Cat People

Cat People is one of the horror genre's most influential films, it's one of the first psychological horrors or at least one of the first to play on the fears of the audience. But Cat People is more than just an influential film, it's also a great one and holds up terrifically well.

It's very well made, with beautiful cinematography and great and effective use of shadows and shadowy lighting. The sets are also hauntingly sumptuous. Cat People has a haunting music score and a very intelligent script that has a good amount of tension as well as a bit of subtle wit. The story, and the atmosphere it has, is one of the main reasons why Cat People works so well, this is more than a monster/ghost feature, this is more a psychological horror that relies on suspense and playing on the audience's fear. Both of which Cat People does splendidly, the suspense in the best parts is positively nerve-shredding and the whole film has a constant eeriness that makes it creepy without resulting to cheap shocks, jump scares or gore. For me the two most effective scenes have always been with the pool and the walk through the park, the latter being justifiably famous and contains a very clever "false shock". It's beautifully directed by Jacques Tourneur, the characters are interesting and the acting is mostly solid if not the best, with Simone Simon being superb. Simon brings a sensuality, menace and poignancy to her role, that makes her presence chillingly mysterious but at times moving. Tom Conway does just fine too.

If there is anything to criticise, Kent Smith is very stiff here. Other than that Cat People is great, both of its genre and as a film in general. 9/10 Bethany Cox

At the zoo, Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) sees the mysterious Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon), who is sketching a black panther. He's intrigued by her--it seems to be love at first sight--and is surprised when she invites him into her apartment for a cup of tea. While in her apartment, he sees an odd statue of a man on horseback, holding a sword-skewered cat high in the air. Dubrovna tells him of her native Serbia, and the legend of unchristian "cat people" who were driven into the mountains. Dubrovna's behavior becomes increasingly odd, and animals often react strangely to her. Could she have something to do with the legend of the cat people?

This was director Jacques Tourneur and producer Val Lewton's first horror/thriller film together (they were to do two others together, I Walked With A Zombie (1943) and The Leopard Man (1943)), and for my money, this is the best of the three. Lewton was famous for understated, atmospheric horror that suggested more than it showed, a style that is also evident in his later collaborations with director Robert Wise (who went on to direct the infamous The Haunting (1963), which is often thought to be a pinnacle of this more "suggestive" style, although it's not a particular favorite of mine).

So what does this mean? Well, a lot of younger horror fans, for whom the oldest film that they are really familiar with in the genre is something like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) or an even more recent film, might be reluctant to call Cat People a horror film. It is "talky", doesn't contain any graphic violence, and we don't even see a horror creature/villain until just a glimpse near the very end of the film. But it is horror--the talking is centered on a captivating supernatural "myth", there are a lot of creepy, well-photographed scenes laden with heavy shadows, there are a couple exquisite chase/suspense scenes, and there is a lot of complex, dark psychological interaction.

The psychological tension is really the focus, as Lewton and Tourneur's films together are moral parables that function more as a metaphor for horror (rather than the more common flipside, where the horror is more prominent and might be a metaphor for some other kind of philosophical point). In this case, the moral and social situations are varied and complex, but are all focused on romantic relationships, ranging from quick actions taken due to lust, to emotional distancing, adultery and abuse of power. The more one watches the film, the more one is likely to get out of the subtextual messages. They remain more subtextual than they might in modern cinema because of content restrictions imposed by studios in this era (although of course those were a reaction to prevalent cultural attitudes at the time). But in retrospect, the buried nature of the themes is a benefit, at least in this case.

Occasionally, the horrific aspect of these types of films can be too understated, so that they simply become realist dramas. That's not the case here. This is a film that is rewarding on many levels.

A 9 out of 10 from me.

I have this theory about the horror films of Val Lewton. It is my contention that these movies caused a sea change in the content and tone of the movies of Alfred Hitchcock. The reason I say this is simple, really: Lewton is the only filmmaker I have ever caught Hitchcock cribbing scenes from. He did it twice. Once from The Seventh Victim (dir. by Mark Robson), which I swear to god provides the first half of the Shower Scene from Psycho. The second from Cat People, which provided the pet store scene in The Birds. This second scene is almost a shot for shot swipe. Both of these steals are evidence that Hitch knew and admired the Lewton movies. More than that, though, there is a change in the subtext of Hitchcock's thrillers after the Lewton movies. The movies he made before them were cut from the Fritz Lang mold of political thrillers. After the Lewton movies, Hitch's movies became more psychosexual in nature. Vertigo, for instance, could easily fit into Lewton's output.

