Mademoiselle Fifi

[This is a contribution to the Robert Wise Blogathon being hosted at Octopus Cinema from September 1-7.]

Mademoiselle Fifi is a curious bit of World War II propaganda, made at the tail end of the war and drawing none-too-subtle parallels between the then-current German occupation of France and the 1870 occupation of France during the Franco-Prussian War. It was the first film of director Robert Wise, stepping in to helm the first of producer Val Lewton's non-horror properties. After producing a string of B-movie horror classics during the early 40s, Lewton, always more ambitious and literary than his low-budget films really required, was eager to branch out into a different kind of film. Mademoiselle Fifi thus initiated the general shift away from horror that characterized Lewton's later features, in which the horror elements increasingly became incidental to the stories he was telling. This film was also the beginning of Wise's fruitful collaboration with the producer, which would also yield The Curse of the Cat People and The Body Snatcher. Moreover, this film continued Lewton's collaboration with Simone Simon, who starred in both his Cat People movies.

Mademoiselle Fifi is thus important in relation to the careers of both Lewton and Wise, but it's also interesting in its own right. For one thing, it's an especially naked piece of propaganda — its narrative, adapted from the stories of Guy de Maupassant, is set during the Franco-Prussian War but every line is clearly crafted to refer directly to the situation of the occupation and the Resistance in 1940s France. It's blunt and forceful in delivering its messages, as was increasingly the case with Lewton, who often presented his rhetorical points with hammering zeal. Simon plays Elizabeth, a proud laundress with a patriotic love of her country and a corresponding hatred for the invading Prussians. She is being forced out of a town because she refuses to eat with the soldiers, refuses to do anything for them, because she heckles and throws things at them in the streets. She winds up in a coach full of rich snobs, initially gaining only the trust and companionship of the leftist political activist Cornudet (John Emery). Of course, in the fashion of a true fairy tale (or a moralist fable) it winds up being "the little laundress" who's able to teach the other passengers about dignity and compassion, generously sharing her food with the starving rich folks even after they've openly insulted her.

This kindness is repaid by the other passengers with contempt and betrayal. The carriage is detained along its route by the Prussian officer Von Eyrick (Kurt Kreuger), who the other Prussians have dubbed "Mademoiselle Fifi" because of his fey, bitchy manner. This officer with the feminine nickname is cruel and unyielding, and will not let the carriage pass until the proud Elizabeth has bent to his will by agreeing to have dinner with him. The other passengers, though initially in solidarity, eventually decide that their business interests are more important than this girl's patriotic idealism, and all but force her to give in. The film's preachy sermonizing would be deadening were it not for the performance of Simon at its core. The character of Elizabeth, this good, noble, saintly young girl who's implicitly compared to Joan of Arc in the film's opening minutes, would be insufferable and unbelievable if played by anyone but Simon, who radiates such sweetness and warmth and innocence with every smile. Her gentle demeanor makes her pious patriotism seem genuine rather than smug — and makes her eventual suffering and betrayal all the more heartbreaking.


Though the film is far from nuanced in its political content, it's nevertheless fascinating for the way it examines the shifting double standards and hypocrisies of the bourgeois. The coach's rich passengers snub Elizabeth and make snide remarks at her expense until they discover that she has food, at which point they begin thawing and making expansive remarks about "brotherhood," as though suddenly they are all the same. This camaraderie only lasts, however, until the girl inconveniences them, and then suddenly they are cavalier about her honor. There is a real undercurrent of sexual snobbery in these people, who seem to assume that any girl of a lower class is promiscuous and easy, with no real honor worth preserving. Thus they feel no guilt or shame in essentially offering up their young companion to the Prussian officer when he demands she have dinner with him. While Elizabeth is upstairs with the officer, below they are celebrating, getting drunk on champagne, laughing at what they assume must be going on upstairs, happy that they'll finally be able to move on in the morning.

Wise cuts purposefully between the dinner upstairs and the dinner downstairs, contrasting Elizabeth's quiet suffering with the reactions of the bourgeois revelers below. Von Eyrick forces her to sing at one point, and the diners downstairs take this as an indication of the charming dinner the couple are having. But when Wise cuts upstairs to Elizabeth, she is in tears as she sings, absolutely ashamed of herself, only going through with it because she has been convinced that it's for the greater good. Later on, when the couple upstairs fall silent, the bourgeois downstairs listen intently, looking at each other knowingly, implying that the officer and the girl are having sex now. But in the officer's chambers, Von Eyrick simply humiliates Elizabeth, pulling her close for a kiss and then blowing smoke in her face instead, then forcing her into his lap only to reject her offhand. He wants only to humiliate her. (And, indeed, it's here that his character's feminine nickname takes on an interesting subtext of homosexuality and misogyny.)

In scenes like this, Lewton's hand is apparent: the producer was frequently interested in issues of class and sexuality, in the hypocrisy and moral censoriousness of those who consider themselves superior to others, and especially in the treatment of women. This theme played out as a consideration of the eroticization and fear of the foreigner in Cat People, and here shows itself in the way these elites treat a poor girl who they seem to consider simultaneously naive and debased. The film is also distinctively Lewtonian in its atmosphere, its foggy nighttime streets, lit by gaslight, and its denouement with Elizabeth darting through this shadowy emptiness, hiding and fleeing. The film is marred by its performances, which besides Simon's incandescent innocence and Kreuger's polished Aryan evil, range from utterly forgettable to theatrically overwrought. Even so, despite the overbearing political parallels and a certain period stiffness in the adaptation, Mademoiselle Fifi is an interesting work in the Lewton/Wise oeuvre, a chance to see Lewton's unique sensibility separate from the horror premises with which he usually worked.

