When listing the artists most responsible for advancing the genre, one often thinks of directors – big names of the Universal Horrors like James Whale or Tod Browning, innovators of the 60s like Bava or Powell, independent voices of the 70s like Hooper or Romero, “Masters of Horror” of the 80s like Craven or Carpenter, or more recently, contemporary artistes like Aster or Eggers. But though it’s easy to view all cinema, and especially horror, with its stylistic flair, as an auteur’s medium, it is still essentially collaborative, and sometimes those responsible for bringing together the right team on the right project have made some of the biggest contributions. One of the most influential players in this regard was undoubtedly Val Lewton, the producer heading up RKO’s Horror division in the 40s, corralling a recurring band of directors, cinematographers, writers, and editors, and guiding them to create highly effective and artful work on a shoestring budget, all in his particular style and carrying his particular preoccupations. Between 1942-1946, he produced 11 films for RKO (9 of which were at least nominally horror). While not all of these could be deemed “scary” by modern standards, they really moved the genre forward, making great innovations in its filmic vocabulary (in terms of light, camerawork, sound, and editing), and I think really planting the seeds of what the field would become.
And so, on and off in the coming months, I’d like to dig into them. Some I’ve already seen and rather admire, and some I’ve never gotten around to, and I’ll have to seek out. Today, I’ll begin with Cat People (1942), his first big success, and its less horrific, but still intriguing follow up, The Curse of the Cat People (1944). Now, I don’t think the pleasure of these films can really be spoiled by knowing the plot so I will be discussing them in full, but if you haven’t seen them yet, now is a great time to check them out – they’re both available for rent on many platforms.
Cat People (1942)
Easily one of my favorite classic horror films, there have been books worth of analysis written about this one and I can’t claim that my observations are particularly novel. Still, I do love it. I mean, it is just so gorgeous for one thing, sad, and sometimes funny; and its couple of scary moments do still scare, even through modern eyes. I also feel it did so much to help invent modern horror technique.
Essentially, this is the story of Irena (Simone Simon), a Serbian woman living in NYC and working as a fashion sketch artist. After a whirlwind courtship, she marries Oliver (Kent Smith), an affable, square jawed chap, but following the folklore of her village, she’s convinced that should she ever allow her passions to run free, she would transform into a murderous feline beast, and so the marriage goes unconsummated. After attempts to cure Irena of what Oliver considers her delusions via psychotherapy (with a particularly sleazy therapist), he finally notices that he’s actually in love with his co-worker, Alice (Jane Randolph). Irena’s jealousy of Alice does what her supposed love for Oliver never did: bring out the beast within, leading her to hunt after Oliver and Alice, kill the creep psychologist, and ultimately and tragically, destroy herself.
It is a simple fairy tale of a story, but it’s also rather mature and psychological – all to do with attraction and repression; Irena’s essential fear of who she really is in her heart, in her blood. There is terror when Alice is stalked by some unseen, growling presence, but there is real horror in Irena’s refusal of self. Finally, there is tragedy as the more Irena opens herself to being who she really is, the more she approaches self-destruction. And along the way, Oliver, though motivated by love, or what he understands love to be, just cannot wrap his head around her experience, cannot open his mind to accept that she may know something he does not, and thus, in trying to help her, only makes things worse. As an encapsulation of his character, I’ve always loved an interchange with Alice wherein he explains “You know – it’s a funny thing. I’ve never been unhappy before. Things have always gone swell for me. I had a great time as a kid, lots of fun at school and here at the office.” This happy go lucky, “normal,” whitebread, American man (who seems to be fighting age, but for some reason isn’t off at the war) couldn’t possibly get where Irena is coming from, and he doesn’t really try to. The film’s story is straightforward, but its themes are rich and its treatment of big concepts like love, fear, otherness, and self is poetic and affecting.
