Review: 'Cat People' Blu-ray

A year after Universal Studios completed its trio of major movie monsters with The Wolf Man, RKO tried to get a taste of that film’s success with a project called Cat People. It was passed off to Russian-American producer Val Lewton, a former pulp novelist without an inclination for the kinds of furry fantasies Universal peddled. For their laughably named project, Lewton, co-screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen (Lewton did extensive rewrites on the script), and director Jacques Tourneur fashioned a more subtle, cerebral film than RKO had in mind, exploring the psychology of a woman who may only believe she is a were-cat, her delusion a symptom of the film’s true monster: sexual repression.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 315

The Date: August 10

The Movie: I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

What Is It?: Val Lewton’s disdain for the supernatural led him to produce a movie called Cat People that probably doesn’t have any cat people and a movie called I Walked with a Zombie that probably doesn’t have any zombies. Rather, the film is a very loose adaptation of Jane Eyre as a romantic familial mystery set on Saint Sebastian, where for a refreshing change, the well-adjusted black majority condescends to the white family falling to pieces on their old sugar plantation. 

Why Today?: On this day in 1902, screenwriter Curt Siodmak is born.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 220

The Date: May 7

The Movie: Curse of the Cat People (1944)

What Is It?: RKO demanded a follow-up to the smash hit Cat People, so cheeky producer Val Lewton reused that film’s three main characters and nothing else, basically turning the characters into completely different people too. The original Cat Woman, Simone Simon, is now a ghost guide to a sweet little girl with an overactive imagination. This is a beautiful, enchanting, and somewhat sad fairy tale about putting away childish things.

Why Today?: On this day in 1904, Val Lewton is born.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 54

The Date: November 23

The Movie: The Body Snatcher (1945)

What Is It?: Boris Karloff gives his most gleefully macabre performance as a grave robber in Robert’s Wise’s adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale. It's a slow burn, but worth watching for Karloff and a very spooky denouement. Lugosi's underused though.

Why Today?: On this day in 1887, Boris Karloff’s is born.

Review: 'RKO Radio Pictures Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy Films, 1929-1956'

As the company that put out Val Lewton’s psychological horror productions, Merian Cooper and Ernest Shoedsack’s giant ape pictures, and Disney’s greatest run of animated fantasies, RKO Radio Pictures certainly has a reputation for producing major genre pictures from the 1930s through the fifties. The studio’s genre output should be enough to inspire a book’s worth of quality history and criticism, but that’s not really what we get in Michael R. Pitts’s RKO Radio Pictures Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy Films, 1929-1956. The author includes a wealth of movies he admits are neither horror, science fiction, nor fantasy. For example, he tosses in a ghost-free western called The Black Ghost because Lon Chaney, Jr., is its star, and Chaney was in a lot of other movies that actually were horror pictures (I guess if RKO produced Of Mice and Men that would be in here too). Even worse, he fills the majority of his 382 pages with really, really thorough synopses of these films. I’m not sure for whom Pitts intended this stuff. Anyone who has already seen one of these pictures does not need to read its synopsis. Anyone who hasn’t wouldn’t want to for fear of having the whole plot spoiled. Each entry also includes complete cast and crew specs, a bit of history, some blurbs from vintage movie reviews, and a smidgen of Pitts’s own cursory critique, but anyone who writes about the Amos ‘n’ Andy movie Check and Double Check without dealing at all with its treatment of race and use of blackface clearly isn’t thinking very deeply about film, culture, or history. Considering that he dismisses those who’ve kept the “Amos ‘n’ Andy” TV show off the air since the sixties as the “political correctness crowd,” he’s probably a guy who’s better off keeping his thoughts to himself anyway.

Review: 'Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade'

The 1920s and 1930s were watershed years for horror cinema as they were for all cinema. The twenties saw silent horror rise around the world with abandoned artistry. The thirties saw the genre’s tropes come into focus at Hollywood’s Universal Studios. That decade’s horror explosion turned to an implosion with the arrival of World War II’s very real horrors and the MPAA’s censorship crackdowns. This left forties horror seemingly out of focus with its plethora of relatively benign sequels, “Poverty Row” cheapies, and hard-to-categorize realistic pictures residing in the twilight zone between horror and noir. The apparent lack of full-blooded, truly artistic horror cinema during the forties often leaves the genre getting a bad critical rep—or even ignored—in discussions of horror and forties cinema.

Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade collects seventeen new essays that reevaluate a period too often maligned or shrugged off. What the writers uncover might cause horror fans to rethink both the standing of our favorite genre during the forties and what constitutes a horror picture. Writer Kristopher Woolfer acknowledges the blurriness of this period by noting how, in the forties, horror as pulpy as House of Dracula had become more reality based— with its vampire and werewolf seeking scientific cures for their monstrousness— and how drama as reality-based as the pseudo bio-pic Citizen Kane borrowed Gothic horror tropes liberally. Peter Marra further forces us to rethink how horror hid in the forties by designating Bluebeard, The Lodger, Hangover Square, The Leopard Man, and The Spiral Staircase as proto-slasher pictures—right down to their sexually motivated killings— released decades before the usually identified year-zero pictures, Psycho and Peeping Tom. Meanwhile, filmmaker Anne Golden acknowledges that a movie such as The Spiral Staircase does not have to adhere to a single genre, and can exist just as reasonably in the shadows of horror as it can in those of the avant-garde. Even more fascinatingly, Ian Olney locates a previously hidden stream of proto-feminist horror pictures during the era (while cheating a bit by bleeding into the fifties). Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare argues that The Body Snatcher contradicts Val Lewton’s reputation for overly restrained “horror of the unseen” pictures with one that he sees as falling in line with the Grand-Guignol tradition (the writer avoids discussing the graphic gore for which the theater is best known since Lewton’s production obviously has none of that). Mark Janovich tries to boost the reputation of forties horror by calling attention to the work of two of Hollywood’s biggest icons—Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson—in the genre.

This book lacks a serious reevaluation of Universal’s horrors of the forties, which included enough unfairly over looked pictures—The Mummy’s Hand, Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, House of Frankenstein—to warrant their own explorations. Too often, Universal’s movies cast in minor comparative roles throughout these pieces. But perhaps Universal’s horrors have been handled as a whole enough times that this gap is excusable. Meanwhile, some of the best horrors of this period—Dead of Night and The Uninvited, to name a couple—are never even mentioned. That is more than a little curious, but even without such key pictures, these essays still manage to reveal how varied, evolving, influential, and present horror remained in this so-called “lost decade.” As should be expected of a book of this sort, a couple writers (Woolfer, Cory Legassic) bury their arguments beneath a slag heap of academic jargon , but the vast majority of these essays are as lucid and pleasurable to read as they are thought provoking… and Kier-La Janisse’s study of the appeal of the horror comedies of the East End Kids for real kids is downright fun.

10 Non-Horror Movies That Think They're Horror Movies

We expect monsters and suspense and shocks and disturbing images when we watch horror movies. They’re all part of the gravestone-littered territory. But what happens when such elements creep into dramas and crime pictures and kiddie-flicks and musicals and sci-fi spectaculars and pseudo documentaries? They may get under our skin even more assuredly because they don’t belong; they’re wrong, and horror has always drawn much of its power from showing us very wrong things. Thus some of the scariest movies are not horror movies at all, but movies that apparently think they’re horror movies. Here are ten of the most horrifying.

