Why So Blu?

Harmony Korine, Val Lewton, Pabst & More Coming to The Criterion Collection October 2024

Coming in October from The Criterion Collection: I Walked with a Zombie / The Seventh Victim, a pair of moody horror milestones from visionary producer Val Lewton; Demon Pond, a folk-horror fantasia from Japanese New Wave renegade Masahiro Shinoda; and Gummo, a transgressive portrait of angelic and devilish souls in America’s rural underbelly from Harmony Korine. Plus: Pandora’s Box, a sensationally modern melodrama from master of early German cinema G. W. Pabst—now on Blu-ray. 

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I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE / THE SEVENTH VICTIM: PRODUCED BY VAL LEWTON

Terror lives in the shadows in a pair of mesmerizingly moody horror milestones 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, working with directors such as Jacques Tourneur and Mark Robson, 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 I Walked with a Zombie and the shockingly subversive The Seventh Victim are still-tantalizing dreams of death that dare to embrace the darkness.

I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE

1943 • 69 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • 1.37:1 aspect ratio 

Producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur elevated the horror film to new heights of poetic abstraction with this entrancing journey into the realm between life and death. When she takes a job caring for a comatose woman on a Caribbean island, a young nurse (Frances Dee) finds herself plunged into a mysterious world where the ghosts of slavery haunt the present and witch doctors have the power to summon the living dead. Sugarcane swaying in a moonlit field, the hypnotic beat of voodoo drums, the relentless pull toward death—the otherworldly atmosphere of this bold reimagining of Jane Eyre is as close as studio-era Hollywood ever came to pure dream-state surrealism.

THE SEVENTH VICTIM

1943 • 71 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • 1.37:1 aspect ratio 

“Death is good” is how producer Val Lewton summarized the message of his films, a credo that received its most explicit expression in this strikingly nihilistic shocker, the first film directed by regular Lewton editor Mark Robson. Kim Hunter makes her film debut as a young boarding-school student who, in search of her missing sister (proto-goth icon Jean Brooks), travels to New York’s bohemian Greenwich Village, where she uncovers a sinister shadow world of devil worshippers and murder. And what about that mysterious room furnished with nothing but a chair and a hangman’s noose? With its daring treatment of depression and queerness, The Seventh Victim has haunted the margins of cinema for decades, its radical bleakness undiminished by time.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restorations of both films, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks
• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the films and one Blu-ray with the films and special features
• Audio commentary on I Walked with a Zombie featuring authors Kim Newman and Stephen Jones
• Audio commentary on The Seventh Victim featuring film historian Steve Haberman
• Interview with film critic and historian Imogen Sara Smith
• Audio essays from Adam Roche’s podcast The Secret History of Hollywood
• Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy (2005), a documentary featuring Newman; Val E. Lewton, son of producer Val Lewton; filmmakers William Friedkin, Guillermo del Toro, George A. Romero, John Landis, and Robert Wise; author Neil Gaiman; actor Sara Karloff; and others
• Trailers
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: Essays by critics Chris Fujiwara and Lucy Sante

Available October 8, 2024

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PANDORA’S BOX

1929 • 141 minutes • Black & White • Silent • German intertitles with optional English subtitles • 1.33:1 aspect ratio

One of the masters of early German cinema, G. W. Pabst seemed to have an innate talent for discovering actresses. And perhaps none of his female stars shone brighter than Kansas native and onetime Ziegfeld girl Louise Brooks, whose legendary persona was defined by Pabst’s lurid, controversial melodrama Pandora’s Box. Sensationally modern, the film follows the downward spiral of the fiery, brash, yet innocent showgirl Lulu, whose sexual vivacity has a devastating effect on everyone around her. Daring and stylish, Pandora’s Box is one of silent cinema’s great masterworks and a testament to Brooks’s dazzling individuality.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 2K digital restoration
• Four musical scores, by Gillian Anderson, Dimitar Pentchev, Peer Raben, and Stéphan Oliva
• Audio commentary by film scholars Thomas Elsaesser and Mary Ann Doane
• Louise Brooks: Looking for Lulu (1998), a documentary by Hugh Munro Neeley
• Lulu in Berlin (1971), a rare interview with actor Louise Brooks, by Richard Leacock and Susan Steinberg Woll
• Interviews with Leacock and Michael Pabst, director G. W. Pabst’s son
• PLUS: An essay by critic J. Hoberman, notes on the scores, Kenneth Tynan’s 1979 “The Girl in the Black Helmet” (Blu-ray edition), and an article by Brooks on her relationship with Pabst (Blu-ray edition)

Available October 15, 2024

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DEMON POND

1979 • 124 minutes • Color • Monaural • In Japanese with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio 

Japanese New Wave renegade Masahiro Shinoda transforms a classic Kabuki tale with his own extravagant visual style in this dimension-shattering folk-horror fantasia. When a lone traveler (Tsutomu Yamazaki) stumbles upon a remote, drought-stricken village, he finds himself engulfed in a whirlpool of myth, mystery, and magic: in a nearby pond reside spirits who hold the fate of the town’s inhabitants—including lovers Akira (Go Kato) and Yuri (Kabuki legend Tamasaburo Bando, who also plays the ethereal princess reigning over the water)—in their hands. Set to the swirling strains of electronic-music pioneer Isao Tomita’s synth score, Demon Pond blends theatrical artifice with cinematic surrealism for an aquatic-apocalyptic fable of human love and folly caught in the current of nature’s wrath.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• 4K digital restoration, supervised by director Masahiro Shinoda and actor Tamasaburo Bando, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
• New interview with film scholar Dudley Andrew
• Program on the film’s special effects
• PLUS: An essay by film critic Michael Atkinson

Available October 15, 2024

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GUMMO

1997 • 89 minutes • Color • 2.0 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

Harmony Korine’s debut feature is an audacious, lyrical evocation of America’s rural underbelly, and an elegy in the southern-gothic tradition of William Faulkner and William Eggleston. Shot in Korine’s native Nashville—standing in for the tornado-ravaged Xenia, Ohio—the rough-hewn film follows two young friends, Tummler and Solomon, as they ride around town, huffing glue and hunting stray cats, their every local encounter charged with vaudevillian anarchy as well as deep pathos. At once transgressive and empathetic, disturbing and undeniably beautiful, Gummo is a one-of-a-kind portrait of angelic and devilish souls caught in a cultural void, circumscribed by poverty and the depleted, alienated spiritual life of late-twentieth-century America.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director Harmony Korine, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
• New interview with Korine
• Conversation from 1997 between Korine and filmmaker Werner Herzog
• Projections episode from 2000 featuring Korine in conversation with Split Screen host John Pierson
• Trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An appreciation by filmmaker Hype Williams

Available October 22, 2024