takes on.  Dorian remains ever young and handsome, even as his cruelty and dissolute lifestyle begin to take over his life.

Made in an era with heavy censorship, not only of what you saw but even what might be implied, this movie convincingly portrays undercurrents of homosexuality and erotic and hedonistic excess, doing justice to the subtle decadence of Wilde’s story.  We do not see the portrait often, but when we do it’s truly shocking.

What I like most about this movie is that while set in a time of tight, almost puritanical restraint, and filmed in an era of conformity, the movie isn’t a morality sermon against pleasure, homosexuality or enjoying life, but instead focuses on Dorian’s cruelty and callous disregard of others as the source of so many scars upon the face of the portrait.

Look for a beautiful, young Angela Lansbury in an award-winning performance as one of Dorian’s many victims...

Drake's Pick: I Walked With a Zombie (1943)

The old monsters are still with us, even after this most awful of wars. For Frankenstein’s creature and the mummy, the last act may be the moment they meet Abbot and Costello and screams turn to laughter.

The zombie shambles in a different direction.

I have trouble picking a favorite among the Val Lewton RKO classics -- and no other movie of the decade approaches the luster of this bunch of black grapes -- but I have to go with I Walked with a Zombie for my favorite horror film of the decade.

Tight as a bloated belly and drenched in shadows, Curt Siodmak’s script and Jacques Tourneur’s direction, play a dream riff on Jane Eyre, darkly romantic but weirdly modern. The movie gives us zombies who are simultaneously the walking avatars of doomed passion and the product of scientific zeal.

The darkest night is always the one in our head.

Early Calypso singer Sir Lancelot gives what may be the finest musical performance in any horror film ever when he menaces actress Frances Dee by playing a sinister island ballad.

And this is the movie that first features the island of San Sebastian, Lewton’s recurring symbol, the geographic heart of his considerable talent.