Movies - Cat People

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	Movies - Cat People

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Cat People is a 1942 horror film which tells the story of a young Serbian woman, Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) living in New York City who is haunted by the myth of the cat people of her village. She falls in love with and marries 'good, plain Americano' Oliver Reed, (Kent Smith) but Irena is afraid that when emotionally aroused she will transform into a panther, unleashing her evil. Also starring Tom Conway as Dr. Louis Judd (Psychiatrist) and Jane Randolph as Alice, Oliver's asexual colleague.

The film is notable for frightening audiences through the suggestion of unseen horrors with cast shadows and ambigious sound effects relying on the power of audience imagination, specifically in the celebrated swimming-pool sequence. The panther remains unseen until the final scenes but in the meantime Simone Simon displays increasingly catlike behavior and the viewer is bombarded by images of cats in paintings and statues.

The movie was produced by Val Lewton. Scenario writing is credited by DeWitt Bodeen, but Tourneur, Roy Webb, Lewton and his secretary helps, and directed by Jacques Tourneur. The cinematographer was Tourneur's sometime collaborator Nicholas Musuraca. It was followed by a sequel, The Curse of the Cat People
, in 1944.

The film has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

Although Cat People is usually categorized as a horror movie, many film critics also consider it a film noir, as Irena assumes many of the traits of both femme fatale and the typical noir hero alienated from conventional society, psychologically wounded and morally ambiguous.

A remake of the film was made in 1982, Cat People
was directed by Paul Schrader and starred Nastassja Kinski, Malcolm McDowell, and John Heard.

Critical reaction

Reviews of the film were positive when the film was first released. Today, the film still has a cult following. of the film praised the film's cast:

"Superbly acted (with Simon evoking both pity and chills), Cat People testifies to the power of suggestion and the priority of imagination over budget in the creation of great cinema. The film was Lewton's biggest hit, its viewers lured in by such bombastic advertising as "Kiss me and I'll claw you to death!"--a line more lurid than anything that ever appeared onscreen."

The film was shot with a budget of under $140,000.

Other information

Lewton and his production team credited themselves with inventing the popular horror film technique, the "bus". The term and technique came from the scene in The Cat People where Irena is walking behind Alice, and at any moment the audience expects Irena to turn into a panther and attack her. At the most tense part of the scene, when the camera focuses in on Alice's confused and terrified face, what sounds like a hissing panther jumping out at her is only the hissing sound of a bus pulling over to pick her up. After the excitement dies down, the audience relizes that nothing happened at all, that there probably was no panther following her, and that it all probably was just in their imagination. This technique has been adapted into practically every horror movie made since then. Anytime a movie creates a scene where the tension rises and explodes into nothing at all, merely an empty boo!, it is called a "bus".

This film was also featured in the novel Kiss of the Spider Woman by Argentine novelist Manuel Puig. In the book, two inmates pass the time by discussing the films one of them remembers having seen. Though this movie is not mentioned by name, the parallels to the plot and mentions of the protagonist's name being Irena clearly indicate that Puig was speaking about this film.

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