The Leopard Man

The Leopard Man is a 1943 American black-and-white horror film directed by Jacques Tourneur and produced by Val Lewton at RKO Radio Pictures, in which killings in a small New Mexico town are first blamed on an escaped black leopard and then traced to a human killer using the cat as an alibi. It was the third and final film Tourneur directed for Lewton, after Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943).^{1 • 2}

Production

RKO bought the rights to Woolrich's novel for $5,175 and assigned them to Lewton, who had just completed Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie. Pre-production began in February 1943, by which time the box-office returns on Cat People had confirmed that Lewton's low-budget "suggested horror" formula had found a large audience. RKO rewarded Tourneur, who had already finished shooting I Walked with a Zombie, with a $5,000 bonus and a contract for A-budget pictures once he completed a third film with Lewton.^{8 • 9}

Adaptation and censorship. Screenwriters Ardel Wray and Edward Dein changed Woolrich's text to keep costs low and sidestep the censors. In the novel, set in South America, Clo-Clo was a part-time prostitute and the killer was unmasked as a police inspector who adorned himself with animal parts cut from the carcass of an escaped jaguar (not a leopard), details that would have violated the Production Code. The film's exteriors were shot around Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Wray's snapshots of local buildings were used by the RKO art department as references for the sets.⁴

The leopard. The cat, named Dynamite, was the same animal used in Cat People.⁶

Style and reception

The film is built on the Lewton unit's signature method of implying horror rather than showing it: shadows, sound, and suggestion carry the menace. The Teresa Delgado sequence, in which a girl is sent on a nighttime errand with a killer cat on the loose, is the film's most cited set piece, and the cemetery chase turns a space legible by daylight into a maze of statuary and branches. Sound design is equally central, from the train that passes above Teresa to the castanets that function as a leitmotif throughout the film.^{4 • 6 • 7}

The climax takes place during a Penitente religious procession commemorating local indigenous people killed by conquistadors in the seventeenth century, for which composer Roy Webb wrote an original penitential chant rather than drawing on the existing Roman Catholic repertory. Critics have read the film as a victim-centered horror film that develops the personalities and family circumstances of its three female victims before their deaths, and as a forerunner of the giallo and slasher traditions; the film critic and later director William Friedkin recorded a commentary for its 2020 Scream Factory Blu-ray release.^{8 • 6 • 10}

Contemporary and later assessments differ. Variety found the plot too confused for an audience to follow, and Bosley Crowther of The New York Times gave it one and a half stars out of five, calling it a half-baked effort; later critics such as those at Slant Magazine and Time Out have ranked it among the high points of the Lewton-Tourneur cycle. Both Tourneur and Lewton themselves considered the film a failure relative to their two earlier collaborations.^{5 • 11}

Place in the Lewton-Tourneur cycle

The Leopard Man closed the partnership: RKO decided to assign producer and director to separate projects to double output, reasoning that did not account for how their talents complemented each other. Tourneur described the collaboration by saying, "Val was the dreamer, the idealist, and I was the materialist, the realist." Lewton went on to produce The Seventh Victim (1943) and later films with Boris Karloff, while Tourneur moved into film noir with Out of the Past (1947).⁴

Within the trilogy, the film departs from its predecessors by denying the viewer any fixed character identification and by shifting the supernatural mystery of Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie toward a human killer, a reorientation that festival retrospectives have described as an important stage in Tourneur's engagement with genre.²

References

1. The Leopard Man (1943), British Film Institute
2. The Leopard Man, Viennale (Vienna International Film Festival), Retrospektive 2018
3. The Leopard Man (1943), AFI Catalog of Feature Films
4. Bret Wood, "The Leopard Man," Turner Classic Movies
5. The Leopard Man, Rotten Tomatoes
6. Chloe Lizotte, "The Leopard Man," Screen Slate, December 16, 2018
7. Ed Gonzalez, "Review: The Leopard Man," Slant Magazine, June 22, 2004
8. Michael Lee, "The Leopard Man as Penitential Horror Film," in Music in the Horror Films of Val Lewton (Edinburgh University Press, 2022)
9. The Leopard Man (1943): Dated and Over-rated, FilmsNoir.Net
10. Leopard Man, The (Blu-ray Review), The Digital Bits
11. Cinemateca Portuguesa-Museu do Cinema program notes for The Leopard Man

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Horror films (individual works) › Monster and creature films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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