A Film Canon

 

 

The first - and strongest - instalment in Val Lewton's RKO horror cycle, Cat People clarifies the extent to which the Universal horror cycle was one of special effects, in place of which it raises atmosphere to a pitch that imbues the most everyday things with an uncanny intensity: "I never cease to marvel at what lies behind a brown store front." More specifically, Tourneur extrapolates an entire aesthetic from the panther's stare, such that the most tangible sources of fear tend to be tactile, mobile patches of extreme blackness, from which occasional flashes of light gesture towards some amorphous malignity - most creepily in a scene that takes place in and around a darkened, rippling swimming pool, but most poetically in the form of an architect's office, blackened apart from the upward stabs of light tables. That said, this new, atmospheric aesthetic is clearly indebted to the older, more theatrical one. Not only is theatricality refined and deflected into a pervasive aestheticism - the protagonist's (Simone Simon) house seems more like a museum, or an artistic approximation of the zoo across the road, than a realistic dwelling-place - but psychoanalysis, or at least psychiatry, is in the foreground, with the critical difference that it is now invoked as a specific doctrine, rather than as a mere possibility. In particular, the conflation of sexual longing with death marks the beginning of Lewton's fascination with the death-drive, as well as Tourneur's most artful evocation of it as an unnerving, distant cry.