"I like the dark. It's friendly."
Irena (Simone Simon)
The Christmas season hardly seems like the time for a horror movie to be showing on America's silver screens, but that was the case 75 years ago.
I suppose for most people living today, when someone mentions the movie "Cat People," thoughts immediately turn to the 1982 movie starring Nastassja Kinski.
But that was actually a remake of a movie of the same name that premiered on this day in 1942. There were some differences between the two, especially in their directors' and producers' visions of what a horror movie should be — and what it could be, given the times when they were made.
Producer Val Lewton was hired by RKO Pictures to make horror films on less than $150,000 — and they were to be adapted to titles Lewton was given by the studio. Even though things cost less in 1942, $150,000 was still a pretty modest outlay to make a movie, and being given a title with no story was a challenge, to say the least, but Lewton did his job well. He recycled RKO's leftover sets, and director Jacques Tourneur completed filming in less than four weeks, coming in about seven grand under budget.
The movie made $4 million in its first two years, rejuvenating RKO financially.
When the movie began, a Serbian woman (Simone Simon) made sketches of a panther at New York's Central Park Zoo. She caught the eye of a young man who approached her and struck up a conversation.
The two ended up marrying, but Irena believed that she carried a Serbian curse and would become one of the fabled cat people of her homeland if they were intimate.
Thus followed an at times over–the–top story, although there was no denying that animals did react oddly to Irena. She couldn't walk into a pet store without frightening the birds there and provoking the dogs into barking fits.
Her fear of releasing the beast she believed to be within her kept her at arm's length from her boyfriend/husband and drove him into the arms of a co–worker. Audiences in 1942 had to imagine what went on with those two since the Hays Code was still in effect.
But viewers could assume what had happened between the two — as Irena surely did, and it provoked a powerful response from her. Suffice to say the beast had been released.
Frankly, the 1982 version was inferior to the original and pretty heavy on special effects and nudity, not so much graphic violence although there was some of that. It wasn't as heavy on dialogue as the '42 version, either.
By modern standards, I suppose the '42 version would be considered more suspense than horror. That was something Alfred Hitchcock knew well and employed in his movies. Hitchcock knew that sometimes it is better to show nothing than something. If he had shown more of the details of Norman Bates' mother during the infamous shower scene in "Psycho," it wouldn't have had the lasting impact it had.
You will still encounter people who believe Hitchcock directed horror movies, but his style was suspense, as I have mentioned here before. So, too, it would appear was it the style of Tourneur and Lewton.
At least in this movie.
In fact, it is clear to anyone who has watched Hitchcock's movies and the movies of Val Lewton that Hitchcock borrowed at least two scenes from Lewton productions. One was the pet shop scene in "Cat People," which was lifted almost shot for shot in "The Birds" two decades later. And the shower scene in "Psycho" bore a striking resemblance to a scene in "The Seventh Victim," which premiered in 1943.
For that matter Stephen King's books tend to be more suspense than horror, but he made his concessions to modern audiences in some of his books — and, consequently, in the movies that were based on them.
As I said sometimes it's better to show nothing than something. Viewers never saw the cat and never saw Irena's transformation into a cat. But, like the shark in "Jaws," the audience was always aware of the threat nearby.
"Cat People" of 1942 blended classic horror with pure suspense. Sadly, it is underrated and mostly forgotten today, but it is a reminder of Hollywood at its best — when it didn't hesitate to let the viewers be afraid of what lurked in their own minds.