Bedlam

Bedlam was the last of producer Val Lewton's RKO horror films, and it's a rather stunning conclusion to the vaunted series of B-movies the producer oversaw at the studio throughout the 40s. As with all of Lewton's work, this film strays far from its ostensible genre, and its horror is strictly human and realistic; it is the horror of cruelty and indifference towards one's fellow beings. Just a year after the end of World War II and the revelation of the horrors of the Holocaust, Lewton made a film about society's continuing tendency to classify people as either human or subhuman, declaring certain specimens to be animals, brutes, mindless, not worthy of respect or dignity or even the ordinary essentials of living. The film is set comfortably in the past, in the 18th Century, and it ends with an optimistic message of progress, but one can't help but think that there are darker, uglier truths at its core.

The film concerns itself with the plight of the insane, institutionalized at a famous London asylum derisively called "Bedlam," where the overseer George Sims (Boris Karloff) charges admission for high society visitors to come and watch the lunatics and be entertained. It is an appalling state of affairs, but no one seems to mind other than Nell Bowen (Anna Lee), an entertainer herself and the protege of the wealthy Lord Mortimer (Billy House). She is a former actress and a cultivated wit, and she is kept as something like a court jester for the corpulent lord. She herself is far from amused by the conditions in Bedlam, but she tries to resist the pangs of her conscience, trying to maintain the air of upper-crust indifference that her friends and companions wear so comfortably. She finds, however, that she cannot stifle her feelings, and the Quaker Hannay (Richard Fraser) encourages her to do something about what she's seen. When Sims parades a troupe of lunatics in theatrical costumes before one of Mortimer's parties — even making a cruel joke out of the death of one of the performers — she is horrified as much by the laughter at the table as by Sims' own actions. She tries to use her influence with Mortimer to change conditions at Bedlam, but the threat of raised taxes proves much more persuasive to the lord than his companion's desires; he tells her to consider his problems rather than those of the poor in the asylum.

Eventually, Nell's insistence on stirring up trouble and trying to improve conditions at Bedlam gets her committed herself, with Sims manipulating a sanity hearing against her and getting her under his care. Sims is a true villain, and Karloff delivers one of his best, creepiest performances as the sadistic asylum-keeper. He is a toady to the upper class, cherishing his stable position, in which he is at least tolerated in society by virtue of his usefulness, but he is never really accepted. All he wants is this acceptance, and he tries to present himself as a poet, an educated man of letters, though as the introduction makes clear, he can only really attain this status by imprisoning and murdering his more sensitive and intelligent rivals. He is a monster masquerading as a sophisticate, and his ingratiating smiles fade over time into sinister leers. He looks uncomfortable, too, in the neat dark wig that covers up his shock of white, ragged hair, another society pretense, a thin veneer barely covering up his evil nature.


This is one of Lewton's most pointed and forceful social commentaries. One of the film's greatest scenes is the climactic moment when, after Nell has finally engineered her escape from Bedlam, the inmates take Sims as their prisoner while one of them, a former judge (Ian Wolfe), decides to put the prison supervisor on trial. The inmates hold a trial in which Sims stutters out his excuses and justifications, saying that he didn't want to hurt anyone, that he was merely following the dictates of society, trying to fit in with those around him — a defense that essentially amounts to, "I was just following orders." It rings as false here as it did at the contemporaneous Nuremberg Trials, but the inmates nevertheless declare Sims to be "sane" and therefore release him. It's a fascinating moment, not least because the inmates' verdict of sanity can also be understood as an acknowledgment of his culpability for his actions. The inmates act as though Sims' sanity frees him, but in actuality it confirms that he knew exactly what he was doing, that his cruelty and viciousness were conscious.

Lewton and director Mark Robson sculpt this film's images with their usual care and delicacy. The images from the early part of the film, in Mortimer's lavishly appointed home, are bright and pristine, seeming to glow with light. The brightness and good cheer of Mortimer's parties and the laughter constantly echoing throughout his house create a powerful contrast against the squalor of Bedlam. The film purposefully delays the moment when the inmates' quarters, hidden behind a heavy wooden door, are finally revealed. When Nell goes to visit the asylum for the first time, as she steps through the doors the camera remains on her face, in a closeup as her eyes go wide and her mouth opens slightly, unable to suppress a gasp of horror. Lewton and Robson hold the moment, taking in Sims' self-satisfied smirk behind her, convinced that he has another satisfied customer. And then the camera slowly tracks backward into the room, revealing the filth and misery and darkness in which Bedlam's inhabitants must live. They are sprawled out all over the floor, most of them dressed in rags and covered in dirt, sleeping on straw, living like animals. As Sims leads Nell around the room, he even describes what kinds of animals certain inmates are: some are pigs, wallowing in their own filth, while others are dogs and need to be kicked every so often. He's a cartoonish villain, but his villainy feels all too real anyway.

