Lights Out

What's missing from the Blu-ray of Jacques Tourneur's The Fearmakers.

There’s a million ways to start a movie, but also only one: by turning on the lights. In the pre-credits sequence of his 1958 conspiracy thriller The Fearmakers, Jacques Tourneur does it with typically deft sleight-of-hand—fading in gradually enough that the image arrives in stages, but fast enough there’s no time to wonder if there’s an unseen character at the controls or if it’s the director himself who has flipped the switch.

Briefly, the light is all we see. Or rather, what we see is part of the interior of a disc-shaped light fitting, a narrow ellipsis that hovers like a flying saucer at the top of the otherwise pitch-black frame. Then the light gets brighter, incandescent, so the exterior of the fitting is briefly visible while the bulb at its centre vanishes into whiteness (if it needs saying, the film is in black-and-white throughout). By now we can make out the essentials of the shadowy scene below: a silhouetted figure is slumped in the foreground with his head bowed, the light beaming down on him from directly above.