1. The Curse of the Cat People (1944 – dir. Robert Wise and Gunther von Fritsch)

We begin with an exception to the rules delineated above. Val Lewton may be horror’s most renowned producer, yet most of his films could just as easily have found a place on this list because he so emphatically avoided commitment to the supernatural. RKO pictures handed Lewton goofy titles like I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, and Cat People, expecting him to make cheapo monster flicks to turn a quick profit. He in turn paid as little lip service to standard horror as possible, mining these pictures for unsettling psychological insight and allowing his stock company of directors— Jacques Tourneur and Robert Wise— to realize them with artful light and shadow. RKO wasn’t getting exactly what it asked for, but it was getting hit films. Cat People was one of the biggest, so a sequel was a natural demand. Not only did Lewton barely bother to tie The Curse of the Cat People to its predecessor, but he made almost no effort to imbue it with anything recognizably horrifying. There is a ghost—former cat person Irena (Simone Simon)—but she is probably just a figment of little Amy’s (Ann Carter) imagination, and she is hardly an entity of horror. Rather, the once murderous monster has been totally rewritten as a benevolent presence, a beautiful and gentle playmate for a lonely girl whose parents (Kent Smith and Jane Randolph from the previous picture) don’t like her wasting her young years daydreaming. The Curse of the Cat People is a truly lovely piece of work—beautifully filmed and bittersweet—that was Lewton’s first to really give horror the heave ho. However, RKO was still able to market it as such because of its lurid title, its ghost, and a single scary sequence in which a local Miss Havisham (Julia Dean) tells Amy a story about the headless horseman that pitches the girl’s overactive imagination into hyperactive mode. There’s also a slight danger that the old lady’s daughter (Elizabeth Russell) is going to wring the kid’s neck in a fit of daughterly jealousy, but come on, that obviously isn’t going to happen in such a sweet film that really only thinks it’s horror.

2. Sunset Boulevard (1950 – dir. Billy Wilder)

When horror fell out of favor in the ‘50s, it immediately began assimilating into other genres. This is clearest in the decade’s sci-fi pictures that exuded fear more readily than the celestial and technological wonder at the heart of the genre. Horror also worked its way into noirs such as Kiss Me Deadly, with its apocalyptic finale, and The Night of the Hunter, a true genre straddler with a villain who is equal parts swindler archetype and boogeyman. In his 1950 noir Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder absorbed horror in subtler ways. Dimming star Norma Desmond (silent film legend Gloria Swanson) skulks through a Gothic old dark house replete with rat-infested swimming pool, Chas Addams-style dead chimp, and wheezy pipe organ on which the grim butler (one-time silent filmmaker and later-day horror character actor Erich von Stroheim) plays the classic horror signifier “Toccata and Fugue”. Norma, herself, is both beautiful and eerily possessed; a dead ringer for Gloria Holden’s Dracula’s Daughter. In his book American Gothic, Jonathan Rigby draws numerous fascinating parallels between Norma and Dracula senior, and her thrall over Joe Gillis (William Holden) is easily comparable to that of the Count over Mina or Renfield, even if the reason is more economic than supernatural. Though Rigby’s treatment of Sunset Boulevard as true horror is a stretch, there is no question that its final image of Norma— now completely insane, floating toward the camera, her eyes ablaze with madness, her predatory, claw-like fingers reaching for the audience—is among cinema’s most terrifying.

3. Vertigo (1958 – dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

Psychobabble’s 200 Essential Horror Movies Part 3: The 1940s

In this feature, Psychobabble creeps through 100 years of horror cinema to assemble a highly personal list of the genre’s 200 most monstrous works, decade by decade.

(Updated in September 2021)

33. The Mummy’s Hand (1940- dir. Christy Cabanne)
 

The commercial and creative success of Son of Frankenstein in 1939 revived Universal Horror—and horror as a whole— after a four-year slump. The studio followed with further sequels, beginning with The Invisible Man Returns in the first days of 1940, but hit a more confident stride the following September with silent-film vet Christy Cabanne’s The Mummy’s Hand.

October 28, 2009: The Eleven Most Memorable Musical Moments from Monster Movies!

Well, kids, Halloween season is winding down, which means I’ll soon be folding Rock & Roll posts back in among the horror nuggets. To make the transition just a little bit smoother I’ve cobbled together a post that focuses on both sides of Psychobabble’s Jekyll and Hyde persona: monster movies and music. So get on your death shrouds and boogie shoes, because I will now chronologically present The Ten Most Memorable Musical Moments from Monster Movies!

