silver nitrate notes

Cat People and What You Do Not See

30 sep 2016

Jacques Tourneur directed Cat People (1942) for Val Lewton's small horror unit at RKO. Lewton had been told by the studio to deliver low-budget genre films with sensational titles. He took the titles and made the films into something else. The cinematographer was Nicholas Musuraca, whom we have met five years later on Out of the Past. Cat People is Musuraca's first major collaboration with Tourneur.

The premise is, on its surface, B-picture material. A young Serbian woman (Simone Simon) believes she is the descendant of women who turn into panthers when sexually aroused. Her American husband does not believe her. As the film proceeds, evidence accumulates that she may be right.

What Lewton, Tourneur, and Musuraca do with this premise is refuse, almost entirely, to show the panther. The famous swimming-pool sequence is the example everyone cites. The protagonist's friend Alice (Jane Randolph) goes for a late-night swim at a Greenwich Village hotel pool. She becomes aware of something else in the room with her. The thing makes a noise. We see ripples in the water near the edge of the pool. We hear footsteps. We see, for a fraction of a second, the shadow of something that may or may not be a large cat moving along the wall. Alice screams. The scene cuts to her in safety.

The panther is never visible. Musuraca's lighting in the pool sequence is a single overhead source that produces hard reflections on the water and deep shadows on the surrounding tile. The audience sees what Alice sees, which is not enough to identify the threat but enough to know the threat is there. This is the technique that defined the Lewton unit and that influenced horror cinematography for the next thirty years.

The bus sequence earlier in the film is the other famous example. Alice walks through Central Park at night. She becomes aware of being followed. The sound of footsteps stops. A bus arrives at her stop with a hiss of compressed air that, in the editing room, was timed to the audience's expected scream. The sequence is, in horror filmmaking, what the term "bus" came to mean as shorthand for any non-threat that produces a startle response. Musuraca and Tourneur invented the bus.

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sources
[1] Bansak, Edmund G. Fearing the Dark: The Val Lewton Career. McFarland, 1995.
[2] Fujiwara, Chris. Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall. McFarland, 1998.
[3] Newman, Kim. Cat People. BFI Film Classics, 1999.
[4] Siegel, Joel E. Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror. Viking, 1973.