A few days ago, I picked up a boxed set of movies produced by Val Lewton. Val Lewton? I think it was Martin Scorsese who said that there were three geniuses in the history of the movies: Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney and Val Lewton. At the time when the classic horror films of Dracula, The Wolfman and Frankenstein were being produced, Val Lewton was producing movies on an extremely limited budget, without big name stars. What he produced were a series of classic and near-classic horror movies with no special effects, and no "Monsters." The terror was created by lighting, photographs, music and editing, usually with the cause of the terror never shown.

Last night, I watched The Leopard Man. Like most of Lewton's movies, the title was far more sensational than the movie. (For example, The Ghost Ship doesn't have a ghost on it.) And The Leopard Man doesn't have a hokey half leaopard, half man. A leopard escapes from a traveling sideshow in a small mexican town and eludes capture at the beginning of the movie. Early in the film, there is an unforgettable scene... one I remember seeing as a kid, without remembering anything else about the movie, or the title of the movie.
A young girl is sent out by her Mother to buy some corn meal and because she is afraid of the dark, the Mother tells her that she is going to lock the door and won't let the girl in until she comes back with the corn meal. When the girl is returning to her house, she is chased by the leopard (although you don't see the leopard chasing her.) When she gets to the door, she starts beating on it, begging her Mother to open it. Her Mother thinks that she is just making things up, until she hears a lot of growling and screaming. By the time she gets to the door, a stream of blood flows out from underneath the door and there is only silence. That scene scared the Hell out of me as a kid. And yet everything was only suggested. But, I never forgot it. As it turns out, two of the other unforgettable scenes in movies that are burned into my brain are from two other Val Lewton movies... The Body Snatcher, with Bellas Lugosi, and The Cat People.

Not every unforgettable scene is from a horror movie... I'll add some others... one I just saw on Turner Classics, this morning. You may have already forgotten my unforgettable scenes, and have others of your own. How about rummaging through those dusty corners of your mind and re-running an unforgettable scene of yours?

Jerry