Cat People: Low Budget, High Quality

Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) confides her fears 

about an ancient Serbian curse to Oliver Reed (Kent Smith)

in "Cat People," the first in a series of inexpensive,

but high quality, horror films producer Val Lewton

created for RKO Radio Pictures in the 1940s.

Cat People (1942, RKO Radio Pictures)

Starring Simone Simon, Kent Smith,

Tom Conway, Joyce Randolph
Screenplay by DeWitt Bodeen; Produced by Val Lewton

Directed by Jacques Tourneur

While classic films often feature legendary stars and boast large budgets to help famous directors tell timeless stories, they aren’t a requirement. The above credits for "Cat People" are a great example. When the movie hit the screen 71 years ago, the participants were far from household names. After this collaboration, however, they forever will be connected with a masterpiece.

Financially troubled RKO ordered Lewton to create inexpensive and quickly made horror films to cash in on moviegoers’ fascination with the genre. What Lewton gave them in "Cat People" and eight other titles he produced for the studio went above and beyond the typical horror fare. They were thoughtful, sometimes beautiful, minor works of art.

"Cat People" tells the tale of Serbian immigrant Irena Dubrovna (Simon), who fears she suffers a curse in which she would transform into a dangerous cat if she feels jealousy, anger or sexual desire. Irena meets happy-go-lucky Oliver Reed (Smith) while she sketches a leopard at the Central Park Zoo. Later in her apartment, after she confides, “I like the darkness. It’s friendly,” Irena reveals her deepest fear to Oliver, who dismisses it as a fairy tale.

In spite of all this, they marry, but Irena keeps Oliver at a distance to reduce the chances of fulfilling the curse. After hearing this from Oliver, colleague Alice Moore (Randolph) recommends psychiatrist Dr. Louis Judd (Conway), who tells Irena her fears have a more mundane source. Eventually, Irena’s treatment of Oliver pushes him toward Alice.

After seeing the pair together, Irena is overcome by jealousy and later stalks Alice down a dark street. Consisting of nothing more than the sight of some rustling foliage, the interplay of light and darkness as Alice walks under streetlights and the clicking sounds of women’s shoes as they continue down the street, an overwhelming sense of impeding menace is generated. When it seems that menace will appear, the hissing sound of a bus door is what we get instead. This device can be found in the thousands of horror films that followed.

In the end,  Oliver and Alice finally discover, “She never lied to us.”

With a budget of less than $150,000, Tourneur and Lewton knew plausible special effects were out of the question. Instead, they filled "Cat People" with shadows, sounds and an atmosphere of foreboding and melancholy that fire the viewer’s imagination, where the best special effects always are created.

Alice Moore (Joyce Randolph) isn't
sure if she's being followed
in "Cat People.