Hang Cat People in the Louvre 

Put five men dressed like cats on the screen, what do they look like?

Like five men dressed like cats.

When an audience pays to see a picture like this, what do they pay for?

To get the pants scared off of them.

And what scares the human race more than any other single thing?

There are some movies you only need to watch once. Others, you can watch a few times and still enjoy. Then, there are the few that you can watch countless times, never tiring of their brilliance. Those special ones are different from all the rest, and they're unique to each person. One of my flick fixations is Cat People (1942), an endlessly stylistic and bizarrely scary creature picture from RKO.

I find it funny that Cat People is one of my favourite movies yet I struggle to explain why everyone should watch it. If I'm being logical, the movie is boring, not very well acted, and makes less sense than a cat's reaction to a cucumber. However, when I look into my heart, I know that at any time, any day of the week, I am down to watch Cat People.

To me, this movie is so attractive. There are the “gowns by ………….. Renié,” as they are displayed in the title opening. Simone Simon, who plays the protagonist, is often dressed in a fur coat, so as to impose the feline presence. My insider tip for watching old movies is that, if there is anyone in the opening credits that only goes by one name, the film will slap.

Maybe, if I explain what Cat People is, it will make sense. Released in the middle of World War II, Cat People is an escapist picture. It follows the story of Irena (Simon), a Serbian woman living in New York. She spends time drawing sketches at the Central Park Zoo until she meets Oliver (Kent Smith). When Oliver puts the moves on Irena, she recoils in fear. To appease her confused, would-be lover, Irena says that she's afraid she's cursed. If she were to kiss Oliver, she would transform from woman to panther. Oliver is skeptical, but patient.

Things take a turn for the sinister when Irena suspects that there is more going on between Oliver and his coworker, Alice (Jane Randolph). Irena stalks her. Alice believes that the curse of the cat people is real and that Irena can transform. Oliver sends Irena to a psychiatrist, Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway), who tries to understand her. Although he doubts Irena's transformative capabilities, he finds it unhealthy for her to obsess over the curse.

Director Jacques Tourneur and producer Val Lewton maintain the audience's wonderment. Is Irena possessed or is it a fiction? They want you to believe that she is possessed, but they don't convince you through visual spectacle. Rather, it's through genius subtraction that this film earned the highest spot in my horror pantheon.

In the old days, Hollywood followed the strategy of quantity over quality. On a shoestring budget, countless monster movies were made, like The Wolf Man, The Ape Man and The Mad Monster. A majority of these films are forgotten, except in cult-cinema circles. Cat People should have been forgettable, but Tourneur's stylistic choices and Lewton's mind for horror turned this doomed picture into something legendary.

Irena believing that an ancient curse has made it so that she will transform into a cat-like creature if she is ever passionately aroused is strangely cool and decidedly weird.

As the quote from The Bad and the Beautiful makes clear, if you actually show people dressed like cats, your movie is going to suck. What Tourneur and Lewton decided to do was never show these so-called cat people. By focusing on the implied, the shadows that permeate a room, the things just out of frame, the filmmakers were able to play with the audience's psyche. The mysterious unknown keeps us pleasantly uncomfortable.

Take the scene of Alice in the swimming pool. Alice gets home and decides to go for a night swim. Totally normal thing to do. What she doesn't know is that Irena is following her. While Alice is in the change room, she starts hearing strange sounds and seeing strange shadows. She gets spooked and dives into the pool. Forgetting to turn the lights on, the shadows of the pool's atrium play with her mind. She hears the roar of a panther, but she can't see anything. When she screams bloody murder, Irena flicks the lights on and asks her the trouble. Like Alice, we're left to wonder if she was imagining things or if Irena really did take the form of a panther. Even when we see the all-time-great shot of the wet panther paw prints that transform into wet high-heel prints, we can't say for certain just who or what Irena really is.

Nothing scares people more than the dark. You can show me adults stabbing themselves in the face with forks, you can show me a guy getting harpooned in the gut, but nothing will toy with my subconscious more than the infinite possibilities of the unknown.

There's something skittish about Cat People. It's its bizarre nature that makes the film one of my favourite rewatches. The concept of a girl turning into a panther if she ever gets horny is at once hilarious and somehow forward thinking for the 1940s. It doesn't help that they have Irena explicitly state that this is how the curse works, only for the remainder of the movie to be filled with her turning into a panther every time she is jealous rather than aroused. Still, the film's absurd comedy is undercut by the frigid tension tethered to Irena's jealousy.

Meanwhile, Oliver marries Irena despite knowing he may never kiss her, which is equally bizarre. His tone-deaf monologue about how he, a straight, white male, has never been unhappy in his life is, at best, hilarious and, at worst, everything that's wrong with old movies. Unnaturally, this odd monologue is the catalyst for Alice admitting that she loves him, beginning the love-triangle plot. Tone-deafness in old movies is not universal, but it is pretty common. I can choose to laugh at, get mad at, or study these natural ocurrences, and my choice varies by the movie. With Cat People, it feels harmless, but anything can transform.

Without a proper budget, without any real stars, and with no premise other than a title, Tourneur and Lewton created an all-time classic. Cat People is a testament to the old studio system, where they would produce 100 crap movies with the hope of one of them being a hit. Cat People is that hit. Its influence is felt in every horror movie with a jump scare and every time a director used the audience's imagination to make the dark come alive.