And it might even become a screenplay and get nominated for a Writer's Guild Award

For the first time in months, I dreamed of watching a movie which does not exist and I especially resent it because it was a Val Lewton. In keeping with the RKO tradition of spooky titles and no budget, it was called The Colder House and recalled The Ghost Ship (1943) and The Curse of the Cat People (1944) with its child protagonist sent to live with her distant, Gothically ill-reputed relatives somewhere coastal in New England and its suggestion that the seafaring men of this once prominent, now much diminished family—a couple of aunts and one uncle rattling around eccentrically in the kind of house that was built in the heyday of the China clippers, the nephew returned wounded from the Pacific theater and failing badly to connect with the girl he sort of left behind him—are some kind of weather-witch, hence their legendary ability to ride out the roughest seas and storms, but it's also claimed locally that the family's fortunes fell when one of them misused his powers to drown a rival in romance and trade and part of the survivor's guilt haunting the young man who talks more to his gravely listening ten-year-old cousin than to anyone else in town is the conviction that he should have been able to prevent the Halsey's Typhoon-style disaster that still wakes him with nightmares of the destroyer tearing itself apart in the gale, the sharks afterward tearing his shipmates apart. I remember the protagonist frightened and fascinated by the terrible stories, not fully understanding what she's doing as she goes from relative to relative, trying to piece together this history that might run as far back as the seventeenth century and diffuses in all directions into rumors and secrets and half-guarded shames; I remember her uncle's awkward hesitation when she coaxes him to give her a sunny day by the sea and one of the aunts tartly scolding both of them, "If he's sober enough, he'll know better, and if he isn't—" the implication in the long-suffering shake of her head that it's no use asking him drunk, another plausible deniability of the powers that the family itself believes in whether the audience agrees or not. Even the finale leaves the question open, although I know the conclusion I would draw from an improbable storm-tossed rescue that ends under a clearing sky. I don't see how the film could really have been made in 1946 after Charles Koerner—Lewton's champion at RKO—had died, but I was tremendously excited to catch it on TCM because it had been recently restored from long-missing elements and therefore I could enjoy, unique among films of the Lewton unit, the enigmatically lensed epilogue, fading into color as if hand-tinted which made it look as nostalgic as an old family album. Most of the rest of it was atmospherically shadowy, white-curling seascapes mingled with noir-lit studio sets. I recognized none of the actors while asleep, but I would hope that Skelton Knaggs at least played some kind of tide-haunting fisherman.