Ron Reed

Jacques Tourneur, B Movie Auteur (Part 4): Curse Of The Demon ("Night Of The Demon" 1957)

Jacques Tourneur’s last journey into the fantastique genre is saturated with dialogue that goes straight to the heart of his favourite and most fascinating questions, evoking Charles Williams and even C.S. Lewis. Problem is, the narrative deck is stacked from the outset, so there’s no room for the sort of ambiguity and psychological suspense that make Tourneur’s earlier supernatural thrillers so effective.

Ron Reed

Jacques Tourneur, B Movie Auteur (Part 3): Stars In My Crown (1950)

Fans of the moody supernatural thrillers Jacques Tourneur lensed for Val Lewton in the forties or his noir masterpiece Out Of The Past may find little appeal in this sunny, easy-going tale of a small town parson set just after the American Civil War. But of the twenty-nine feature films he directed between 1939 and 1965, this is the one he fought to do. One wonders if he may have felt an affinity with the story’s central character, the transcendently decent Reverend Josiah Gray – prefiguring perhaps the greatest portrayal of small-town integrity to be found in American literature and film.

Ron Reed

Jacques Tourneur, B Movie Auteur (Part 2): I Walked With A Zombie (1943)

If you’re hoping for a horror movie, Zombie will disappoint. Even seemingly climactic scenes mystify rather than thrill: they pay off only in mood and a slow accumulation of character detail. Eventually, even the basic narrative seem to dissipate. Forced to fill in narrative gaps by intuition, we must assemble scraps of dialogue and details of behaviour into our best guess about what’s going on – a narrative strategy that forces us to “lean in” to the story, heightening our attention and tuning us to nuance, atmosphere, suggestion. However much we succeed in making sense of the story on repeat viewings, we’re left with unsettling questions, unsure we’ll ever have the full story. Kind of like life.

Ron Reed

Jacques Tourneur, B Movie Auteur (Part 1): Cat People (1942)

Psychologically complex, genuinely sexy, hauntingly sad – and when it comes to the creepy stuff, Cat People plays for keeps. Tourneur’s aren’t called “supernatural thrillers” for nothing: the films are both thrilling and theological. The supernatural is rendered spiritual, otherworldliness is grounded in the everyday world, and sin and the human condition are taken seriously.