Directed and filmed respectively by Lewton regulars, Jacques Tourneur, and cinematographer, Nicholas Musuraca, it is also just beautiful to look at, an endlessly stylish cinematic treat. Blacks are inky and whites shine. Lamps take any excuse to get knocked to the floor, throwing dramatic shadows upon the wallpaper, lights skim along walls, bringing out their full texture, and characters inhabit a world constructed almost entirely of light and shadow. Tourneur and Musuraca craft a visual vocabulary that feels as expressive and visually engaging as something out of German Expressionist cinema, while setting it all in a realistic modern context, bringing a sense of evocative mystery and deep feeling to this tale of supernatural folkloric terror as a vehicle for psychological conflict. Also, their visual contributions enable Lewton’s biggest innovation for the development of the genre: situating all of the terror in that which remains wholly unseen. Unlike a werewolf film, there is no transformation, and we generally only see large cats when Irena goes to the zoo. Rather, the shadows hold the nightmares, and they wait there, ready to strike, but never actually show themselves.
This element is so essential to what became the language of horror films. Even in an explicitly gory 80s splatter fest, there will be scenes of stalking, of a character creeping along, sure that they’re being watched, followed, terrified by what might jump out at them, even if they also feel silly because there’s evidently nothing to be scared of. The fact that later films will inevitably show something “scary” doesn’t mean they aren’t still deeply indebted to what Lewton began in Cat People. And the fact that this artistic choice was largely prompted by economics (Lewton never had to spend a dime on monster effects), detracts nothing from its aesthetic value.
The first great example of this in the film may be the first occurrence in horror of a “jump scare.” It is also a perfect 2 ½ minutes of film – scary, thrilling, and meaningful, but when it’s all over, you just want to stop the show to applaud. Alice is leaving coffee with Oliver while Irena observes them from a distance. As Alice starts down the street, Irena follows. We cut back and forth between the two women, Alice walking with a slower, steady gait, and Irena more quickly, hurried, the sounds of their steps echoing through the otherwise silent night. They each move into the small pools of light beneath the streetlamps before slipping back into the darkness. We see Irena getting closer and closer though they never share a shot. We watch Alice as she stops for a moment as if she’s heard something and turns to look behind herself – the street is empty. Worried, she starts to go faster, and then she runs. Each time she returns to the light, it is as if she’s returning to safety from the danger of the shadows, but she’s getting more and more terrified. The tension rises as light and shadow alternates with a rhythm not quite matching that of her harried footsteps, resulting in an unsettling syncopation – nothing is exactly happening, but it is uncanny, it is scary. Finally, she clutches a lamppost as we hear what sounds like a rising growl and then the hiss of…a bus pulling into the stop (and there is the first jump scare – it’s a fun irony that it’s based on not having a cat enter the frame). Rattled, she boards the bus as we see the trees moving (perhaps the wind, perhaps something else). Cut to the large cats in the zoo agitated in their cages and then a zoo worker finding dead sheep beside what look like large paw prints in the dirt. We follow similar prints on the pavement as they resolve into the tracks of a pair of muddy high heels, and finally we see Irena, shaken, dabbing her mouth with a handkerchief. Chef’s kiss!
In a later scene, Alice has gone to the pool in what I assume is her apartment building (fancy). Irena asks the girl at the front desk if she can go down to see her. We see Alice in a shadowy, eerily underlit locker room (no one in this movie ever turns on the lights). She gets spooked and dives into the water. A growling begins and we cut back and forth between her, progressively more and more terror-stricken as she treads water, frantically looking all around, and shadows on the wall amidst the wavering reflection of light off the water. It really feels like we’re seeing a panther or something stalking around the room, but there’s nothing there, only shadows, until finally, as Alice is shrieking for help and workers for the building come running into the pool area, with a flick, Irena turns on the lights, standing there, innocently, but oh so threateningly. The sweeter and more benignly she behaves, the more intimidating she is. And it is a pleasure to see her strong, more herself. But we also know it’s not going to end well.
