This is my favorite time of year, second only to Christmas. Autumn has arrived, the weather is cooling down, and October becomes the month long celebration of scary movies called Shocktober. There are a lot of horror movies out there, but as a genre, horror is still looked down upon by some mainstream critics and moviegoers. It doesn’t help that, admittedly, there are so few quality horror movies made but, like comedy, it’s a very difficult and subjective genre. So, in the days leading up Halloween I’ll be posting some recommendations for scary movies to help you celebrate Shocktober.
Night 5: Val Lewton Night
“She looks like a cat.”
Cat People (1942)
In the early 1940’s RKO Pictures created a low budget
B-horror movie unit to compete with, and capitalize on the success of, Universal
Studios’ B-horror movies like Dracula,
Frankenstein, The Wolf Man and their
many sequels. Producer Val Lewton was put in charge of the unit and tasked with
churning out horror movies with sensational titles, miniscule budgets, and left
over sets from other movies. The result was a series of horror films that were
the opposite of what the studio was expecting, but were still box office hits.
Today they remain spooky and interesting films and Val Lewton is one of the few
producers that critics, film historians, and cinephiles consider to be an
“auteur,” or the author of a film. The first of these low budget horror movies was
Cat People, released in 1942, which
deserves to be included alongside horror movie classics like Dracula (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). If you are someone that doesn’t like graphic
violence or bloody horror, or even if you are, or if you want to become more
familiar with classic horror cinema, Cat
People is a great film to watch any Shocktober night.
Cat People stars
Simone Simon as Irena, a Serbian immigrant in New York City who meets and falls
in love with Oliver, played by Kent Smith. Irena lives in an apartment close
enough to the zoo to hear the animals at night and finds the roar of the big
cats comforting. She and Oliver fall in love and marry, but Irena’s belief in a
superstition of her homeland keeps her from becoming intimate with him, or even
kissing him. She fears that any passion or jealousy she has will change her
into a jungle cat and she will kill her lover. At a restaurant, a woman that
some characters say “looks like a cat” greets Irena by calling her “my sister.”
When Irena walks into a pet store with Oliver, animals go into a wild frenzy and
become calm once she leaves. Oliver is a good, decent husband and believes
Irena will overcome her superstitions with the help of a psychiatrist played by
Tom Conway, who exudes a cool, debonair, and condescending aura (not unlike
that of his brother, actor George Sanders). Oliver confides his marriage
troubles in his friend and co-worker Alice, played by Jane Randolph. Though
Alice is in love with Oliver her only intention is to be a friend and offer
advice, but Irena resents their closeness and becomes jealous and dangerous.
Lewton was a hands off producer when it came to shooting movies,
but there is a distinctive style to his RKO horror movies despite working with
different directors. The Lewton style was born out of necessity due to budget
restrictions, but he and his directors turned this handicap into creative
advantages. Cat People is shot with
stark shadows and low lighting resembling the look of a Film Noir. In fact, the
director of Cat People, Jacques Tourneur, perhaps Lewton’s best collaborator, would go on the direct the lauded Film
Noir Out of the Past.
It’s a well-established horror movie trope that you can scare
the audience more by showing them less; what you show them will never be as
scary as what they create in their own imaginations. Lewton and Tourneur fully
exploit this idea to great effect. They knew they did not have the budget for
decent special effects so the movie avoids showing the audience what they might
expect to see, namely a monstrous cat-person, and instead fills its spooky
scenes with shadows, dim lights, and darkness. Shadows are as important to Cat People as its characters, and they are
used along with a clear and effective sound design for maximum effect. They
hide the film’s low budget and put the audience at unease by denying them a
full picture and thus a full explanation. You may not see a lot of horror in Cat People but it builds a moody
atmosphere that primes the viewer for scares which the movie delivers, but
never quite how you are expecting. In one of the most memorable scenes Alice is
walking home through a park at night in shadows and small pools of light from
the street lamps. There is complete silence except for the clicking of her
heels and… another set of heels behind her. For just a brief moment, so
purposefully quick it’s easy to miss, we think we hear the growling of a big
cat, but the growl morphs into the rumble of a city bus. A few moments later,
however, large paw prints are found in the soft ground of the park.
Cat People plays
with the preconceived notions the characters and audience have about
superstitions and the supernatural. The movie begins in a thoroughly real world
in which there is no chance of anything supernatural. Then, slowly, it shows us
scenes to suggest otherwise and make the characters second guess their
rationale. Is Irena really a cat person of old world legend or does she just believe
she is so much that the people around her begin to unconsciously believe so as
well?
Cat People is the
antithesis of the Universal monster movies, in which the monster is the star of
the movie. It holds back showing you any horror or scenes of violence for as
long as it possibly can. The characters feel like full-fledged people, a rarity
in horror movies of any era, and their world feels like a real, lived in place. Cat People does all of this and more in
less than 75 minutes.
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