Cat People (1982)

Cat People (1982) 4/5

 The legacy of Paul Schrader’s Cat People might have less to do with the film than with the David Bowie/Giorgio Moroder theme song “Cat People (Putting out Fire with Gasoline),” which has appeared in films like Atomic Blonde as well as unexpectedly shown up the American version of The Office. Quentin Tarantino’s use of the song in Inglorious Basterds is an absolute showstopper. Bowie clearly liked the results so much that he wanted to put the track on his album Let’s Dance, but because MCA refused to let the song be released by Bowie’s label EMI, he had to make due with a re-recorded version, which just doesn’t have the same lush atmosphere that Moroder was able to pull off.

But this review isn’t about what a great song “Cat People” happens to be or even how amazing Bowie was (because if you get me started, we’ll be here all night. No, this review is of the actual Cat People remake directed by Paul Schrader and released in 1982, which is doubly overshadowed, by both the original and the song. But if you’re willing to resonate at the same frequency as the film, then you’ll appreciate what Schrader accomplishes with his take on the b-movie turned horror classic.

The film begins with a prologue that takes place in an unspecified time and place, perhaps an imaginative take on northern Africa. The very first shot is of blood red sand that blows away to reveal skulls and bone fragments. We then see as women are ritually tied to a gnarled, naked tree and consumed by leopards. A pall of red shrouds the images, which are pure Hollywood constructs, put together through sets and matte paintings. The artificiality only enhances the dreamlike atmosphere of the wordless introduction before cutting to the film’s version of Irene, played by Nastassja Kinski, arriving in New Orleans.

She’s there to meet here brother, Paul (Malcolm McDowell), but curiously doesn’t recognize him when he approaches. We’re not immediately clued into the backstory between Irene and Paul, but they were separated when they were younger and are just now reuniting. I’ll avoid major spoilers, but in the long tradition of Malcolm McDowell playing a creep, there’s an immediate incestuous subtext. It should also come as no surprise that Paul, like his sister, is also a cat person. (If the original had been titled Cat Person, then Schrader’s remake could have pulled the old Alien/Aliens trick and used the title Cat People, but, alas, it was not to be.)

From here the film follows the broad outlines of the original, but only contains a couple of scenes pulled directly from forty years prior. After showing up in New Orleans, Irene explores the city and finds her way to the local zoo where she encounters zoologist, Oliver (John Heard). Most of the film follows their burgeoning relationship as Irene slowly uncovers her secret past.

(There are a few spoilers in the following paragraph.) In the forty years since the original film, what could be shown and discussed in cinema had clearly changed. It was suggested in the original film that Irene would transform into a panther after having sex and potentially kill her mate, including Oliver who she marries in the original (although it’s suggested that the marriage is never consummated.) Here the rules of being a cat person are slightly more complex. If Irene or her brother have sex, then they will transform into a panther, but they can only transform back after they have taken a life. It’s later revealed that there is one exception: cat people can have sex with relatives and not transform. Paul believes that now that he and his sister have been reunited after all these years, they should run away together. After all, their parents were also brother and sister. (End of major spoilers)

Schrader takes the psychosexual subtext of the original and places it up front and center. According to Wikipedia, John Heard almost turned down the film because he thought it was pornographic. (McDowell also reportedly almost turned down the role, which, if you look at his IMDB page, must have been the only time he has that thought in his entire career. [As of this writing, he has six movies lined up for 2018 alone.] I mean, three years earlier he starred in Caligula.) Kinski spends much of the second half of the film in varying stages of undress. Even the film’s poster makes the explicit nature of the film, referring to the movie as an “Erotic Fantasy.” But none of this seems out of place considering how much many of these themes ran through the original.

It’s not much of a stretch to lump in Cat People with the werewolf craze of the 80s, including An American Werewolf in London, The Howling (and its many sequels), Silver Bullet, and, of course, Teen Wolf one and Too. It makes sense to see these films as reactions to the rise of the Moral Majority political organization, which formed in 1979 and became more prominent during the Reagan administration. Where the Moral Majority wished to police sexuality, werewolf and werecat movies of the time were happy to metaphorically showcase how hidden desires monstrously transform when unaddressed.

