Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall

At least three of director Jacques Tourneur's films--Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man--are recognized as horror classics. Yet his contributions to these films are often minimized by scholars, with most of the credit going to the films' producer, Val Lewton.

A detailed examination of the director's full body of work reveals that those elements most evident in the Tourneur-Lewton collaborations--the lack of monsters and the stylized use of suggested violence--are equall...