The story of Bedlam (1946) is the story of a collaboration between two masters of horror, whose careers intersected just as they were both beginning to despair of the genre into which they’d been trapped. Boris Karloff was secretly a wonderful actor typecast as a gargoyle. Val Lewton was a brilliant producer banished to the least reputable unit at RKO studios. Forced to collaborate by larger forces, they produced a forgotten classic of the horror genre, albeit one that both men would repeatedly insist was not a horror film.
Lewton was a veteran screenwriter who found himself in charge of the horror unit at RKO, making silk purse films out of sow’s ear titles like Curse of the Cat People (1944) and I Walked With a Zombie (1943). In this role, his creative freedom was simultaneously vast and severely curtailed; the studio didn’t care at all what was in the movies that he made (so long as they came in on time and under budget), but he was forced to start with cringe-worthy, proto-clickbait titles that practically screamed “lurid exploitation.”
Instead, Lewton’s artistic aspirations (and budgetary restrictions) led him to pioneer a new kind of horror film. While nominally a producer, Lewton also had substantial directorial input as well as writing or ghostwriting all of his films’ screenplays. Under his aegis, RKO’s horror unit began to produce sophisticated, atmospheric tales of terror, more film noir thriller than monster mash. This direction was a direct counterpoint to Universal’s popular monster franchises, which Lewton dismissed as “silly films where a werewolf chases a girl up a tree.” Lewton’s films were Edgar Allan Poe in a world of EC Comics, so imagine his terror when RKO brass called to tell him they’d hired a him new star: no less than Boris Karloff, Mr. Universal Monsters himself.
As it turned out, though, Karloff had no interest in reliving his makeup-caked past. His turn as Frankenstein’s Monster made his career; but it also typecast a charming, sensitive performer as an all-purpose ghoul. Karloff, a dedicated jobbing actor, would play any role that paid his bills, but he longed for an opportunity to flex his creative muscles and play a character with real texture. Working with the self-consciously literary Lewton, he finally got the chance. Karloff turned in wonderful, layered characterizations in both The Body Snatcher (1945) and Isle of the Dead (1945), but his own favorite of his films with Lewton would be Bedlam, a film about the first wave of mental healthcare reform in Enlightenment England. It may not sound like the ideal backdrop for a horror film, and indeed Karloff and Lewton consciously decided that it wouldn’t be one. Instead, both of the film’s creative forces decided to film a historical drama.
Today, those genres wouldn’t be mutually exclusive; but in the 1940s, horror films were B-pictures, regardless of quality, while historical dramas were prestige productions. Even though Karloff and Lewton were working with a B-level budget, they were determined to turn in A-level work. Snatcher and Isle had both been classy productions, but Bedlam was painstakingly researched, and many of its characters are based on real historical figures (at least one character, John Wilkes, was a real person). Such was his dedication to research that Lewton originally wanted to forgo credit for his screenplay for Bedlam in lieu of citing the documents he used to write it.
So, yeah, Bedlam is indeed a historical drama. It’s well-researched, well-written, and especially well-acted. But, with apologies to Messrs. Karloff and Lewton, it’s also a horror picture. It can’t help but to be one, because the historical facts themselves form such a terrifying narrative. The real Bedlam was founded as The Priory of the New Order of St. Mary of Bethlem in 1247 in London. Originally a religious order ministering to the poor, it was eventually re-purposed as a rudimentary psychiatric hospital, the first of its kind in Europe. Unfortunately, a combination of ignorance and callous greed allowed the institution to devolve into an involuntary freakshow, with administrators charging fees to allow visitors to gawk at the patients.
In the film, Karloff plays such an administrator, and it’s the combination of his callous treatment of his charges and his own amoral social climbing that generate the story’s horror elements. As Master George Sims, Karloff is greasily charming to his social betters, while displaying at best icy indifference and at worst utter malevolence to those in his “care.” He casually threatens them with personalized tortures, but as is typical of Lewton’s films, we don’t see that firsthand. Instead, we see the terror of the inmates over whom he reigns like a petty king, and we’re forced to imagine the unspeakable horrors of his “hospital.”
Bedlam’s protagonist is Nell Bowen (Anna Lee), a social rival of Sims whom he manages to commit to his asylum. She, along with the audience, initially assumes that the horror of Bedlam lies in being trapped alongside its bestial occupants, but we quickly learn that isn’t the case. In fact, it’s much worse: many of Sims’ “beasts” were once functioning people, and their current state is a direct result of his malevolent “care.” Dan the Dog cowers like an abused pet, Tom the Tiger paces in his cage, and Dorothea the Dove is only peaceful in that she’s been traumatized to the point of catatonia.
Instead of asking us to fear the insane as a menacing other, Bedlam forces us to confront the fragility of our own sanity. Indeed, Lewton credits — literally, in the opening titles — a series of engravings called A Rake’s Progress as his inspiration for Bedlam. These images depict the deterioration of a once-healthy young man, as his choices result in alcoholism, crushing debt, venereal disease, and finally incarceration at Bedlam. This emphasis on the precariousness of sanity is probably somewhat biographical. According to some sources, Lewton himself was an ailurophobe, and all sources agree that he suffered from insomnia, had an active persecution complex, and couldn’t stand to be touched. Due to his obsessive research, Lewton had to have understood that the fears and anxieties that plagued him could have, in Bedlam’s heyday, been used to label him a dangerous maniac and justify his indefinite incarceration.
In the end, Bedlam was and wasn’t a success. Karloff and Lewton absolutely succeeded in creating a film that was every inch a historical drama, and it got very good reviews. Unfortunately, it lost money at the box office, the one unforgivable sin for a B-picture. As a result, RKO’s tolerance for Lewton’s quality-conscious house style vanished, and he with it; he left RKO, and his career never recovered. Karloff, conversely, enjoyed something of a career resurgence. Although he’d still play two-dimensional heavies until his death, he also got a number of choice parts in Roger Corman’s Poe adaptations, as well as what would have to be his second most iconic role as The Grinch that so memorably Stole Christmas.
Even today, Bedlam remains relatively unknown to horror aficionados, even within the Lewton canon, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s not as sexy as Cat People (1941) or as atmospheric as I Walked With a Zombie, and it’s as slow-paced as it is sinister (at least until the final reel). It’s also an undeniably fascinating filmic artifact, a relic of a blessed partnership between two genre giants who refused to be known as cheap ghouls. Knowing that they had to fight tooth and nail to make a sensitive, stylish piece of art like Bedlam, it’s hard to argue that they didn’t deserve better. It’s hard to argue that Hollywood deserved them.
