Films at the Edge of Memory

To-day I read "Dark Adapted Eyes", the new Caitlin R. Kiernan story in the Sirenia Digest. It's a treat for anyone obsessed with film and film history. It presents a story, told with one conventional narrative scene, one article, and one interview, about a lost film called Dark Adapted Eyes. The first part, the third person part with dialogue, is set in a diner in L.A. and has a nice old L.A. feel to it. One of the characters mentions going to Tower Records so it must be set many years ago, I'm guessing the '80s.

Caitlin works in a lot of Hollywood trivia knowledge. This lost film is supposedly a 1952 Hammer movie directed by Jacques Tourneur that resembles Alien so much that people talk about it as an influence. 1952 would've been years before Hammer became famous as a horror studio and Tourneur was working in Hollywood at the time (Hammer is a British studio). In fact, in 1952, Tourneur was making Way of the Gaucho in Argentina (or possibly his 1953 film Appointment in Honduras). But it's part of the story that it would have been impossible for Tourneur to have directed the movie and it's stated that Tourneur even denied directing it. All these little problems, though, help give it the quality of some incredible, obscure movie. It sort of reminds of learning about Luis Bunuel's Robinson Crusoe. The story sure gave be some California nostalgia.