Cat People

Cat People is one of a trio of remarkable collaborations between director, Jacques Tourneur and producer Val Lewton. Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie, and The Leopard Man, were all low budget “horror” films made in the early 40’s at RKO. What distinguishes them from other films of that genre and budget is Tourneur’s ability to create highly atmospheric, noir-ish visuals that suggest more than they actually show. The scripts and plots Tourneur worked with were also extremely intelligent and creative. Cat People uses the trappings of a horror film to construct a metaphor for female sexual fears and repression. I Walked With A Zombie is an ambitious recasting of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre as a voo-doo inflected monster movie.

In his essay on Jacques Tourneur’s horror films, Ed Gonzalez points to another complex aspect of the Lewton/Tourneur thrillers that raises them above the usual ilk: “There's a certain multi-cultural conflict that distinguishes the Lewton-Tourneurs. In 1942's Cat People, the director's most famous film, the exotic Irena Dubrova (Simone Simon) embraces her cultural past as her sexual urges begin to overwhelm her. In 1943's superior I Walked With a Zombie, Betsey Connell (Frances Dee) similarly acknowledges the power of tradition inherent in Caribbean voodoo lore. In Leopard Man, resistance to tradition and authority and the desire for privilege kills the film's three Mexican women. These anti-racist conflicts seemingly pit a foreign culture against an American one, challenging cultural expectations.”

Tourneur later moved on to direct some of the most seminal of Hollywood film noirs such as Out of the Past and Berlin Express. I think as we look at Cat People this week, we might want to go back and review the previous blog post on film noir so we can talk about how the film both makes use of and subverts elements of the genre (I’m thinking in particular about how Cat People handles the status of the “bad” “dark” woman in a manner that runs explicitly counter to genre expectations).

Another genre concern is the horror film, and again we’ll want to pay attention to how Cat People both conforms to and breaks these conventions. The wikipedia discussion of the history of horror films covers the central elements of the genre: “In horror film plots, evil forces, events, or characters, sometimes of supernatural origin, intrude into the everyday world. Horror film characters include vampires, zombies, monsters, serial killers, and a range of other fear-inspiring characters.” In Cat People, the specific monster “pathology” is lycanthropy: the werewolf. Although Irena fears transforming into some kind of predatory big cat (like a leopard or a jaguar), the basic situation is the same---a human becoming something nonhuman, wild and deadly.

That Irena’s putative transformation is tied to her sexuality is one way the film’s subject links to film noir and its fear of female desire. Of course, Cat People gives us something much more complex than the male hysteria over vagina dentata that is a trademark of both noir and its literary companion, the hard-boiled detective story. Here, none of the men fear Irena, it is Irena herself that is afraid of sex.