The same can't always be said of the other characters. Despite the film's many virtues, it often suffers from mannered, stilted dialogue — it's the kind of writing that tries to approximate older forms of speech by eliminating contractions and making the conversational rhythms stiff and slow. Karloff's sheer intensity gets across even the clunkiest of the dialogue, but some of the other actors occasionally stumble. This is especially a problem for Fraser, whose stubborn Quaker comes across as self-righteous and sermonizing. Lee, however, is a worthy foil for Karloff's scenery-chewing evil. She's free-spirited and quick-witted, even if the rather staid dialogue never really establishes her as quite as funny as she's supposed to be. But as usual with Lewton's productions, the emphasis is on the film's atmosphere, particularly the eerie, darkly lit interior of the asylum, with its shadowy back corridor where grasping hands reach out from between the bars of cages. This is a horror story about the inhumanity with which people treat one another, and the societal structures that prop up and encourage this inhumanity.

Isle of the Dead

Val Lewton's penultimate horror production for RKO, Isle of the Dead, is one of the producer's weakest works. There are, as usual for Lewton, some intriguing ideas at the core of this film, but it's weighed down by a messy script and often shoddy execution, particularly in the brisk, confused pacing and jumpy editing that skips abruptly from scene to scene. This is especially true of the film's expository first half, in which the tough, uncompromising Greek general Nikolas Pherides (Boris Karloff) and the American newsman Oliver Davis (Marc Cramer) pay a nighttime visit to an island where Pherides' wife is buried. The opening establishes Pherides as a cold, brutal leader — he punishes one of his commanders, whose troops were delayed during that day's battle, by handing the hapless man a pistol, a silent signal that he should go kill himself, which he obediently does outside the general's tent. Davis' attempt at critiquing the general soon morphs into good-natured banter, perhaps because the bland Cramer isn't capable of getting any of his lines out, throughout the film, without a misplaced grin and a cheerful lilt in his voice. He manages to make every scene he's in seem like a comedy. To make amends, Davis offers to accompany the general to his wife's grave, and the two make a brief journey by boat to the cemetery island (guarded by a gruesome statue of the three-headed dog Cerberus).

Once there, however, they find that the grave has been desecrated, the coffin open and the body missing. It seems like the film is setting up a creepy ghost story or zombie tale, but the mood of slowly encroaching terror is cut short by Pherides' incongruous reaction — basically, "she's not here, oh well, let's go back" — and the fact that this whole curious incident is barely ever mentioned again. The script is riddled with these kinds of odd holes and tonal discontinuities, moments where the only possible reaction is nonplussed confusion. In fact, Pherides and Davis only wind up staying on the island because they hear haunting singing from far away, and they follow its sound, drifting on the wind, back to a house where the archeologist Albrecht (Jason Robards, Sr.) lives with several guests. They wind up being trapped there, however, when they discover that one of the house's residents has died of a virulent plague, and that everyone else may be infected. Unable to leave lest they spread the disease on the mainland, they all settle in to wait out the plague's course.

The inevitable supernatural element comes only in the form of the grave pronouncements of the housekeeper Kyra (Helen Thimig), who insists that the disease is being spread because of the presence of an evil spirit in the house. Specifically, she is fixated on pretty young Thea (Ellen Drew), the nurse to sickly Mrs. St. Aubyn (Katherine Emery), who was convalescing from an incurable illness even before arriving at the island. Kyra sees the older woman wasting away, growing paler and weaker every day, while Thea remains active and rosy-cheeked, and believes that the younger woman is sucking the life from her patient. As the plague slowly thins the ranks of the house's guests, Pherides, formerly a staunch defender of rationality and science, is won over by the force of these superstitions, and comes to believe that in order to stop the plague he must destroy Thea.


These is compelling raw material for an atmospheric B movie. Lewton, always interested in digging beyond the surface-level scares of most horror, finds in this story an extended debate between science, religion and superstition, all of them posited as alternate ways of coping with and understanding mortality. Pherides is also an interesting symbolic character, a man who believes he is doing good but who commits horrible acts in the name of noble causes. Just as, earlier in the film, in patriotically defending his homeland he drives a man to his death for a minor offense, once on the island his desire to protect those around him brings him to the brink of murder. The film's thematic foundations — the ways humans confront and think about death, the horrors perpetrated through good intentions — are strong, and by all rights this should be another of Lewton's powerful, subtle horror dramas. But its script and uneven pacing sabotage it at every turn, and its themes are treated with a complete lack of nuance. The debate over religion versus science is presented only in the most simplistic of terms, in scenes whose rhetorical points are patently obvious.

Moreover, with the exception of Ellen Drew's conflicted young innocent and Helen Thimig's witchy, fiery-eyed old housekeeper, the cast is abysmal and the dialogue is flat and deadened. Whole scenes play out where everyone seems to be reading from cue cards — or perhaps trying to read them, squinting at words too far away to read properly, slowly sounding out what they think they're supposed to say. Even the usually dependable Karloff seems lost, as though he stumbled onto the wrong movie set and got trussed up in this general's costume without any idea of what he's doing. There are moments where his energy and intensity comes through in the hard set of his jaw and his gruff manner, but more often he simply wanders through the movie without purpose. No one else is especially great, but Robards and Cramer are particularly awful, with the former stagey and pompous, and the latter simply smug and ineffectual. The problem is exacerbated by the sheer variety of performances on display: everyone seems to be in different movies, most of them rather bad movies from the look of it. Cramer's good humor rubs uncomfortably against the monster movie mugging of Karloff and Thimig, or against the sweet, low-key subtlety of Drew, whose character is inexplicably expected to fall in love with Cramer's Oliver.