For all that the biggest stylistic influence of the film is probably its focus on the unseen, its refusal to show a “monster,” it is Irena’s story, as penned by DeWitt Bodeen – her fear of her own monstrousness, that lingers. In this, there are many layers of possible meaning, of possible readings. On the surface, in a story of supernatural/psychological horror, it is plainly awful to think that a person might never allow themselves to feel, to love, lest they become a violent killer. The next layer is one of assimilation. Irena is an immigrant in America (as was Lewton and his mother and aunt who raised him) and this can so easily be taken as a tale of a woman who has come from a far-away land, trying to deny her history, her culture, trying to become part of this new world where she doesn’t quite fit in. In a key scene, at their wedding party in a Serbian restaurant, a mysterious woman approaches Irena saying “Moja sestra” (my sister). It seems that this is another “cat person” from her village, and like recognizes like. Irena crosses herself against the woman who leaves into the cold night as the boisterous celebration resumes. Irena has denied her identity, trying to adopt another one, a modern, “American” self, free of old, embarrassing superstitions.
But of course the strongest reading here is the queer one. Irena has rushed into a marriage with this guy she barely knows and for whom we don’t see much evidence of real, strong feelings. He seems like a generally nice guy and she’s going to try to make it work. But on the night of their wedding, she explains that she can’t yet share a bed with him and begs him to be kind and patient as she desperately attempts to get over “this feeling that there’s something evil in me.” In this reading, the woman in the restaurant still recognizes a kindred spirit who is trying to hide her true self, and being thus seen threatens to out Irena – thus her fervent denial. Finally, while she is never moved to become a killer feline for love of her husband, her jealousy of Alice brings on the change. She seems more invested in following this other woman around than she is tempted by her husband sexually or romantically, and even if her relationship to Alice is only antagonistic, it is still easy to see an interest, a focus which surfaces as jealousy but evinces some depth of fascination.
Regardless of how you read it (and I feel these levels are in no way mutually exclusive), Irena’s arc is tragic. In the beginning, when we first see Irena and Oliver meet and strike up a relationship, she seems so sweet, so hopeful. She’s determined to commit to this pairing and leave behind the part of herself she fears, but she just can’t do it. It’s only after the wedding that we see her tortured by her inner impulses. When her emotions for Alice (anger and jealousy) free her true self, eliciting her animalistic side, it obviously upsets her, but she also grows more confident. I love when she’s revealed at the pool, sweet and deadly. It’s satisfying to see her coming into herself. And by the end, when the psychologist tries to push himself on her, it’s like there’s this little smile. She wants him to – because it will make her angry and release the beast, and she will take pleasure in shredding this jerk. Furthermore, she will savor this momentary freedom to be her true self. Sadly, though, this may also be a bit of a death drive – she still can’t fully accept who and what she is, and she knows this killing will bring her to her end.
All of these levels work together. One need not cancel another out. It is clearly a story of a woman worried she might be a monster, and the story of an immigrant trying to assimilate and leave behind her cultural identity is also right on the surface. The queer reading is just that, a reading. There are many elements that support it, and it’s only there for you if you see it, but I think its inclusion brings a depth to the sadness of Irena’s self-denial, self-hatred, self-refusal, and in the end, her self-destruction, which enriches the whole film; in its emotional specificity, it makes her repression all the more universal and grounded.
So, there we have it. This is just one of the best: A beautiful, sad, horrific story; top notch, low budget, high effect filmmaking, endlessly stylish, that succeeds in being really scary a couple of times while barely doing anything at all; a greatly influential work that laid the groundwork for where horror would go in the coming decades; and just a triumph of cinematic pleasure, so rich in its visual storytelling that it is a genuinely visceral joy to dwell in its space.
The Curse of the Cat People (1944)
Off the bat, it must be said that this really doesn’t feel like a horror movie and it is important to go into it with that in mind. While it does continue the story of the surviving characters of the first film, the two films are wholly different beasts (see what I did there?), with little to nothing in common when it comes to their respective vibes. Furthermore, I found it regrettable that Jane Randolph’s Alice, such a brassy, bold character in the original, is so subsumed into her role as housewife and mother that she all but disappears. That said, having recently watched this for the first time, I’ve got to say that I did really like it. If you go expecting anything like Cat People, you could be disappointed, but if you are open to its particular charms, I think there are rewards to be found.
