10/25/15 – day twenty-five of thirty-one days of horror!
One of the first and best examples of the psychosexual freak-out,
Jacques Tourneur’s 1942 Cat People, produced by the visionary Val
Lewton, is a noir-drenched master class in suggestion and suspense.
Though made in the fading heyday of the Universal horrors, you won’t
find any monsters here, at least none that you can see. But the
supernatural, or at least the strong implication of it, is very much
present, captured at that sweet spot between reality and the lingering
terrors of nightmares. Simone Simon
makes for the perfect alluring yet tormented lead, playing a woman that
believes she will turn into a panther if she gives her body over to the
man that she loves. Paul Schrader made an interesting if not entirely
successful 1982 remake with Natassja Kinski, but no Halloween season
should pass without a revisiting of the classic and only recently valued
original.
