31 Days, 31 Horror Movies: Cat People (1942)

I've loved black and white horror movies since I was a kid, sneaking out way past my bedtime to watch The Return of the Fly or Trog on "Weird" - a late night TV show out of Bangor, Maine. Later on I got to see a bunch of them on Saturday afternoon cable, often at my grandmother's house. Most of the old Universal Monster movies, a bunch of Allied Artists Pictures like Attack of the 50 Foot Woman and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and even the occasional Hammer film - like The Mummy.

I didn't get to see a lot of the RKO horror films, though (King Kong being the exception). I have a vague memory of I Walked With a Zombie - Darby Jones as Carrefour made an impression - but I mixed it up with White Zombie for the longest time. I didn't see any other Val Lewton (or Jacques Tourneur) films until I was an adult, trying to fill in gaps in my horror viewing experience (a process that continues).

This is a roundabout way of explaining that this is probably only the second or third time I've seen the original Cat People.

I know, right?

As an 'I keep finding new things about movies I've already seen' aside - I didn't realize Alan Ormsby worked on the screenplay for the 1982 remake! Ormsby worked on Deathdream, Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things and my favorite Nazi zombie movie, Shockwaves (as writer, writer/actor, and makeup artist, respectively).

The Medium
I've recently ditched cable for YouTube TV and one of the benefits has been the addition of Turner Classic Movies to the lineup. I was able to watch the film commercial free with a good quality picture.

I know there's a Criterion Collection release I should probably check out. (I'm extremely annoyed with myself that I didn't pick up the Warner Video Val Lewton Horror collection when it was a reasonable price.)

The Movie
Oliver, a bland, if handsome, engineer meets Serbian immigrant Irena at the Central Park Zoo where she is making sketches of a black panther. Intrigued with each other, they form a friendship and then a romance. Unfortunately, Irena harbors a strange obsession with a legend from her homeland. King John drove the devil-worshippers out of her village, but the 'wisest and most wicked' fled into the mountains. These women were actually cat people and would turn into great cats when aroused or angered. Irena believes that she is descended from those witches.

This woman seconds the motion.

Despite this belief, which Oliver treats as an idiosyncrasy even though it keeps them from so much as kissing, the couple eventually marries. It's only after Irena accidentally frightens a pet bird to death - and then feeds it to the panther at the zoo - that he begins to take her seriously, suggesting she see a psychiatrist.

Dr Judd is a pretty terrible psychiatrist. Pro tip for any mental health professionals out there - don't hit on your married patients. Or any patients, really. In addition to the unwanted advances Irena gets an earful of "mind cankers" and "childhood traumas." Afterwards Irena finds that Oliver has told his assistant Alice about her problems, a betrayal of trust that seems lost on her husband.

"I didn't get the ending of Inception, either."

Oliver is, truth be told, kind of an idiot - and when Alice confesses that she's actually in love with him he somehow manages to make it all about himself, talking about how he's never been unhappy before and how he's not even sure he's in love with Irena. In a just world Irena and Alice would leave Oliver behind and travel the world together feeding dead birds to caged panthers.

Anyway.

When Irena sees Alice and Oliver together at a restaurant she waits until they separate and then begins to follow Alice. This leads to one of the most tense scenes in the film as both women move through pools of light and shadow, Irena getting closer and closer until we don't even see her emerge from the shadows anymore. There's a sound, something indefinable, and Alice begins to panic. A loud hiss and growl startles her (and us) only to be revealed as an arriving bus. Alice boards, relieved.

Don't get too comfortable.

Elsewhere a groundskeeper at the zoo finds dead sheep and suggestive prints - pawprints that seem to turn into the imprints of a woman's shoes.

Things move somewhat predictably forward from here. Irena grows more isolated and jealous, Oliver and Alice conspire against her with Dr. Judd, there's one of the creepiest pool scenes ever shot, and something like a great cat begins to stalk - and kill - those who have angered Irena.