That brings up another problem with the film, namely that for a group of quarantined people trying to survive a deadly plague, nobody seems to be making much of an effort to avoid contact with one another. Not only do Oliver and Thea meet illicitly in the woods to make out, but Thea spends the night in the room of a plague victim — and doesn't get ill, for some reason — while everyone else wanders around freely, chatting and hanging out as though on vacation. There's no sense of urgency, no consistency to how the disease spreads or who gets sick, no real tension. Lewton and director Mark Robson save most of the film's horror for a handful of effective set pieces towards the end, nearly redeeming the film by belatedly injecting some formal interest into the proceedings. This despite the fact that many of the effects in the ending sequences are achieved without any overt visuals whatsoever, instead weaving dense aural tapestries. In one scene, Thea locks herself in her room with the ailing Mrs. St Aubyn, while from outside the door Kyra taunts and cajoles her, her sing-song chants slowly driving Thea to despair and terror. There's also a remarkably effective sequence of a woman being buried alive, which Lewton and Robson signal entirely with the sounds of her struggle inside her coffin: amplified scrapings and scratchings, the creepy noise of fingernails screeching against wood.

Scenes like this, and the eerie shots of Thea wandering around the dark island with the clawed shadows of tree branches written across her face, indicate the possibilities of what this film might've been if it was a peak Lewton production. As it is, despite these flashes of the old Lewton touch, as a whole Isle of the Dead is dull, uneven and sloppily constructed.

The Body Snatcher

The Body Snatcher continues producer Val Lewton's streak of intelligent, substantial horror films for RKO, a run of films that were meant to be nothing but B-grade schlock with a few scares and thrills, but which consistently rose above this modest aim. Lewton's films are extraordinary, not just because of their justly acclaimed eerie atmosphere and inventive use of shadows to suggest horror rather than showing it directly, but because the producer never failed to locate the horror of his scenarios in interesting moral and psychological foundations. For Lewton, these low-budget horror productions became ways of exploring sexual attraction and foreignness (Cat People), class issues (The Leopard Man) and the psychology of childhood (The Curse of the Cat People). The Body Snatcher is, on its surface, a quietly creepy tale of serial murders that incorporates both the real-life story of the early 1800s Burke and Hare murders and the Robert Lewis Stevenson short story based on those events. Burke and Hare were a pair of murderers who killed 18 victims and then sold the corpses of their victims to the Edinburgh Medical College, where the doctors essentially disposed of the evidence through dissection. The film picks up on the underlying themes of this grisly incident, delving into the questions of morality raised by the story: the compromises involved in scientific research, the comparative value of human lives and the ethics of the medical profession in general.

The film's Dr. MacFarlane (Henry Daniell) is an eminent and well-respected researcher, the head of a school for doctors in training and an expert in anatomy. However, his practice is tainted by his association with the sinister Cabman Gray (Boris Karloff), a monstrous man who digs up graves and supplies the doctor's hospital with a steady supply of corpses for dissection and study. The doctor sees Gray as an ugly necessity, a way of getting around the laws that he believes constrain scientific research and limit the progress of medicine. If Gray can supply the school with more corpses, MacFarlane reasons, he can train better doctors who can go on to save more lives. However, MacFarlane's justifications aside, Gray also has a powerful hold over the doctor; they have apparently known one another for many years and were somehow involved together in the Burke and Hare murders. MacFarlane draws his innocent young assistant Fettes (Russell Wade) into the plot by enlisting him to receive corpses from Gray, signing for them as though they attained them through legal means.

Lewton, together with director Robert Wise, creates a typically dark, shadowy atmosphere in which this story can play out. The streets of Edinburgh, as rendered here, seem to consist mainly of dark back alleys through which sinister characters like Gray can stalk, his shadow stretched out across the wall in front of him. The sound design is equally stunning. A beggar woman who seems to be constantly around fills the night with her haunting, melancholy songs. The steady clip-clop of Gray's horse, its hooves echoing off the cobblestones as it pulls his carriage, signals the arrival of more nasty cargo through the night. Things only get darker when Gray, urged by Fettes to get more specimens for the school, switches from robbing graves to making his own fresh corpses. There's an eerily memorable sequence in which Gray's carriage quietly pursues a woman who walks down the street, singing, eventually disappearing into the foggy dark beyond an archway. As the carriage fades into the night after her, her singing abruptly cuts off a few moments later, her voice strangled into silence, the only indication of what's happened to her.


Karloff's performance as Gray is powerful and overbearing, and yet also, as the film goes on, surprisingly complex. Karloff is an intimidating presence, especially once he reveals his stylized one-handed technique for suffocating his victims. This character is sinister and evil, a nasty brute who thinks nothing of committing the most foul deeds. And yet it also becomes clear that he is more complex than a simple horror movie villain, that he's actually a lonely, poor man with very little to live for beyond the sense of power he gets from associating with a famed doctor like MacFarlane. There's a note of genuine sadness to Karloff's portrayal, a subtle emotional core beneath the evil surface; this subtlety and complexity mark Karloff as one of the greats of horror. This film was his last screen pairing with his fellow icon of 30s and 40s horror, Bela Lugosi, though it's a rather uneven match-up here since Lugosi only gets the minor role of MacFarlane's Igor-esque manservant Joseph. This confrontation between the two screen legends is horribly unbalanced as a result, not at all like the oneupsmanship on display when the two clash in Edgar Ulmer's The Black Cat. Here, Karloff clearly dominates Lugosi, though it's great fun to hear the Hungarian actor earnestly saying, through his characteristic thick accent, "I'm from Liverpool."

