Strange Duties

Hollywood composers during the studio era performed many tasks unusual for a modern musician. Roy Webb's strangest duty for The Leopard Man involved composing a seventeenth-century penitential chant for the film's climax. The RKO Music Department could have drawn such a chant from the vast repertory of the Roman Catholic Church. Webb's participation in preparing penitential music for the film, I argue in the chapter to follow, drew him into the larger, penitential project of the film as a whole.

For Lewton, the entire task of making horror films functioned as a strange duty. Lewton hated horror films. In a letter to his mother and sister, he complained that, “I’m to work on such wretched and uninteresting material.” Later he frets on what “making cheap things” will ultimately cost him. This lamentation runs throughout his correspondence with family, even leading him to defend the New York critics who wrote negative reviews of I Walked with a Zombie.

While The Leopard Man's climax unfolds against the backdrop of a penitential rite performed to atone for a slaughter of peaceful Puebloans by the conquistadors, the film itself can be seen as a sort of penitential rite for its makers. The film's violence is rooted in the creation of violent entertainment as a publicity stunt meant to advance an entertainer's career goes wrong. The result sees a leopard released into an unsuspecting community. A girlis killed, and a mild-mannered museum curator becomes homicidal after viewing the corpse. He then emulates the leopard's violence. By criticizing the field of entertainment and its production of unintended consequences through the manufacture of violent imagery, The Leopard Man functions as a form of penance for its reluctant makers. To achieve this strange end, the Lewton unit subverted horror genre conventions by creating a victimcentered horror film.

Producing a Victim-Centered Horror Film

Pre-production of The Leopard Man began in February 1943. By that time the box office reports on Cat People had begun flowing in. The news was good, maybe even astounding. Lewton's experiment in suggested horror had won favor with a massive audience.

RKO rewarded director Jacques Tourneur, who had by then already finished shooting I Walked with a Zombie, with a US$5,000 bonus and a contract sending him on to make “A” budget pictures upon completing a third film with Lewton. Lewton was not so fortunate.