Schrader’s attempt to shake up and reveal taboo subconscious thoughts is nicely bolstered by his choice of setting. The original film takes place in New York, but Schrader smartly moves the events to New Orleans, which is emptied of pedestrians giving the city an eerie shroud as if the world around Irene exists only in her mind. Splashes of red and green only highlight the effect. There’s a clear connection between the use of color in Cat People and the neon noir of the 80s, which is fitting because the original film similarly makes use of noir’s chiaroscuro. The film prizes atmosphere and images over tight plotting and only becomes more oneric as the movie somewhat meanders to its conclusion.

Schrader’s Cat People justifies the idea of remakes as more than just a way for a studio to cheaply cash in on name recognition. This 1982 remake takes advantage of the forty year distance as well as Schrader’s unique eye. Paul Schrader came to prominence as a screenwriter with fellow New Hollywood alums, penning Taxi Driver and Raging Bull among many others. And while he’s not a household name like Spielberg and Scorsese, Cat People suggests that he can be a formidable director.

The Curse of the Cat People

Curse of the Cat People (4.5/5)

In the tradition of Aliens, Evil Dead 2, and Halloween III, Curse of the Cat People is a sequel that radically diverges from the original film. Where Cat People was a horror film about a woman who descended from people who could transform themselves into, well, a giant species of cat, Curse of the Cat People changes gear by eschewing most of the original’s horror film trappings and instead becoming a family drama about children and their imaginary friends. While some people might say to themselves, “I watched the entire movie, and not one person turned into a damn cat!” Curse of the Cat People actually serves as a worthwhile follow up to the original, and the genre hopping only reinforces the fact that this is a thoughtful and unique picture that stands on its own.

In the original film, Oliver Reed, a dopey middle class striver, marries a woman from Eastern Europe, Irena, who comes to believe she is descended from people endowed with the ability to transform into giant cats. Irena slowly loses her mind as her husband begins to strike up a romance with his coworker, Alice. By the end of the film, Irna dies, but not before transforming into a panther and killing her therapist.

Curse of the Cat People moves its characters from the city to the suburbs. Years later, Oliver is living in a house and now married to Alice, his coworker from the first film, and the two of them have a six-year-old daughter, Amy. Amy is estranged from her fellow schoolmates because she spends most of her time daydreaming. She knows that she’s different from other children, and on her birthday, Amy wishes that she could be normal just like other children.

Like many films after Curse, Amy’s childhood alienation is demonstrated by the fact that her classmates do not show up for her birthday party. But in a twist on what has become a trope, it’s not that the other children are purposefully avoiding her. Rather, Amy never mailed the invitation, instead stuffing them into a gnarled tree that she imaginatively transforms into a mailbox. It’s not that other children don’t avoid Amy--the film doesn’t shy away from the cruelty of kids--but on some level I think that Amy wants to be alone. Like any creative person, sometimes it’s easier to escape into fantasy than to be around others.

Eventually, Amy starts to have visions of an imaginary friend who looks just like her father’s first wife, Irena the Feline-American. And yet it’s not clear whether or not Irena supernaturally appears to Amy or if the vision is only in her head. Before seeing Irena, Amy uncovers photographs of her that Oliver keeps around, and her presence metaphorically haunts the home in the form of one of her paintings that Oliver still keeps around. This naturally makes Oliver’s current wife uneasy.

Amy also strikes up a friendship with a former actress, Julia Farron, who is now an elderly woman shut up in her creepy home with her adult daughter. Julia and Amy form a natural pair because both are interested in the world of make believe, but Julia also represents what happens when you find yourself too invested in the unreal. Julia has developed an unhealthy belief that her daughter, who has sacrificed much of her own life to care for her aging mother, is not really her daughter. Perhaps a sign of increased dementia, but almost certainly tied to her career as an actress, Julia believes her actual daughter died when she was six and that this woman who now takes care of her is somehow an imposter.

Curse wonderfully recreates the imaginative world of children. Amy finds a place of her own in the family’s backyard, a site of imagination. In fact, the backyard is referred to as a “garden,” which connotes a place of play and fantasy, a location where fairies might exist. Like the imagination, a garden is both wild and cultivated, containing plants that would not naturally appear in our backyards. It’s no coincidence that gardens have become metaphors for imagination in children’s literature as we can see in classic’s like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden.