1. “Fort Collins Calypso Song” from I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

When RKO Studios told producer Val Lewton that his next project would have the goofy title I Walked With a Zombie, the cagey director started work on a film that was essentially an adaptation of the Charlotte Brontë classic Jane Eyre reset on a sugar plantation on the zombie-plagued island of Saint Sebastian. Filling in for Brontë’s Jane is Betsy Connell (Francine Dee), a nurse who learns that the Rand Family, for which she has come to care, has a dark past via a catchy ditty sung by Calypso legend Sir Lancelot. When the “Fort Collins Calypso Song” is first heard, Wesley Rand (James Ellison) flies into a fit of rage. Later, Sir Lancelot sings the song in a gloomier rendition aimed at Betsy. Calypso never sounded so creepy.


2. “The Headless Horseman” from The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949)

Disney’s telling of Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” may be the most faithful version of this oft-told tale. Well, that is if you ignore Bing Crosby’s snappy songs. But why would you? For a film that isn’t generally ranked among Disney’s greatest, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad has some truly memorable musical numbers, the best of which is this complex piece in which yellow-bellied Ichabod Crane learns of the headless Hessian haunting the woods surrounding Sleepy Hollow.


3. “Once Upon a Time There Was a Pretty Fly (Lullaby)” from The Night of the Hunter (1955)

Is there a more haunting scene in film than the riverboat escape in Charles Laughton’s masterful The Night of the Hunter? Two young children flee from Demonic Preacher/Big Bad Wolf Robert Mitchum and take to a little wooden boat. Suddenly, the manic, terrifying tone shifts toward the eerily dreamy, and the little girl begins to sing a beautiful song about an escaping fly in an incongruously mature voice (actually sung by former vaudeville singer Kitty White). The journey downriver is accompanied by various tableaux that draw equally on fairy tales and wild nature: a perfectly spun spider’s web; a croaking frog. There may have never been a more transcendentally beautiful marriage of music and film as the “Once Upon a Time There Was a Pretty Fly” sequence, but special mention should also go to Mitchum’s creepy rendition of “Hymn #59” (a.k.a. “Leaning”), which he sings whenever he’s on the hunt.


4. “Willow’s Song” from The Wicker Man (1973)

A lot of viewers stumble into The Wicker Man without knowing it’s a demented pagan musical. The soundtrack is a trove of wonderful British folk songs that comment on the action of the film in unexpected ways. We get to hear Christopher Lee’s port-rich bass as he sings the rollicking “Tinker of Rye” and multiple fine songs by Paul Giovanni & Magnet. Yet no song is as evocative as “Willow’s Song”, sung by Lesley Mackie (who plays Daisy in the film) and lip-synched by Brit Ekland as she frolics in the nude in an attempt to lure Edward Woodward to his doom. Ekland’s voice is not the only phony in this scene—as she was pregnant at the time, director Robin Hardy incorporated a stunt butt to substitute for the Bride of Rod Stewart during her rear shots.

5. “Tubular Bells” from The Exorcist (1973)

William Friedkin had a bastard of a time finding an appropriate score for his little demonic possession opus The Exorcist. After violently rejecting the music he commissioned from Lalo Schifrin, who is most famous for writing the theme to “Mission Impossible”, he resorted to the needle-in-a-haystack method of hunting through random records in Warner Bros.’s music library. That’s when he happened across the yet-to-be-released Tubular Bells, a severely pretentious new age symphony by former Soft Machine bassist Mike Oldfield. Friedkin was so enamored with the creepily tinkling music that he used the first movement of “Tubular Bells, Part 1” as a running theme throughout his film, so there isn’t necessarily one moment with which the piece is best associated. But it became so powerfully linked to the blockbuster that Oldfield’s highly uncommercial album ended up selling in the neighborhood of 16 million copies throughout the world. It’s hard to believe anyone can listen to “Tubular Bells” today without conjuring up images of green vomit and spinning heads.

6. “Puttin’ on the Ritz” from Young Frankenstein (1974)

Mel Brooks was adamantly opposed to the “Puttin’ on the Ritz” dance number Gene Wilder wrote for Young Frankenstein, feeling it strayed too far from the Universal Monster Movie parody at the heart of the film. Brooks had a point, as Wilder’s Frankenstein and Peter Boyle’s Monster high-stepping to Irving Berlin’s standard seems to come out of nowhere, yet it may be the most famous scene in this most famous horror-comedy. The spectacle of Boyle answering Wilder’s lines with a yowled “Puttin’ ona riiiiiiss!” doesn’t sound like the stuff of comedy gold, but it’s the scene’s bizarro incongruity that makes it stand out among the picture’s innumerable gags.


