CAT PEOPLE (1942)

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23 AT 7:30PM

The first of the iconic horror films legendary producer Val Lewton made for RKO Pictures redefined the genre by leaving its most frightening terrors to its audience's imagination. Simone Simon (Seventh Heaven) stars as a Serbian ?migr? in Manhattan who believes that, because of an ancient family curse, any physical intimacy with the man she loves (Kent Smith, The Spiral Staircase) will turn her into a vicious feline predator.

"Wondrous ? filled with horrors imagined rather than seen, with a superbly judged performance from Simone Simon." - Tom Milne, Time Out Film Guide

Lewton, a consummate producer-auteur who oversaw every aspect of his projects, found an ideal director in Jacques Tourneur (Out of the Past), a French chiaroscuro stylist adept at keeping viewers off-kilter with startling compositions and psychological innuendo. Together, in a series of atmospheric horror films which included I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man, they eschewed the canned effects of earlier monster movies in favor of shocking with subtle shadows and creative audio cues, a unique style fully realized in one of Cat People's most famous sequences, involving a young woman trapped alone in a dark swimming pool while an unseen sinister presence prowls the perimeter. One of the studio's most successful movies of the 1940s, Cat People (remade in a more graphic style by Paul Schrader in 1982) raised the creature feature to new heights of sophistication and mystery, leading no less than Martin Scorsese to state that the movie is "as important as Citizen Kane in the maturation of the American cinema." (Dir. by Jacques Tourneur, 1942, USA, 73 mins., Not Rated)