(Jacques Tourneur, US 1942, 73 min.)
CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE
(Robert Wise, US 1944, 70 min.)
A double-dose of psychologically charged from producer Val Lewton’s fabled low-budget unit at RKO Pictures. In Cat People, Simone Simon suffers from a Serbian curse that turns women of her ancestral tribe into lethal felines whenever they think jealous thoughts. In the sequel Curse, Simon’s character returns as a ghost to comfort a lonely young girl. Two films for one admission price.
Program Notes
Val Lewton began his career as a novelist – his role as a film producer actually came from a misunderstanding. When RKO studios was looking for producers, someone told them that he had written “horrible novels.” RKO misunderstood the word horrible for horror and Lewton got himself a new job.
Lewton was involved in his job not just as a producer, but also as a writer and creator. He brought out his ideas and created the Val Lewton unit, made up by director’s Jacques Tourneur, Robert Wise and Mark Robson, scriptwriter Dewitt Bodeen, and actors Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Tom Conway, Jane Randolph, and Elizabeth Russell. This way he was able to make every film a collective creation.
Their first production was directed by Jacques Tourneur and entitled Cat People. The film was very well received by the audience, despite the fact that the heads of RKO speculated it would fare poorly at the box-office. Val Lewton developed a visual style which strongly evoked the German Expressionism, using devices such as evocative lighting, shadows and extreme perspective shots.
In his book Dreams or Darkness, J.P. Telotte mentioned that “It was not simply the typical threatening presences, monsters or ghouls lurking about, rather they derived largely from what we do not see.” In this way, Val Lewton´s unit broke free from many of the stereotypes in horror movies.
The films produced by the Val Lewton´s unit did not need to show spectacular sets, nor gorgeous costumes or special effects, instead they relied on the principle of “no-showing” (Telotte 7). Rather than using explicit imagery, the film employs abstract figures, dark areas in the frame, and stylized shadows. In this way, viewers are allowed space to conjure their own fears. This was a method that Freud might explain with the concept of the unheimlich, or in English: the uncanny. That is, a situation that is generally familiar to us, but presented in a manner that makes it feel sinister. In most cases those situations are related to life events that we don’t want to remember – in other words, repressed. In that way we find that the uncanny elements are part of our selves, but hidden in our subconscious waiting to be awakened by an external stimulus.
Two years later, RKO expressed the desire to repeat the success of Cat People and asked its horror unit to make a sequel. Lewton did not agree, and instead of producing a second chapter the unit created a dark fantasy story derived from the main substance of Cat People, titled The Curse of the Cat People. This film was directed by Robert Wise, again starring Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Elizabeth Russell and Jane Randolph. Focusing on childhood issues and exploring the thin line between the perception of reality and fantasy, the script was written based on true experiences in Lewton´s childhood. The use of stylistic resources like shadows, drastic changes of visual textures and symbolic elements were present again – engaging the audience in some very tense moments.
Cat People and The Curse of Cat People made an evolution in the horror movie genre. Not just for taking advantage and innovating formal devices but for exploring the complex subject of the human psyche.
~Beatríz Torres Insúa, Student, L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation
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