7. “Time Warp” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

The most popular Midnight Movie is also the greatest monster musical, so The Rocky Horror Picture Show has no shortage of revered songs. Still, I doubt that many of the film’s crazed followers would argue that its most supreme musical moment is this insanely catchy rocker that informs squares Brad and Janet that time-traveling ecstasy is just a pelvic thrust away. The three solo spots in the song—Riff Raff (Richard O’Brien) careening from Karloffian lugubriousness to Bon Scott screeching, Magenta (Patricia Quinn) sing-speaking like the Bride of Bela Lugosi, Columbia (Little Nell Campbell) chewing her lines like a Queens car hop—are exhilarating. It’s just a jump to the left…

8. “In Heaven (The Lady in the Radiator Song)” from Eraserhead (1977)

Few filmmakers integrate music as seamlessly into their films as David Lynch. Even the sound of steam escaping from a radiator takes on a musical quality in Eraserhead, although actual music is used relatively sparsely in Lynch’s debut feature. There are a couple of organ pieces by Fats Waller and this childlike ditty sung by Peter Ivers and lip-synched on screen by actress Laurel Near. Following the birth of his monstrous baby, Henry X (Jack Nance) starts seeking solace from Near’s tiny, puffy-cheeked figure residing in his radiator. At one point, she interrupts his nightmarish visions to emerge from the darkness and serenade him with a song essentially impelling him to commit suicide, because “In heaven, everything is fine.” It’s beautiful and haunting in execution, oddly disturbing in intent, and absolutely unforgettable.

9. “Blue Moon” from An American Werewolf in London (1981)

The film that basically gave birth to the ironic use of music, An American Werewolf in London sports a soundtrack loaded with moon-themed oldies. After Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising” plays out in its entirety as David Kessler (David Naughton) nervously paces around his new girlfriend’s apartment waiting to turn into a ravenous man-dog, he settles in for the evening as Sam Cook’s version of “Blue Moon” oozes from the soundtrack. Suddenly, Kessler screams in agony as he undergoes the single greatest werewolf transformation ever conceived. The sweetness of Cook’s voice matched with the violence of Rick Baker’s werewolf effects achieves weird transcendence.

10. “96 Tears” from Stephen King’s Cat’s Eye (1985)

The filmmakers responsible for Stephen King’s Cat’s Eye did not secure the rights to the original version of “96 Tears” by Question Mark & the Mysterians, but I will forever associate the classic garage rock anthem with this fairly decent anthology nevertheless. This somewhat generic remake by the Northern Orchestra is featured in the first and best segment of Cat’s Eye: “Quitters Inc.” James Woods plays a schlub struggling with a mean nicotine addiction. He tries a radical solution that involves his wife being placed in an electrified booth in the event he sneaks a ciggie. Of course, he does, and wifey winds up hopping and screaming to “96 Tears” in the “Cat Room.” It’s an ironic combo of disturbing torture and danceable Rock & Roll that makes for the most memorable scene in the picture.

11. “Partytime (Zombie Version)” from Return of the Living Dead (1985)

Goth-metalists 45 Grave did not write the horrifying “Partytime”—a truly depressing song about the rape and murder of a five-year old girl—for Return of the Living Dead, but surely that’s where the vast majority of folks heard it. At the behest of Orion Pictures, 45 Grave frontwoman Dinah Cancer agreed to dump the original bleak child-abuse lyrics in favor of dopey ones that are far more in step with the fun-loving zombie flick. In the film, the track plays as the dead first start rising from the grave en masse, but it’s equally memorable for its place of pride in the trailers that ran on late night TV constantly throughout the mid-‘80s. There are better songs on the Return of the Living Dead soundtrack than this goofy headbanger (contributions from the Cramps, the Damned, and TSOL), but none that better sum up the movie with the tagline “They’re back from the grave and ready to party.”