Jacques Tourneur's last film for producer Val Lewton was based on a Cornell Woolrich thriller set in a New Mexico town, where a series of murders seem to be the work of a leopard escaped from a sideshow. Seem to be... Manny Farber, one of Val Lewton's original and ardent supporters, wrote in 1951 of The Leopard Man, "This fairly early peak example of (Lewton's) talent is a nerve-twitching whodunit giving the creepy impression that human beings and 'things' are interchangeable and almost synonymous and that both are pawns of a bizarre and terrible destiny. A lot of Surrealists like Cocteau have tried for the same supernatural effects.... Val Lewton's film shows a way to tell a story about people that isn't dominated by the activity, weight, size, and pace of the human figure. In one segment of the film, a small, frightened senorita walks beyond the edge of the border town and then back again, while her feelings and imagination keep shifting with the camera into sagebrush, the darkness of an arroyo, crackling pebbles underfoot, and so on, until you see her thick dark blood oozing under the front door of her house. All the psychological effects...were transformed by Jacques Tourneur into nonhuman components of the picture as the girl waited for some noncorporeal manifestation of nature, culture, or history to gobble her up."