Halloween Horrorfest 2018: CAT PEOPLE (1942)

It saddens me that there’s a whole generation of people who willfully won’t watch films from before the beginning of the Modern Blockbuster Era.  There are some people who won’t venture past the 80‘s when it comes to ‘classic’ film.  I can understand how the films of what is called The Golden Age of Cinema may be anathema to some; rewatching this movie reminded me how watching a story in black and white with a different set of values and operating under a restrictive watchdog organization can seem like a communication from another planet.  But the best movies from that era make working without color, within a restrictive set of guidelines, an advantage.

It’s obvious what Cat People is about, but it’s fascinating to see how director Jacques Tourneur (the first of three films he made for Val Lewton at RKO) works his way around the Hayes Code to discuss sexual jealousy like they do here.  The dialogue plays around the edges, conveying the yearnings and paranoia felt by a woman whose own inhibitions prevents intimacy trying to hold onto the man she loves and the tension between the spiritual and the intellectual well without spelling things out.  But what Tourneur does with shadow and pacing and mood amplifies this dialogue, turning a very intangible conflict very, very tangible.  And the way this film is intentionally ambivalent about the nature of Simone Simon’s Irena--there’s always an alternative explanation for the apparent supernatural happenings--only emphasize the sense of unease throughout the story’s 73 minute running time.

Man, it’s hard to try to bring something out other than 'this is an excellent horror film’ here.  I’ve been struggling for forty-five minutes and I’ve only spit out two paragraphs.

This is an essential movie for students of horror.  Yes, it’s paced a lot slower than what is expected of movies nowadays, but then it’s also quite a bit shorter and feels like less of a slog as it could have been.  Yes, it’s all about implication, but sometimes what we can decide in our own minds is scarier than what a special effects artist can come up with.  Hell, not having the means to show things outright forces Tourneur to appeal to all the senses to convey the entropic elements.  A simple thing as a character noticing the perfume of another is made something to fear.

Look, just see the movie.  I can talk about how wonderfully ethereal and 'other' Simone Simon is, or how the relationship between Kent Smith’s Oliver and Jane Randolph’s Alice seems so effortlessly intimate without being necessarily romantic to the point of Alice’s admission of love being...weird, or how Tom Conway’s Dr. Judd is a real sleaze at heart, or why I found a scene of just the shimmering reflections of the water in a pool creates a sense of otherworldly danger more effectively than seeing some CGI creature ripping people apart (I’m looking at you, Zombie Hunter).  But there are writers and film fans who can convey all this more eloquently and effectively than me.  Go seek them out, or better yet, watch the film yourself and develop your own conclusions.

(Now I have the urge to revisit Paul Schrader’s 1982 version...maybe something for a later point in the Horrorfest...)

How YOU Can Curate The 2nd Half Of The Horrorfest!

There’s still time to help curate this year's Halloween Horrorfest

If you donate $31 to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network before October 15th and send me the receipt proving you did, you can name one movie I have to watch during the Horrorthon.  Keep in mind there are some things I won’t do (so no Eli Fucking Roth movies, for example), and it has to be a movie I can find.  If you’re an independent filmmaker and are willing to make the donation, by all means send me the film.  I will do as many as I can before October 31st, and those I can I will view in the days after Halloween during ‘Beyond Halloween Horrorfest.'