| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Icons of Grief: Val Lewton's Home Front Pictures. By Alexander Nemerov. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. xii, 213 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 0-520-24099-5. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-520-24100-2.)

Early on in Cat People, an elegant 1942 horror film, the Serbian émigrée Irena tells her American suitor Oliver why she has chosen to lead a solitary life in America: "I fled from the past. Some things you could never know of ... or understand. Evil things. Evil!" The central horror conceit of murderous feline transformation will eventually explain Irena's exclamation, but the role of Serbia in the origins of World War I and its status as a German puppet state in World War II would likely make a 1942 audience assume specific historical knowledge of the evil left behind. Cat People was the first of nine low-budget but artistically ambitious horror films that the Russian émigré Val Lewton produced from 1942 to 1946. In Icons of Grief, Alexander Nemerov proposes that the real horror of World War II haunts Lewton's fictional horrors: "In movies celebrated for their portrayal of the unseen, the war is the singular beast" (p. 1).

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