Onetime railroad engineer and factory worker, bilingual novelist, short-story writer, film director, and screenwriter, German-born Curt Siodmak made his mark in American cinema in the low-budget horror and science-fiction film genres. Siodmak has been responsible for terrorizing the adolescent imaginations of five generations of viewers.

Siodmak is best known as a writer of the fantastic, both in his novels and in such well-known motion pictures as The Wolf Man (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and The Beast with Five Fingers (1947). His films are known for their strange, exotic settings, cursed but sympathetic heroes, and such creatures as werewolves, zombies, and vampires. Siodmak has shown that the horror film can be literate and imaginative without resorting to exploitive thrills or unnecessary gore or violence.

Kurt (as his name was originally spelled) was born in Dresden just after the turn of the century. The son of Leipzig banker Ignatz and...