Whereas the first film is a kind of mature thriller (aggression growing out of sexual self-repression), this is a story of the loneliness and magic of childhood. But it is still all to do with repression. At least six years after the events of the first installment, we pick up with Oliver and Alice. They’ve left the dark, shadowy city for the apparent safety of a small town upstate (Tarrytown, home to Sleepy Hollow and the Headless Horseman) and are bringing up their precocious 5 year old daughter, Amy. Their domestic idyll is disrupted, however, when the dreamy Amy befriends what seems to be the ghost of Irena. Concurrently, Amy also strikes up a friendship with an odd, somewhat demented older woman, Mrs. Farren, who is cared for by her embittered adult daughter – but in her dementia, Mrs. Farren doesn’t believe that she is her daughter, but is rather some sinister imposter. Oliver cannot abide what he sees as his daughter’s dangerous fancy, seeing a reflection of the madness he feels was responsible for his first wife’s death, and treats poor Amy abysmally, essentially forcing her to lie or be punished (including physical punishment). This leads to a climax where Amy almost dies twice over before Oliver finally pays the smallest amount of lip service to her experience in order to manipulate her back to “normalcy.”
Of the two, I think Cat People is clearly the more coherent, consistent film, but Curse is certainly rich in theme and feeling, if a little shambolic at times. It has a few touches of “horror cinema” (particularly in Mrs. Farren’s spooky old house), but it really isn’t trying to be a horror film at all. Reportedly, Lewton had originally titled it Amy and her Friend, and its more sensationalistic title (and accompanying marketing campaign) was imposed by the studio. If anything, I think it shares some DNA with films like Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Tideland (2005), or The Fall (2006), all stories where a young girl, in the face of real life traumas, recedes into a world of fantasy, but where the line between reality and imagination is never clear and all may be mythic or psychological or both.
In this case, Amy was born into a house already haunted. Oliver presents himself as a friendly, “normal,” all-American, middle class dad, but he has never gotten over Irena’s death, or the circumstances that led to it. He keeps her photographs lying around and their bright, airy living room is dominated by a piece she had painted (actually, a Goya, but it’s attributed to her). The easy psychological reading of the film’s events (as articulated in the final act by Amy’s teacher) is that Amy, in her typical childhood loneliness, can feel that something is off, that some sadness lingers in her parents even if they never talk about it and never told her about how Irena had died. She finds Irena’s picture in a drawer and learns her name from her mother and the next thing you know, she’s imagining her, befriending this connection to her parents which they hide away and deny. A clue that Irena is a product of her imagination is the fact that she’s dressed as a fairy princess, her gown covered with sparkling stars, and she doesn’t behave at all like the Irena we knew and loved – because she is really built from Amy’s needs and imaginings. Oliver and Alice react poorly to Amy’s connection to this dark part of their past and try to force her into the same state of repression in which they reside, one necessary to live a “normal” life. This is all mirrored (the same, but reversed) in the relationship between the kooky Mrs. Farren and her very “normal” daughter – being denied so long by her mother, never able to win her recognition has made her into a bitter, broken, possibly murderous adult. Is this what awaits Amy?
A common reading I’ve found of Val Lewton’s films, particularly the early Horror is that they are all emotionally rooted in the war. While untold real-life horrors were happening overseas, on the home front, referring to that darkness and that loss was apparently quite frowned upon. One had to ‘stay positive,’ buy war bonds, support the boys abroad, and maintain a proper, good old fashioned American optimism. But of course, for most people, some son, father, brother, friend wasn’t coming home again. Of course there was loss and pain, and those who did return had seen and done things that would stay with them for years. But we don’t talk about that sort of thing, do we?
It’s quite easy to read this socio-emotional repression into this film. In this tale of grief denied, this child senses a loss, a powerful feeling – and she meets it where the adults refuse to. There is a lovely scene on Christmas Eve when carolers have come to the house and are welcomed in to have some drinks and sing around the piano. While Oliver, Alice, and their guests all gather near the instrument singing in the warmth of hearth and home, Amy hears faintly from outside, Irena singing a very pretty French song. I don’t think the song is particularly sad, but in the context, it feels ghostly, mournful, and lonely: it feels like a sadness kept out in the cold, not allowed to surface, and Amy is drawn to it. As I understand, Irena sings in French because Simone Simon was French and this is what she could sing (she didn’t know any Serbian songs I guess), but made in the spring of 1944, the fact that this melancholic moment occurs in this particular language seems to draw a line directly across the ocean to the beaches of Normandy.