As a take on the werewolf myth Cat People is pretty understated. Unlike the Universal films the creature is mostly hinted at. A growl, a number of suggestive shadows. There's no drawn-out transformation scene or awkward half-transformed creature. There is a woman who thinks she is becoming a panther and there is a panther. Whether she's right or merely disturbed is open to interpretation. (Mostly - I think it's clear what the film wants us to think.)

It wants us to think late night swims are a bad idea.

Cat People was made on a relatively low budget ($134,000 - roughly $2 million in 2018 dollars), but it looks great. First time producer Val Lewton makes every dollar count and Jacques Tourneur knows how to make the most out of a limited number of locations (and a metric ton of suggestive shadows).

I think James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein was the first movie where I really noticed lighting in a film. Doctor Praetorius in the crypt - brrr.... But I remember after I watched Cat People for the first time that I found myself thinking that Tourneur was a filmmaker who also knew the value of light and dark. The light tables in the office, the areas of shadow near the bus stop, that whole scene where Alice is stalked in the pool. The shadows are damn near a separate character in the movie.

A supporting character, at least.

The Bottom Line
There are depths to Cat People - you could write a paper (and I'm sure people have) talking about gender roles and the virgin/whore dichotomy in the 1940's or the nature of evil and whether it's something that can be inherited. That's not what I take away from the film at the end of the day, though, even if subtext does enrich the experience.

No, for me it's all about the shadows, man - the SHADOWS.

31 Days, 31 Horror Movies: It Follows

For the last 8 years I’ve been watching a horror movie a day during the month of October. And then (because I’m not too bright), I’ve been writing up a rambling, barely coherent post about each.

Here are the rules I try to abide by:

1. It’s got to be a horror movie (straight sci-fi, thrillers and mysteries are generally out, though rules are made to be broken).
2. I have to watch one a day, but I might not get to write it up for a day or two.
3. No set watch-list. I’ll decide that day what I’ll watch (and I’ll take recommendations under consideration). The only exception is if I get an itching for a particular film and I don’t currently have access – I’ll plan around when I can rent/borrow/buy it.
4. I try to do theme weekends – past years have seen things like :Spanish Language Time Travel Horror, Horror Comedies, and Vincent Price Movies With “Doctor Phibes” In The Title.
5. Probably should go without saying, but there are bound to be spoilers galore.

Today was a rough one to get started on. Day after a migraine is always a brain crash and I had a ton of work to do. On top of that, my in-laws stopped in hoping to have some tech support. So I spent two hours chasing the Ouroboros of an account connected to an email with a lost password whose backup email is from an ISP that no longer exists and a phone number that is ringing to a phone 25 miles of the coast of Maine with no one to answer it and that needs to be updated by logging in to the first account which…

Anyway.

When I finally got a few minutes to watch a movie I wasn’t really in a horror movie mood. Which, it turns out, is exactly the mood I needed to be in to watch a horror movie I haven’t wanted to watch again for a while.

None of this makes sense, does it? Ah well, on to the first movie of 2018!

It Follows
I’m not sure why I haven’t rewatched It Follows since seeing it in the theater. I know I liked it – in fact I remember thinking I’d have to watch it again, maybe even pick up the Blu-ray. Time passed, though, and even after it was released on Netflix it sat in my queue and I just kept overlooking it.
I think I always felt like I’d just seen it. I don’t even know how to explain that, given that it’s been four years since the movie came out. It happens to me sometimes – I’ll see a movie a hundred times and not get tired of it, or see it once and then be all ‘nah, I’m good’ if it comes up again.
To cut the rambling short(ish) –  I just haven’t felt like re-watching It Follows… until today.

The Medium
It Follows is currently streaming on Netflix. The stream was good quality, but watching it on the small screen diminished the experience somewhat. I missed the opportunity to scrutinize the backgrounds at the level of detail that the big screen allowed.

The Movie
I think of It Follows as a nightmare. It looks like a nightmare, it feels like a nightmare, and it has that weird sort of dream logic where nothing you do seems to make a difference. You run and you run and no matter how far you go or how fast you go, when you turn around whatever you’re running from is right there.

GAH!

