Valley of the Zombies (1946)

You just don't associate Republic Pictures with horror movies. They made just about every other type of B-movie: westerns, detective stories, dramas, crime movies.  Especially westerns.  Not to mention serials.  But horror featured very rarely in their output - that was usually the preserve of Universal's B unit, Columbia or kings of poverty row, Monogram, all of whom knocked out low budget horror flicks by the dozen.  To be sure, Republic's serials often featured the fantastical - increasingly tending toward science fiction subjects post-war - and they did put out an adaptation of Kurt Siodmak's novel 'Donovan's Brain' in the forties, titled The Monster and the Lady, but, along with The Crimes of Dr Crespi (1932), Valley of the Zombies (1946) was one of only two straightforward horror films that the studio produced.  This lack of experience in the field may well account for the film's shortcomings as a horror movie.  Of course, it doesn't help that the title itself is inaccurate on several counts, namely that there is only one zombie in the film and he's less of a zombie than a vampire.  Even back in the forties, long before the modern cinematic conception of the zombie as a decomposing flesh-eating ghoul had been established, horror audiences would already have had a pretty fixed idea of what a movie zombie should be like: a shambling walking corpse with staring eyes and no will of its own.  Valley of the Zombie's Ormand Murks (Ian Keith), however, looks and behaves far more like a vampire - returned from the dead, he sustains himself via transfusions of blood taken from victims and is an intelligent and cunning operator, fully in control of his own actions.  (Interestingly, Keith was later to be mooted as a possible Dracula, before Bela Lugosi reclaimed the role, for 1948's Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein).

Not only is the film confused as to the nature of its monster, but stylistically, it doesn't really look or feel like the mainstream B-horrors being produced by other studios.  To be fair, its production values are, for a B-movie, reasonably high, (much higher than a Monogram picture) and is very slickly directed, smoothly moving through its fifty six minutes of running time.  But it just doesn't feel like a horror film.  It feels far more like one of those macabre mystery pictures that like to tease the audience that it might involve the supernatural, but which always have a rational explanation.  The fact that the main protagonists are a cross-talking duo of doctor and nurse, reinforces the mystery movie feeling, giving the impression that the writers were, perhaps, trying for a Thin Man-type vibe with its male/female crime solving team set up.  These two also find themselves constantly hampered by a couple of bone-headed police detectives who naturally suspect them of being behind the vampire-style murders, with the victims left drained of blood.  Eventually, the action moves to a spooky old house and its crypts, before returning to the city for a distinctly crime-movie style denouement on a rooftop.  Overall, the closest equivalent, in terms of the film's feel and style, that I can think of are the films in Universal's brief 'I Love a Mystery' series (derived from a long-running radio series), which were in production at around the same time and also liked to use the trappings of the horror genre to dress up their mysteries.

Valley of the Zombies isn't exactly a bad film.  On the contrary, it is quite entertaining and features performances and dialogue somewhat superior to those found in contemporary horror films from other studios.  But it just isn't really a horror film, despite the blood-drinking depravities of its villain, never really giving the audience much in the way of suspense, shudders or shocks.  Directed by John Ford's nephew Philip, it's a very smoothly put together distraction for an hour or so, though.