"The enemy of art is the absence of limitations." — Orson Welles

“I like the dark. It’s friendly.” — Simone Simon as Irena Dubrovna

In 1942 at RKO Pictures, Orson Welles had been given the boot by the studio’s top brass because he cost the studio too much money, on movies they could not figure out how to sell to the public. It was a dismal end compared to the fanfare that greeted his arrival in Hollywood in 1939, when the sky was the proverbial limit to what he would accomplish. But RKO was battle-scarred having suffered the full wrath of the William Randolph Hearst publicity machine over their objections to Citizen Kane, while The Magnificent Ambersons was all but junked in a panic over its length and sophistication. RKO was now determined to do things differently—to rein in costs and start churning out movies without the controversial flair that Welles brought to his projects. The new motto at the studio after Welles left was “showmanship in place of genius” – a direct rebuke to Welles the troublemaker. Around the same time that Welles was finished there, a writer from New York named Val Lewton was hired to helm a string of B horror pictures to compete with the highly popular Universal horror films. These films would be made quickly, for very little money, and would have really silly titles whenever possible. But the ironic thing, and something that no one at RKO expected, is that Lewton was a serious artist, almost as revolutionary as Welles was, in terms of what he brought to a genre that no one expected anything from except cheap thrills and a good time.