That said, for all that this psychological reading maps very cleanly upon the film, I think it does a disservice to let it reduce the story and Amy’s experience to something so knowable and schematic. The film is frankly much weirder than that, and it takes clear steps to leave open the possibility that Irena’s ghost is truly present, allowing Amy’s experience to retain at least a degree of credence, her lived mystery allowed room to breathe. As with the original film, this is largely thanks to cinematographer, Nicholas Musuraca, and while it may not be as strikingly stylish, he is no less masterful in his use of light. The deep, unsettling shadows of the first outing are replaced with something subtler and more gentle, but still magical. A key setting is the backyard where Amy often meets her possibly imaginary friend. Actually a studio soundstage, Musuraca has complete control over the light and uses it to a very theatrical, lovely effect. Additionally, to helm the project, Lewton promoted Robert Wise from editor to director and he maintains a light touch throughout, allowing all possibilities to coexist (Wise would go on to have quite the career – perhaps most famous for West Side Story, he’s more known in horror circles for his 1963 Shirley Jackson adaptation, The Haunting, a film where it’s quite easy to see the legacy of Val Lewton’s tendency to imply but never quite show). Finally, DeWitt Bodeen, the screenwriter of Cat People also returned and deserves credit for the film’s successful walking of the line between fancy and reality, for the way the two fraught stories of parents and children counterbalance one another.
Twice, Oliver is in the backyard with Amy and asks if she can see her friend. The whole time, he never takes his eyes off of her, never deigns to look where she is looking, never doubting that his sense of what is real or possible could ever be false. The first time, her failure to answer as he desires leads to a beating – and while the movie really isn’t scary, this is the true horror of the piece. Amy (as her parents undoubtedly did before her) lives in a world where she is expected to be her daddy’s “good girl,” and that means behaving as the other children do and not being such a little weirdo, not dredging up feelings and stories best forgotten. It means smiling prettily and doing what she’s told, and not speaking the truth if it disrupts the agreed on stasis. It means training herself to repress her own sense of mystery and melancholy and learning to fit in, erasing her unique individuality in the process.
By the end of the film, after Amy survives almost freezing to death and being strangled, Oliver chooses to play along if it will bring her back to him, and so he once again asks if she can see her friend. When she says yes, he says he sees her too, but his eyes stay fixed upon his daughter. He still never even thinks to look, to see as Irena waves good bye and fades from view. He can somewhat pretend, but he can’t possibly open his mind enough to even just turn his head for a moment. You can understand where he’s coming from, but it is no less frustrating for it. Thus Amy feels somewhat placated and will redouble her efforts to be who he wants her to be. She will learn to be what he is and her magic will die. It is a terribly sad ending, even as it’s played for loving warmth. As with all tragedy, it stings with the sadness of destruction brought on by one seeking to do good.
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And so that is Cat People and The Curse of the Cat People. I think that as long as one doesn’t expect the second to be like the first, they make an interesting and evocative double bill. Both circle around the tragic horror of self-repression, whether in terms of an adult woman wrestling with her sexuality and identity (and the disruptive, violent power it brings), or a young girl learning to ‘be normal.’ And they are both artful and evocative. The first is high style and its influence echoes still today, but the second is still a rewarding watch, melancholic and frustrating as it is. While they are notably different films, it is still clear that they’ve come from the same team, and are invested in the same ideas, though they present them in a different mood, almost a different genre. Notably, both films maintain a kind of plausible deniability when it comes to the supernatural, Schrodinger’s cat both alive and dead at all times, all fantastic elements both real and psychological, the box never opened, the tension unresolved.
With that, I am going to stop here for now, but I think in the coming weeks, I will periodically check in with the good Mr. Lewton and his oeuvre. I have seen a few others, but there are still many I’ve missed and I’m eager to finally fill this gap in my education. I’m looking forward to it…