The directors, Gunther Von Fritsch and Robert Wise (more on them later), capture a child’s fantasy world. The one technique that I found particularly reminiscent from my own childhood is how brief shadows of clouds portend the arrival of the fantastic. I remember feeling a bit of a chill and a bit of wonder whenever a cloud would pass over a field I was playing in. For a moment, time seemed to stop, and I found myself looking around to see if anything around me had suddenly changed. This obviously come out of the overactive imagination of a child, but Curse suggests that I wasn’t the only child who took a passing cloud as a symbol for the supernatural.

Curse could easily stand on its own, apart from the original film. Without the first Cat People, I think most would read the appearance of Irena as solely the work of Amy’s imagination. At one point, Amy is told by her father that she must denounce Irena’s presence or suffer the consequences, which means he will spank her. This is referred to as a “special occasion” because it’s the first time Amy has had to endure physical punishment for misbehaving. (People sure were accepting of parents hitting their children in the 1940s).

While Oliver is smacking his child, Alice has a conversation with Amy’s teacher. (In another exchange that reminds us the film is made in the 1940s, Amy’s teacher is reminded that she doesn’t have children of her own, likely because if she did, she would be a housewife and no longer working.) The teacher reminds Alice that it’s healthy for children to have imaginary friends and that this is a phase that she will grow out of. She then quotes a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson on the subject, titled “The Unseen Playmate.” When Amy starts to truly connect with others, then her unseen playmate will disappear. It’s at this moment that the film unveils the moral of the story: having imaginary friends is a normal and natural part of a child’s progression to adulthood.

Curse has two directors, Gunther Von Fritsch and Robert Wise. Wise actually took over from Fritsch when he fell behind schedule, and it turned out to be Wise’s first directorial effort and served as the inauguration of an impressive career, which includes highlights like The Day the Earth Stood Still, Run Silent, Run Deep, The Haunting, and The Sound of Music. Moving from horror to domestic drama, Curse succeeds thanks to its empathetic and detailed understanding of a child’s imagination.

“When children are playing alone on the green,

In comes the playmate that never was seen.

When children are happy and lonely and good,

The Friend of the Children comes out of the wood.”

--Robert Louis Stephenson

Cat People

Cat People (1942) (4.5/5)

Cat People begins like a traditional romance with a couple that meets cute at a local zoo. Having trouble sketching the likeness of a black panther, Irena keeps on throwing away her unsatisfactory attempts but each time misses the trash can. Another zoogoer, Oliver Reed. disposes of her trash and jokingly chastises her. But after they strike up a conversation, this Oliver fellow seems less concerned that one of Irena’s sketches, a badass image of a panther skewered on a sword, has slipped from her sketchbook and is left to muss up the city zoo. (This is before the EPA existed, so I guess people were a little looser about these things). Because we know this is a horror film, we also know that this relationship may not end well, and Cat People could be categorized as a horror-romance in the tradition of early gothic novels, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, or later horror films like The Fly or Let the Right One In.

Irena and Oliver strike up a romance and eventually get married. It’s not clear how long they were dating before marriage, but in the film it goes by quickly. It doesn’t seem as if Oliver knows much about his bride before marriage, except that she’s has a deep connection to her Serbian roots. In her apartment there’s a statue of “King John” regally atop a horse with his sword held straight up impaling a large cat-like creature. This isn’t Magna Carta King John, as Oliver first guesses; it’s actually Jovan Nenad, a sixteenth-century Serbian military commander who established the last independent Serbian state prior to the takeover by the Ottoman Empire. According to Irena, her village was captured by the Mamluk people, and soon after, the villagers started practicing witchcraft, which gave them the ability to turn into cat creatures. King John retook the village and killed those cat people who didn’t flee into the neighboring wilderness.

Although my knowledge of Eastern European history is hardly encyclopedic, you can probably guess from the description Irena gives us that the King John was a Christian who drove out the Muslim Mamluks. (In fact, the Mamluks were a slave warrior caste that likely inspired George RR Martin’s The Unsullied). Like plenty of horror stories, Cat People is about fear of contamination. Irena symbolizes the immigrant to the United States who may not be as white and Christian as you think. The mismatch between Irena and her husband is further highlighted by Oliver Reed’s absurdly Anglo sounding name.