Karloff's Gray is, throughout this film, the locus for various tensions about scientific ethics and the evolution of morality in response to the rapidly developing advances of society. Gray might be a monster, but the corpses he supplies to MacFarlane and Fettes throughout the film allow the doctors to treat a critically wounded young girl (Sharyn Moffett) paralyzed from the legs down. Because of Gray's horrible actions, a young girl is able to walk again, and science has advanced in being able to treat a problem that had previously been deemed incurable. Lewton's consideration of these issues is ambiguous and subtle, allowing the contradictions between murderous horror and life-saving ingenuity to remain troublingly unresolved by the film's end. There is no answer: lives were lost to allow this girl to walk again, but her walking is undeniably a victory nonetheless, undeniably a beautiful and nearly miraculous thing. Lewton and Wise never lose sight of the film's primary raison d'être — to horrify, to frighten, to evoke a mood of gloom and murder — but at the same time they engage directly with the complicated tangle of ethics and trade-offs involved in scientific progress.

The Curse of the Cat People

Few film titles could be more misleading than The Curse of the Cat People, a gentle, meditative film about a little girl and her imaginary friend. Conceived as just another low-budget horror film for producer Val Lewton, a sequel to his wildly successful first film, Cat People, Lewton instead created a deeply personal ode to childhood innocence and the confusion and loneliness of children in an adult world they don't understand. Young Amy (Ann Carter) is the daughter of the heroes of Cat People, Oliver and Alice (Kent Smith and Jane Randolph, both reprising their roles from the first film), now happily married following the tragic events of the earlier film. Despite this tangible connection to the past, the tone of this sequel is far removed from the moody, shadowy supernatural horror of Cat People.

Instead, the film is about the inner fantasy world of a lonely young child. Amy is an isolated and distant girl, easily distracted from games with the other children, often content to run off by herself to make friends with a butterfly instead. She has an active imagination and a free spirit, but her increasing encapsulation in her own dream world worries her father Oliver, who has already seen the damage that vivid fantasies can do to one's psyche. In fact, Amy's problems are only compounded by Oliver, who, wounded by his past, resorts to simply berating and punishing his daughter when he judges that her fantasies have gone too far. He all but severs the lines of communication between them, explicitly telling her that he doesn't want to hear anything about her fantasies or about her isolation from the other children at school. He doesn't realize it, but he's cutting her off, preventing her from being able to talk to him, pushing her further away into a dream world where she can find a more loving and accepting friend who doesn't yell at her or judge her.


She soon finds this friend in the form of Irena (Simone Simon), the deadly cat woman from the first film, Oliver's deceased first wife. But even though Simon returns to play this vision of Irena — possibly a ghost or simply a figment of the girl's imagination — she is not at all the feral, intimidating creature who stalked through Cat People. Dressed in beautiful, glamorous gowns, shimmering in the icy winter glow of the family's backyard, Irena looks like a princess from a Disney musical, a young girl's fantasy playmate who appears whenever she calls. With her lilting foreign voice and slightly off-kilter beauty, Simon proves as potent in this film as she was with her more sinister role in its predecessor. She is Amy's sweet, kind friend, a source of comfort when the young girl has to cope with the meanness and fickleness of children at school or the inconsistent messages and haphazard parenting she faces at home. Amy is especially confused to find that her parents' discomfort with her fertile imagination doesn't extend to superstitions like wishing on her birthday candles, which they encourage.

Indeed, Amy finds comfort and support from everywhere but her home, where her well-meaning parents can't seem to figure out whether there's anything wrong with the girl or if she's just an ordinary child. Amy is especially drawn to the kind but eccentric old Mrs. Farren (Julia Dean) who lives in a creepy, decrepit mansion around the corner. This old lady gives the girl a "wishing ring" (the ring that first summons Irena) and tells her ghost stories like the legend of the Headless Horseman. Lewton himself grew up not far from Sleepy Hollow, and the mingled fascination and terror that Amy feels upon hearing this story must have been drawn from Lewton's own childhood. Mrs. Farren is interesting to Amy, but the young girl hardly understands what's going on in the house, with a scowling, bitter woman (the cat-like Elizabeth Russell, channeling Simon's creepiness from Cat People) lurking around in the shadows. She is Mrs. Farren's daughter Barbara, but the addled old lady believes her daughter died as a child, calling Barbara a liar and treating her with undisguised contempt. One of the film's points is that all of this goes over the head of Amy, who doesn't understand the complex and ugly adult emotions bubbling over in this house, which she loves so much for its ornate decorations and the theatrical ghost stories of Mrs. Farren.


Although The Curse of the Cat People is hardly a horror story, the shadowy atmosphere and visual beauty for which Lewton's productions have become known is quite possibly at its peak. The film had two directors, both directing features for the first time: Gunther von Fritsch, who was fired for progressing too slowly, and editor Robert Wise, who stepped in to take his place and complete the picture halfway through. The film is seamless, however, bolstering the impression that it was Lewton, not his directors, who was the driving creative force on the RKO horror films he produced. The visual style is clean and sumptuous, using shadows to carve out areas of light and shade in the family's back yard, where Irena hovers, glowing radiantly, beneath the black and white grids caused by sunlight filtering through the leaves above. There is a subtle eerie aura to the film, a suggestion of something creepy beneath its sunny suburban surface, but the film's only real hint of the supernatural is in the way Irena is able to dim the light in the backyard or put on a show of sparkling crystalline patterns for Amy. It soon becomes apparent that the real danger lies not with a ghostly presence come back to haunt the living, but with the incomprehensible problems and emotions of the adult world, too large and confusing for a young mind to cope with or understand.

