Gateway Cinephiles

3-Minute Intro: Cat People

Screened: October 30, 2007
Format: DVD - Turner Home Entertainment (2005)
Horror Fest 2007

Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People is a rare species of horror film: a surprise box-office smash in it time, a beloved classic in the decades the followed, and a work of magnificent skill and beauty. The first film from producer Val Lewton after he became head of RKO’s horror division, Cat People was a signal to the studio and audiences alike that Lewton would produce a new breed of thriller. Armed with a miniscule budget, a handful of sets, and a mandate to keep the film short, Lewton tapped French actress Simone Simon for his lead and French-American director Tourneur. Together, they brought a chilling, noir sensibility to the film that captivated audiences. Shot for less than $140,000, Cat People made over $4 million in 1942, compared to the half million brought in by RKO’s Citizen Kane the previous year.

Cat People has the requisite ingredients for a horror movie: a beautiful woman, a sense of dread, and—perhaps—malevolent supernatural forces. However, it is not particularly horrific. Lewton and Tourneur successfully resisted the studio’s demands for fearsome, cheesy effects shots, and created a film that terrifies by showing less, not more. The fear of Cat People lies in what is implied and imagined. Through brilliant use of scene construction, lighting, and editing, the filmmakers craft a shadowy tale about the irrationality and consuming nature of fear.

The script was a collaborate effort between DeWitt Bodeen, Lewton, Tourneur, and others. It has a poetic simplicity that serves the filmmakers’ vision well. While violence and lust were often used to promote B-movies, they were rarely addressed maturely in the films of this era. In this respect, Cat People was a revelation, touching on so many unsettling topics with intellect and grace. It plucks at numerous human fears: anxiety over female sexuality; the terror of the loss of self-control; sexual and emotional jealousy; paranoia; fear of insanity; fear of the foreign; and the animal panic of being hunted. Cat People is not a socially conscious film, but it speaks to what lurks in our consciousness. It conjures a rare, realistic kind of dread, the kind that prompts the unconvincing reassurance, “You’re just imagining things.”