Over time, Irena comes to fear that she herself is contaminated and may be one of the cat people. Another Serbian woman who bares a striking resemblance to a cat approaches Irena during her engagement dinner and speaks to her in her native tongue, calling her “sister.” According to legend, if a cat person kisses someone, she will transform into a cat and eat her mate. Cat People was made after the implementation of the Motion Picture Production Code, which established strict censorship over Hollywood cinema, so the film can’t say this in so many words, but for the audience it’s pretty clear what kissing means in this context. In fact, Oliver even says something along the lines of, “You know, it’s kind of weird we’re married and all and we haven’t ‘kissed’ yet.”

Here it becomes clear the film also embodies the fear of female sexuality as well as racial difference. Even after he marries Irena, Oliver keeps up a flirtatious friendship with his coworker, Alice Moore, who expresses doubt early on about the viability of Oliver’s marriage. Like early film star and sex symbol, Rudolph Valentino, Irena’s appeal comes from her darker complexion, which marks her as distinct from her blonde rival Alice. (Although he was Italian, Valentino also played Muslims, such as the title character in The Son of the Sheik). When Oliver, Irena, and Alice go on a museum trip, Alice should feel like the third wheel, but in fact Oliver suggests Irena explore other parts of the building because unlike him and Alice, she must be bored with these English ship models they’re looking at. The implication, of course, is that Irena is racially, religiously, and culturally unsuited for Oliver.

Irena starts to become concerned that Oliver and Alice are having an affair, and at first it appears that the film is setting up Irena to be a paranoiac. When Oliver’s having a late night at the office, she tracks down her husband only to find him having a meal with Alice. She later stalks Alice late at night down starkly lit streets. This scene in particular is masterfully crafted, juxtaposing the sound of Irena and Alice’s increasingly frantic footsteps and ratcheting up tension until it is broken by the sound of a bus arriving at its stop. Anyone who has watched a horror film is familiar with the scene where we expect the killer to jump out of the shadows, but instead a friendly character or a cat jumps out instead. The technique apparently dates back to Cat People and is known as the Lewton Bus after producer Val Lewton. There’s also a scene where Alice jumps into a pool in order to escape from a large cat she’s convinced is stalking her, and I’m pretty certain this moment in the film inspired a similar scene in the indie horror film It Follows.

But Irena isn’t as crazy as she’s initially made out to be. In fact, Oliver is planning to leave his wife for Alice, and even gets the advice to annul the marriage, which is another indicator that the marriage was never consummated. In all honesty, Oliver is kind of a dick. I mean, dude, you married this woman who you barely knew and then won’t step up when she’s clearly having a difficult time. What’s more, you’re ready to jump ship now that times are tough.

That’s not to say that Oliver doesn’t try to help out his wife, but he does so in arguably the wrong ways. He’s convinced that Irena’s cat person fears are only in her head, so he sends her to a psychiatrist. [Be warned. There are spoilers ahead]. When watching the film, I felt like there was something off about this psychiatrist dude. It turns out, like Irena’s cat people phobia, this wasn’t just in my head. The guy’s kind of a creep, and at the end of the film, he tries to kiss Irena, which I don’t think would be looked kindly on by the APA. Until this moment, we’re not quite certain whether Irena’s cat people fears are legitimate or not, but sure enough, she transforms into a leopard and mauls her therapist.

It’s easy to see why Cat People has become a horror film classic. First off, director Jacques Tourneur drapes the film in shadows, a technique he would use in the film noir classic, Out of the Past. (If you ever wanted to watch Robert Mitchum walk into a room and knock out some schlub with just one punch, then you really should watch Out of the Past). Oliver works for an architecture agency, so Tourneur makes great use of underlit drafting tables to create incredibly stark, nearly abstract chiaroscuro. Second, the film is thematically rich. From issues of hybridity, race, religion, immigration, science and medievalism, Cat People contains a whole host of themes in its brisk seventy-three minute running time.

Ultimately, it’s difficult to reduce Cat People down to a single message. While it certainly embodies America’s fear of the other as present in our anxiety over immigration, it also seems more sympathetic towards Irena than not. After all, the men in the film, her husband and therapist, ultimately fail her. She’s a monster, but she’s also the character who’s easiest to identify with. It’s not surprising that producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur, both of whom are immigrants, would take the point of view of Irena, and it’s unfortunately not surprising that the film’s exploration of America’s fear of immigrants who come from the Muslim world remains timely nearly seventy-five years later.