THE BODY SNATCHER

Terror lives in the shadows when it comes to the films conjured from the imagination of Val Lewton, the visionary producer-auteur who turned our fears of the unseen and the unknown into haunting excursions into existential dread. As head of RKO’s B-horror-movie unit during the 1940s, Lewton brought a new sophistication to the genre by wringing chills not from conventional movie monsters but from brooding atmosphere, suggestion, and psychosexual unease. Suffused with ritual, mysticism, and the occult, the poetically hypnotic and the shockingly subversive films are still-tantalizing dreams of death that dare to embrace the darkness.

Based on a story by Robert Louis Stevenson, this spare and chilling entry in Lewton’s oeuvre stars a brilliant Boris Karloff as a struggling cab driver in 19th-century Edinburgh who helps procure bodies from freshly dug graves for a local doctor. Soon enough, the bodies he delivers become a little too fresh. Lewton and director Robert Wise, of course, provide the eerie atmospherics, yet Karloff brings his customary richness of character to this deeply unsettling role, cutting through all the ghoulish murder and blackmail with humor and literate depth as THE BODY SNATCHER builds toward its truly macabre finale.