This is a lovely, haunting film, as disturbing in its way as any of Lewton's more conventional horror productions. There is no true horror here, only the misunderstandings between generations that might, if unchecked, grow into potentially tragic alienation. The film's horror lies in the fear that one doesn't understand one's own child, or else in the amplified fears of childhood, where the sound of a speeding truck might be transformed into the galloping hooves of the Headless Horseman's mount. In this child's eye world, ghost stories that evoked delight and mystery by day jolt the child awake, sweating and terrified, by night, comforted only by the presence of a sweet, angelic friend, hovering at the foot of the bed and whispering lullabies into the chilled night air.

The Ghost Ship

None of the films producer Val Lewton made for RKO in the 40s could be described as conventional horror films, despite their pulp novel titles and horror premises, but The Ghost Ship, Lewton's fifth film and second with director Mark Robson, is possibly the furthest from its horror roots. Before its late detour into escalating madness, the film is a quiet, slowly paced seafaring tale. The idealistic young officer Tom Merriam (Russell Wade) is assigned to his first long voyage aboard the ship of the accomplished captain Will Stone (Richard Dix), a well-liked skipper with a stern, iron-hard regard for authority — particularly his own. Throughout the bulk of the film, Lewton and Robson seem less concerned with developing any sense of horror or suspense than with exploring the moral dichotomy between the captain and his young officer.

These issues play out mostly in conversations between the two men, with Captain Stone attempting to impart his sense of the officer's role into his protégé. These moral inquiries are broadly written, dealing in generalities and clichés, and the performances (particularly Wade's groan-inducing kiddish naivete) are stiff and stagey. But the issues the film is interested in exploring are undoubtedly worthwhile: the thirst for control and power, the necessity of speaking out and fighting back against corrupt authority figures (surely a pointed commentary in 1943, with the lessons of Hitler still looming large), the value of human life and the tremendous moral stakes involved in preserving and protecting it. The appropriately named Captain Stone is a man obsessed with power, to the exclusion of all else. He has a woman who loves him (Edith Barrett) in one of the port towns along his route, but he ignores and neglects her, preferring the satisfactions of leadership to those of love. He believes that his stewardship over the men on his ship gives him rights over their lives, and their deaths, an idea the film illustrates with the lovely image of a glowing white moth fluttering around a light bulb. When Stone and Merriam first meet, Merriam makes a gesture to kill the moth, but his superior pulls him up short, telling the younger man that he is not responsible for the moth's safety, and therefore has no right to take its life. It's an elegant, circumspect way of communicating the profound sense of control and entitlement that Stone holds over his crewmen.

Merriam initially finds himself persuaded by Stone's cheerful, casually delivered philosophy and seeming respect for the younger man. But he soon comes to see something darker in the captain, something mad and evil at the core of his philosophy, and this darkness in Stone comes to the fore with increasing frequency throughout the film. At its best, this duel of moral opposites — one believing in the essential goodness and equality of men, the other a totalitarian who calls human beings "cattle" — plays out within the cramped, dimly lit corridors of the ship, its gentle rocking creating pulsating shadows on the walls. The atmosphere is moody and minimalist, and the shipboard setting is sparse. Lewton was using an existing ship set on the RKO lot, and the expressive lighting narrows the focus to the claustrophobic confines of the boat itself, with hardly a glimpse of water or sky beyond its borders.


The film is thus less successful during its middle section, which ventures off the ship into a bright, airy port town where Barrett abruptly appears to humanize the captain, to provide some context for his increasing dementia and isolation from humanity. The film's philosophical and moral beats are pounded home so forcefully that it quickly becomes tiresome, particularly during Barrett's speech to Merriam about meeting girls and creating a life outside of his sailor's work. The dialogue is often clunky and pat. The writing in Lewton's films is never exactly subtle, with the themes inscribed right on the surface, but his earlier productions were generally more poetic and evocative; this one has too much psychoanalytical patter and contrived philosophy. Its poetry is confined to its images, which though not as consistently stunning as earlier Lewton productions, are still often eerie and effective. Lewton and Robson make particularly good use of character actor Skelton Knaggs, whose pockmarked, skeletal visage makes for inherently haunting images. As the mute sailor Finn, Knaggs' role is basically to stand around looking vaguely creepy, staring off to sea, his face half-obscured by shadows.

There also are several moments where Finn's internal monologue provides a poignant counterpoint to the film's theme that human connections are what maintains sanity and the sense of morality. As a mute, Finn has no friends, can foster no relationships with others, and this isolation and alienation torments him, whereas Stone suffers in a self-created isolation, a victim of his own monomania. In the final twenty minutes of the film, as Stone begins to spiral further and further out of control, Dix's increasingly unhinged performance becomes more and more appealing in its wildness. The intensity of his portrayal of Stone as a madman is convincing enough to make one forget the earlier clumsiness and stiffness of his conversations with Merriam. The scenes of the unraveling Stone stalking the ship's narrow hallways carrying a large, glinting knife are among the film's most memorable images. The Ghost Ship might be one of Val Lewton's weaker productions, but it's still an interesting if flawed attempt to create horror from a study of moral opposites.

