Cat People - 1942

Cat People - Released December 25, 1942. Directed by Jacques Tourneur

Psychology and superstition collide in this 1942 film from producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur. Cat People tells the story of Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon), a European émigrée torn between her love for her new American husband (played by Kent Smith) and her fear, derived from her Old World family traditions, of uncontrollably turning into a panther when emotionally triggered. When her husband grows impatient with Irena’s progress in therapy under local psychologist Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway), he seeks comfort from a work colleague (played by Jane Randolph)—and a dangerous love triangle begins to take shape.

Director Jacques Tourneur (son of silent film director Maurice Tourneur) works with his screen imagery often by way of subtraction: as the tension is increased, less and less is shown, with shadow and ambiguous movement filling the mundane urban setting where Irena confronts her troubles.

How Cat People came about

Producer Val Lewton had been hired into RKO to make low-cost horror films, and his first project was just a title and a vague idea handed over to him: Cat People.

This was Lewton's first film on his own and he was expected to bring in a competitive quality product in a field where Universal Pictures had been dominating for years. He had apprenticed under David O. Selznick as a story editor, the in-house Russian literary expert, a quality analyst, and uncredited screenplay "fixer," among other varied roles. Lewton had worked for Selznick for years beginning when they were both at M-G-M and then later hired into Selznick International when the famous producer went solo. Reflecting his own literary tastes, Lewton famously tried to dissuade Selznick from pursuing a film adaptation of Gone with the Wind, but championed bringing Hitchcock to America for Rebecca, the adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier's novel, among other projects

Lewton came to RKO with excellent references, a long resume as a novelist and jack-of-all-trades in the inky world of journalism and magazine writing. Besides his film-related work under Selznick, he had been at M-G-M in various posts since 1926; he was the nephew of silent film era "superstar" Alla Nazimova; and Lewton's mother Nina Lewton had also been working for M-G-M since 1916.

Though it has long been said Lewton's unit at RKO was a "B-movie" unit, there's been good arguments made that he was actually given the reins of a sub-A unit, as he had access to people and a freedom to develop projects that a typical B-unit would not have available, and after Cat People went on to make $4 million in box office receipts (or "only" $2 million, depending on the source of the accounting), Lewton's budgets steadily increased on some of his better projects (such as his string of Karloff films). That freedom Lewton enjoyed was curtailed at the marketing stage, though, and also the titles which he was given, all being "market-tested" according to the RKO method.

Lewton was glad to get Jacques Tourneur for a director on Cat People. The two had already worked together for a prolonged special sequence in the 1935 Tale of Two Cities back at M-G-M. Now the pair commenced to partially circumnavigate but also fulfil the main goal RKO had for Cat People, which was to imitate Universal's The Wolf Man.

The Lon Chaney, Jr., money-maker shares with Cat People certain essentials such as the spectacular shape-changing transformation (which is only hinted at, visually speaking, in Cat People), the obvious parallel of a love-triangle in both movies, but Lewton and Tourneur pulled up a minor detail of the Universal film and exploited it far more richly, that is, where poor Larry Talbott's father (played by Claude Rains) briefly explores the psychological issues underlying his perplexed son who is seeing mounting evidence that, despite no memory of it, he is indeed changing into a wolf during full moons. Where Universal slightly tread upon the matter of the mental health of the "monster," Lewton (along with writer Dewitt Bodeen) jumped in with both feet on Cat People and built the main narrative around the love triangle between the three leads, and the psychological treatment being given to Irena by Dr. Louis Judd (played by Tom Conway) who is completely informed of Irena's "primitive superstitions" and seeks to explore and then expose them as harmless delusions (which turns out to be a tragic mistake on his part).

It was a clever leap-forward for horror films in 1942 – a psychological exploration that was more characteristic of budding-noir films and of richly written melodramas from Hollywood, such as Selznick's own Rebecca, the Bette Davis Now, Voyager, and King's Row; and it also acknowledged the changing terrain of pop culture beyond film, such as the psychologically-themed Inner Sanctum Mysteries radio program (begun January 1941) and bestselling novels such as Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, Richard Wright's Native Son, and Margaret Campbell Barnes' The Sun Is My Undoing, centered on conflicted, psychologically rich characters navigating profound emotional or societal turmoil.

Cat People is a well-crafted film, notable for its excellent cinematography and carefully paced storytelling. (One of the frequently cited details of Val Lewton’s career as a producer is that—regardless of the official screen credits—he often provided the final shooting script on set.) But the question remains: Did Cat People simply arrive at the right moment to satisfy a growing appetite for psychological horror, or was it so innovative within its genre that it reshaped the cinema marketplace and created a niche that hadn’t previously existed? This remains a matter of ongoing debate and analysis in tracing the film’s history—and the generous box office it earned upon release.

Cat People has been frequently imitated and remade—both officially and unofficially—many times around the globe. Anyone familiar with Lewton and Tourneur’s landmark film will recognize how often it has been "borrowed from." The concept of "less is more" became a standard tool in the filmmaker’s toolbox, the invention of the "bus" effect, and the film’s psychological portrait of a sympathetic monster—alienated, emotionally and psychologically isolated—helped establish a new archetype, one in which the creature, despite the shape-changing and the terrorizing, is also deeply human and, in a crucial way, a victim.

Also - Val Lewton org - Cat People

Tom Conway - art by Erik Weems

What's Recent

Original Page November 2012 | Updated June 24, 2025