Cat People is the first of the Lewton movies and sets the tone for them. It pretends to be about a McGuffin (serbian were -panthers), but is actually about something else (in this case, frigidity and repressed lesbianism). This represents a huge change in the evolution of the horror movie. Cat People is the first horror movie to explore these themes as central concerns rather than as sub-rosa undercurrents. It also pioneered the techniques of film noir (which as a genre didn't really exist yet). Cat People is strikingly stylized and its effect is of stranding the viewer in the middle of a darkened room with some dreadful beast circling just outside his sphere of perception. This has a hell of an impact--particularly if you have the good fortune to see this in a theater. I'm not going to claim that Cat People is one of the best horror movies ever made (it does have flaws), but it is one of the four most influential horror movies ever made (along with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Psycho, and Night of the Living Dead). But unlike its brethren, its influence spreads corrosively through the entirety of cinema through both film noir and the films of Alfred Hitchcock. You would be hard pressed to find any film short of Citizen Kane or Rashomon that is nearly as influential.

One doesn't want for a second to take credit away from screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen, one of the most intelligent scenarists the horror film evr had the benefit of. But it's a matter of record that producer Val Lewton, here as on all his horror pictures, was responsible for the initial premise and the screenplay's final draft. And one wonders how much of Lewton - one of those male writers who tended to form his most empathetic bond with his female characters - there is in Irene: like him an eastern european immigrant (she from Serbia, he from Russia, albeit second generation he grew up in an essentially Russian household) living in the very different world of 40's America, both hyper-sensitive (particularly over morbid fantasies regarding cats) and artists of an essentially solitary and modest nature, but prone to fits of violent temper. Certainly, Irene is one of the most vivid and haunting protagonists any horror film ever had. Some critics may disparage the film as inferior to its follow-up, 'I Walked With a Zombie', but although that's a more completely achieved work, none of its characters captures the imagination as Irene does. One scarcely needs to heap more praise on the most celebrated suspense sequences, but the rest of the movie is more than just a set-up for these. It is, for one thing, oneof the supreme evocations of spiritual loneliness in the cinema. As Irene huddles by the doorknob between her and husband Oliver, while the panther in the nearby zoo calls out through the wintery night, this is an evocation of an isolation more than merely physical and tragically irrevocable. Lewton also had on his side, in this instance, the best of his directors, Jacques Tourneur, a sensualist (which could scarecely be said of his successors, Mark Robson and Robert Wise) who makes of the story a sort of tactile poem in the textures of the black fur of Irene's coat, the silk of her stockings, the flakes of falling snow on Irene and Oliver's wedding night, the wet tarmac across which Jane Randolph has to make her scary walk home, the ebony of an Egyptian cat-statue, the fabric of a couch torn by Irene's fingernails, the white enamel of Irene's bath-tub and the gleaming dusky hunch of her wet shoulders as she sits weeping within. This is a subtle movie, but also an intensely physical one. If there is a weak spot, it lies with the casting of Kent Smith as 'good plain Americano' Oliver Reed. His boy next door charm is hopelessly inadequate to the context of Irene's drama and he increasingly seems doltish and blindly insensitive in the blandness of his responses to her torment. The film might have been greater still if Lewton had cast an edgier, fierier actor, one whose incomprehension of Irene might have betrayed its own violent streak and extended the 'cat people' metaphor beyond Irene herself. Think of someone like John Garfield in the role! But Garfield would have been out of Lewton's budget range and one can scarcely harangue the producer for being too modest, in the production of his first quickie horror, for fully grasping how rich a work of film poetry he and his collaborators were in the process of creating. But poetry it is. The horror genre has never produced as much of that as it ought to have done, so for heaven's sake, make the most of this and the other Lewton productions.

'Cat People' was the first collaboration between director Jacques Tourneur ('Curse Of The Demon') and producer Val Lewton, and is still one of their greatest achievements, and one of the most influential horror movies ever made. It's arguably the best horror movie made between the Universal classics of the 1930s and the beginning of Hammer studios in the 1950s. So many subsequent film makers from Hitchcock on down have been influenced by this movie and yet it rarely gets the respect it deserves. 'Cat People' pretends to be a monster movie but is really something more complex, and relies on atmosphere and suspense rather than explicit shocks or gore (there is virtually none of the latter). Fans of Hitchcock and film noir will probably appreciate it more than hardcore gorehounds. Simone Simon is very well cast as the mysterious and troubled Irena and the rest of the cast range from adequate to very good. The acting is probably one of the weakest links in the film but not enough to spoil your enjoyment (I think 1940s acting is an acquired taste and I can see how a modern viewer who expects more realistic and natural performances could sometimes find them a bit hard to swallow). 'Cat People' is a horror classic and is highly recommended to anyone interested in the genre.