The Seventh Victim

The first of producer Val Lewton's films without director Jacques Tourneur at the helm essentially proves, as though there was any real doubt, that Lewton is the primary auteur of the string of Gothic horror B-movies he presided over. The Seventh Victim, despite the addition of director Mark Robson on his first Lewton project, picks up without interruption the shadowy atmosphere, tragic romanticism, and literary sensibility of the three Lewton/Tourneur masterworks that preceded it. It is a strange, unsettling film, not so much for its story as for the odd melange of tones and themes that it balances, sometimes awkwardly but always intriguingly. It is sometimes a noir-tinged mystery, complete with a smart-mouthed fedora-wearing detective, sometimes a creepy thriller about an underground cult of Satanists, sometimes a philosophical and poetic inquiry into the nature of creativity and the desire for life. The film's main thrust focuses on the young, innocent Mary (Kim Hunter), searching for her missing older sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks). In the course of her quest, Mary falls in with Jacqueline's husband Gregory (Hugh Beaumont), her aloof psychiatrist Dr. Judd (Tom Conway), and the helpful poet Jason (Erford Gage) who falls in love with Mary as he joins the search.

Actually, though, Jacqueline's disappearance winds up being much less mysterious than it originally appeared; at times it seems like practically everyone who Mary runs into has seen Jacqueline only recently. This girl is both omnipresent and a ghost who haunts the film: she shows up briefly at the film's halfway point, wordlessly raising her fingers to her lips and then running away, before finally reappearing in the film's final act. Brooks is perfect for the role of the missing girl, and she brings a haunting gravity to her every appearance. With her straight bangs and severe black hair framing a delicate face, she's like a child dressing up for Halloween; her aura is both sinister and naïve. Her elusiveness only adds to her mystique. When she first appears to Mary, wide-eyed and unspeaking, she's like a lunatic holdover from the silent movies, her personality inscribed in her face and hairstyle, and in her deliberately exaggerated movements.

If the search for Jacqueline is the film's primary narrative, it is hardly the only subject that the filmmakers concern themselves with. It isn't even correct to say that Lewton and Robson make room for diversions and small asides, so much as they arrange the entire film around the principle of such diversions. There are numerous examples, such as the care that goes into establishing a local Italian restaurant as a central gathering point with several quickly sketched but compelling regulars, or the brief but clearly loving scenes at the school where Mary works, showing the children at play for no narrative purpose other than to create a light contrast to all the darkness. There is also, throughout the film, a running bit of business with a girl (Elizabeth Russell) living next door to Mary, who throughout the film is seen walking through the halls coughing. She seems like an extraneous character, just a bit of color on the sidelines of the plot, until at the end of the film she engages Jacqueline in a conversation, philosophically discussing mortality, illness, and what makes life worth living. It's a strangely moving moment, as surprising as it is beautiful, and the film's final image shows this previously anonymous woman dressing up for a night of fun, having decided to stop simply waiting for death and go out and live, if only for a single night.


In a film that's barely over an hour long, such diversions quickly cease to be simple asides and soon irrevocably alter the film's entire character. The result is a film that often feels awkwardly paced, somehow off-kilter, because its horror/mystery plot keeps getting sidetracked into irrelevant but often interesting material. The film is somewhat unbalanced because it was originally intended to be an A-picture with a bigger budget and a longer running length. When the film was cut, several narrative scenes were hacked out, including presumably all of the material that might've explained the otherwise baffling romance that abruptly develops between Mary and Gregory. But Lewton seems to have made sure that all of the philosophical and non-narrative asides were preserved. This pacing is sometimes disruptive — as when Robson interrupts the climax of Jacqueline's confrontation with the Satanists for a pointless scene between Jason and Dr. Judd, resolving some unexplained business from their pasts — but more often the film's disjunctive storytelling is satisfying in its own peculiar way. It's hard to quibble about the often blunt editing or the uneasy transitions from one narrative beat to the next when the overall effect of the film is so haunting and strange.

As with all of Lewton's films, shadows and expressive camera angles enhance the eerie quality of the story, even when, as in this film, there is virtually no overt violence, let alone horror. The scene where the Satanists attempt to taunt and cajole Jacqueline into committing suicide is a case in point. The scene is shot with Jacqueline looking lost and small within an oppressively big armchair, with the cult members amassed as a threatening bulk on the other side of a table from her, looming over her. Between them, a wine glass sits on the table, seemingly glowing with significance, filled with poison for Jacqueline to drink. As the night wears on and she still resists taking a drink, the shadows begin to cloak her face, wrapping around her and causing her jet coat and hair to blend into the darkness. Only her pale face continues to float in the black surroundings, along with the glass, reflecting light from some unseen source. It was for moments like this that Lewton staged entire films: beautiful dramas acted out in the dark, moral and philosophical conflicts between the urge to live and the knowledge of the evil and sadness that comes with life. Lewton was asked to deliver nothing more than a lurid slasher flick with an exploitative Satanist subtext, and instead he and Robson crafted a sensitive, potent film about the nature of good and evil, and the struggle to create happiness and light in a world of darkness.

The Leopard Man

The Leopard Man is the most conventional horror film of the three movies that director Jacques Tourneur made with producer Val Lewton. This third film, following on the eerie Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie, uses many of the same aesthetic techniques as the two earlier efforts — shadowy atmosphere, slow build-up, and the suggestion of violence rather than its direct portrayal — but hews much closer than either of the others to a true horror plot. The result is the creepiest and scariest film to come out of the fruitful Tourneur/Lewton collaboration, but not necessarily the best.

