This film holds up well as a good, basic thriller. It doesn't have the same kind of strange, mystical power of other Lewton films, but is effective at invoking the image of dark streets at night, when the most ordinary sidewalks and street lamps take on a sinister feeling. The most remarkable aspect is the surprisingly strong and unconcealed sexual motive for the killings. SPOILERS AHEAD: The murderer's confession at the end is reminiscent of the speech Peter Lorre makes to the kangaroo court in Lang's M. His compulsive, rambling confession has a strangely authentic quality, of the words spilling out awkwardly and spontaneously, trying to make sense of his crimes as much to himself, as well as justifying his actions to others. Though a blatantly sexual motive isn't mentioned, it's hard to interpret his words any other way, except as a twisted, rape sort of feeling. The photography is excellent and the performances at least adequate. Two sequences are especially effective, the young woman trapped in the locked cemetery, and the terrifying encounter of another girl with the escaped panther under a railroad bridge. This last sequence still has the power to unnerve the viewer sixty years later, and is one of the best of the Lewton "buses". This may seem petty, but at least two other viewers have commented on the same theme. The mean-spirited mother who refuses to pay any attention to her daughter's story of the escaped panther, and dismisses it as a lie to get out of going to the store, and then cruelly locks her out of the house, must be the most obnoxious mother outside of Cinderella. The younger brother mocks his sister's fear, by throwing the shadow puppet silhouette of a leopard's head on the wall of the kitchen, but is seen doing the same thing in the funeral parlor, where his sister is lying in her coffin. Whether this was intentional, or the child actor felt like doing it and didn't know the camera was on him, I don't know, but I found myself yelling at the DVD player, " That a..hole is still doing it! What the hell's the matter with you?" No one in the movie even seems to notice.