The Cat People could very well stand as a feminine version of The Wolf Man. Women equal cat, men equal dogs and what have you. The two films were released just a few weeks shy of exactly one year apart. The central figure is the victim of an ancient Middle European curse. And together, Irena Dubrovna and Larry Talbot somehow manage to suck every last ounce of excitement and fun from the actually pretty cool ability to transform into a ravenous and powerful beast. But Irena is not the female equivalent of Capt. Bringdown over there in England who is without question the gloomiest movie monster ever. The two films diverge in other ways to, not the least being that the extra $46,000 more the makers of The Wolf Man had to spend on Lon Chaney’s impressive makeup and shooting the scenes showing him attacking victims wound up costing the film a lot more than it was worth in terms of suspends and thrills.
That $46,000 disparity in budget favoring the earlier movie about the guy whose curse transforms him into a hair beast in full view of the audience reveals how creativity is usually stimulated not by abundance but dearth. In today’s economics, such a paltry overage would hardly account for the fangs crafted by Hollywood’s makeup magicians. In the years immediately following the attack on Pearl Harbor, that extra $46,000 the makers of The Wolf Man had to play around with likely made all the difference in quality. Clearly, the bulk of the budget went to creating a believable werewolf whose screen time is robust, but still not enough to make up for the number of minutes one must waste listening to Larry the non-wolf whine on and on about how horrible it is become a wolf. Whether it was due to the lack of excess cash available or whether it was entirely an aesthetic decision on the part of the filmmakers, the genius of The Cat People lies in the fact that it never—ever—shows Irena transforming into a cat. In fact, with the exception of one very brief image of a cat that can easily be interpreted as the result of an overactive imagination fueled by the terror of potential victimhood, there is not even any irrefutable proof that the titular movie monster exists at all.
What the producer/director/screenwriting team of Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur and DeWitt Bodeen proved—and continue to prove—is that, like with a striptease, once you’ve shown everything, there’s really nothing to do but leave the stage. After the first attack of the Larry Talbot’s werewolf and every werewolf to follow in his wake, the horror is inevitably and inexorably reduced with each appearance of the snarling, hairy man-beast. By contrast, by not having a transformation scene and by not revealing for certain whether Irena really is a cat person or a mad person, The Cat People manages to ramp up the terror with each subsequent “appearance” of its titular monster.
Just when you think the filmmakers could not possibly top the sheer dread and encroaching sense of anxiety that accompanies Alice’s utterly bloodless walk to the bus stop…the toss her all alone into a swimming pool at night with barely any lights on and really get the pulses racing. And that’s not even the climax or last time that what may or may not be a panther lady is stalking her prey.
Throughout the film, Lewton and Tourneur work to create a steadily increasing sense of dread and tension not through the “gotcha” moments so popular with all the kid filmmakers today. What these classic filmmakers realized and what most horror movie makers today do not—oddly, considering Stanley Kubrick totally nailed it with The Shining—is that tension simply cannot be created through a series of flashy editing of individual shots lasting no longer than ten seconds. The Cat People is perhaps the iconic example of how true suspense and genuine chills are built upon the expert utilization of all the tools at the disposal of the director: composition, lighting, sound, cinematography and, perhaps most importantly, timing. As the movie proves, it isn’t even merely enough to know when to show something and when to hold back; you have to know if it is even worth showing the thing at all.
