Literary Nonfiction. Film Studies. This collection of interviews, essays and commentary on acclaimed director Curtis Harrington—whose films include Usher, Night Tide, What's the Matter with Helen? and The Killing Kind—seeks to illuminate the sinister chiaroscuro of his films. Interviews with Harrington and Dennis Hopper, tributes by Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters, and critical essays by Edward Crouse offer a comprehensive glimpse at Harrington's films, and the man himself. Harrington's films, in editor Amy Greenfield's words, depict "a sometimes gaudy, sometimes elegant, sometimes ordinary daily world within which lurks a savage and mysterious poetry, which, even at the moment when the glimmerings of his character's spirits seem to be stamped out, ignites the screen and calls us toward the unseen through a cinema which can instill objects with magic—the magic of a child's belief in the life of objects and the tribal belief in the life of images."