From the very first scene – a suburban street at dusk, revealed  in the first of many languid, floating 360 degree pans – the film feels slightly unreal. Disconnected. Not that it isn’t familiar – the setting evokes comparisons with John Carpenter’s Halloween and when a girl in nightclothes (and high heels) runs from one of the nearly identical houses we’re almost certain that someone or something will pursue her into the gathering dark. Nothing does however, nothing we can see anyway. The scene continues, but the rhythm is different, and it throws you off – or it threw me off, anyway.

Then the movie proper begins, and we meet Jay – played with a sleepy-eyed detachment by Maika Monroe. A disaffected young college student still living at home, still drifting through life like she drifts in the above-ground pool in the backyard. Other characters are introduced with typical horror movie economy – the pining nerd, the jealous sister, the former-flame next door. And, of course, the really nice guy she’s dating – the one with the terrible secret.

I seriously thought about just posting that Killer Klowns image again.

It’s that secret that lies at the heart of It Follows. Her beau has what has to be one of the worst sexually transmitted diseases of all time. There’s something monstrous following him, trying to kill him. When the inevitable occurs and Jay has sex with him, that thing is passed on to her. It’s horror movie cliché that sex-equals-death, of course, but here the trope is reversed. The only way to rid oneself of the curse is to have sex with someone else – passing it on to them. (Though if that person then dies, it makes its way back down the chain – neatly circumventing the obvious tactic of sleeping with your hated ex.)

The majority of the film involves Jay and her friends trying to deal with a presence that only she can see, that can look like anyone, and that absolutely will not stop. The feeling of unreality established in the opening scene persists throughout the film. Shots linger longer than they should.  David Robert Mitchell uses a lot of wide lenses and they isolate the characters in the foreground, which combines with the longer shots to give us time to peruse the background for things that are out of place, off. Even closeups have plenty of depth of field and there’s always someone – or something – moving in that background space.

Is that a Klown back there? It is, isn’t it.

It Follows is a horror movie by way of indie-film character study – there are portentous scenes where young people say very little in very meaningful ways. A character reads Dostoevsky aloud. The main character stares into the middle distance without blinking while another character shifts nervously. I sometimes find this meaningful-meaninglessness to be annoying, but somehow it works in this context. It contributes to that dream-like feeling of unreality, as does the almost complete lack of adult presence. The characters – young, but not children – live in a vacuum that lacks significant relationship with the larger world.

The setting also facilitates that nightmare feeling. Despite the earlier comparison this isn’t Carpenter’s 1970’s Illinois, this is modern Detroit. A dim and grimy suburbia where similarity breeds contempt rather than familiarity. The characters live on the border of  an urban decay that presents itself more as a profound isolation than a distinct threat.  The looming, vacant-windowed buildings and empty, orange-lit parking lots are a modern wasteland, nearly empty of people and providing little in the way of comfort or context. Even the suburban houses, so similar and normal on the outside, are mazes of dim rooms lit only be the blue glare of the television.

And sometimes weird flower lamps.

Then there’s the soundtrack. The synth score by Disasterpeace is initially disconcerting – it feels like it belongs in an older, more Italian horror film. I couldn’t help feeling at times that someone had taken a Goblin score for an unreleased 1980’s Argento movie and simply repurposed it. That being said, it IS really effective, and in a movie that – for the most part – studiously avoids the standard cinematic shock cuts and jump scares, it provides much of the eerie and occasionally disturbing mood.

There are missteps. Sometimes the pacing is too glacial, even for the kind of mood they’re trying to create. One scene in a bathroom lingered so long on so little that when one of the rare jump scares occurred it didn’t work – I’d forgotten that we were supposed to be building up to something. There are a few action set pieces that are disjointed and confusing. The final scenes are too few and go by too quickly – especially compared to the earlier pacing.

This scene takes approximately an hour and a half, for instance.

The Bottom Line
It Follows is a really good horror movie, even on a belated second viewing. Knowing the set pieces and jumps let me pay more attention to things going on in the background and details like how IT often wears the form of someone Jay knows. (And what time period does this even take place in? Tube TVs but clamshell Kindles?) It unsettles more often than it scares, but it does that really well. Definitely worth a watch – or even two.