The film's premise is simple: a trained leopard escapes in a New Mexico town after the show biz promoter Jerry (Dennis O'Keefe) tries to pull a publicity stunt for his girlfriend and top talent Kiki (Jean Brooks). Soon enough, dead girls start showing up on the streets of the town, mauled to pieces in vicious attacks, and a few small clues lead Jerry to wonder if the cat is really to blame, or if a more human predator is on the loose. The film is loosely structured with a continually varied perspective. Though Jerry and Kiki are the film's ostensible protagonists, the point of view often shifts off of them to the town's residents, briefly taking up other people's tales. The camera will often unexpectedly begin following someone who seemed to be an ancillary character in a scene, picking up their story and seeing where it leads rather than following the track of the main plot. This democratic structure refuses to privilege the young couple who would be the unquestioned heroes in any other horror film. The killer's victims are not treated as disposable pieces of flesh who are just there to scream and die. In just over an hour of film, Tourneur still finds time to draw out the stories of all his characters, giving respect and attention to the eventual victims before their final moments.

The first victim is a young girl (Margaret Landry) who's afraid of the dark but is forced to go out late at night anyway, to get corn meal for her father's supper. Her nighttime walk to the grocer's is a moody, haunting trek through the shadowy town and its empty outskirts, with a midpoint pause at a railroad bridge where the girl is terrified by the shadows underneath the crossing. Tourneur isolates her in the cold, dark night, pulling back for a long shot of this crucial junction, her lonely figure standing just outside the deep black under the bridge, as though foreshadowing her end. But before it comes, she gets a wonderful little scene in the grocery store, admiring the birds chirping in a cage. It's apparent that this is something she often does, delaying her walk back through the darkness by a few minutes, and it triggers a crisp but evocative exchange with the grocer, who says she can pay him next time she comes: "The poor don't cheat one another. We're all poor together." This quietly spoken line, freighted with melancholy, suggests a long history between the grocer and the girl's family, and evokes the conditions of poverty for families scraping by in this village. The film's barely hidden subtext is its insistent probing of class and money, which comes up again and again in small asides and brief scenes. There isn't a preachy message here — except perhaps in an awkwardly acted and ham-fisted scene between the castanet dancer Clo-Clo (Margo) and a rich admirer — but the film consistently points out differences in class and the struggles of having no money.


The second victim is of a different class, a wealthy young woman (Tula Parma), and Tourneur again takes great pains to delve into the substance of her life rather than simply throwing her into the middle of danger. The film is able to invest a great deal into these characters with a few broad strokes: a lovely scene where her family awakens her for her birthday, clustered around her bed with flowers and singing; her pining for her boyfriend, who she keeps secret from her parents for some reason; her conspiratorial relationship with the maid who helps her arrange her trysts. These details are strictly extraneous to the plot, but establish the character and give her a life beyond what we see on the screen. Lewton and Tourneur were always known for doing a lot with a little, suggesting what is not seen, in their suspense and horror scenes, and in this film the principle is extended to the lives of the characters. These brief vignettes suggest that we are only seeing part of a life, that there is much beyond the surface of all these people who we meet for such a short time. Even the cemetery watchman, who doesn't have much to do otherwise, gets a great, creepy little throwaway moment when he tells Jerry and Kiki, "I have many friends, but they don't bother me with talk," gesturing through the cemetery gates as he says it.

The film takes the concept of "local color" as its defining aesthetic, so much so that Jerry and Kiki themselves are increasingly marginalized. They come across a bit like a team-up of Nancy Drew and a Hardy Boy, clean-shaven kids trailing around the edges of the story while the murder victims get most of the really juicy screentime. This is fortunate, because this duo isn't particularly interesting in and of themselves, and the movie falters whenever it tries to drum up some interest in their tepid romance or their conflicts of conscience over having started this whole thing. O'Keefe seemingly wandered off the set of one of the noirs he's best known for directly into the midst of this stalker tale, just for a change of pace — though it doesn't seem to have changed his tough guy demeanor any. Clo-Clo is much more interesting; Margo can barely act, but she winds her sinewy way through the film right from its first shot, which frames her curvy, dancing form in a doorway, contoured into an S-shape by her snake-like motion. The click of her castanets, insistent and eerie, also flows through the film, its coldly rhythmic sound echoing through the town's deserted streets at night, a music like the clacking of bones, one against the other.

The Leopard Man is at its best when it concentrates on small details like this, building its unsettling atmosphere through the accumulation of sounds, shadows, and slowly building tension. It's a film without a center, economical in its storytelling and yet giving the impression that it has time for plenty of detours into the lives of its characters, even the least "important" ones. This meandering quality to the plotting is the film's greatest strength, and it's inevitable that as the structure begins to tighten up in its final act, the film loses some of its charm. Despite a vaguely unsatisfying resolution, this is a fine low-key horror production from Lewton and Tourneur.

I Walked With a Zombie

The wind blowing through palm fronds on dark, moody Caribbean nights. The insistent rhythm of tribal drums beating in the distance. The strange moans and calls that echo through the chilly night air. With such simple effects, director Jacques Tourneur and legendary horror producer Val Lewton conjured up a genuinely eerie, haunting atmosphere for a film that has only a tangential relationship to its own campy title, I Walked With a Zombie. As usual for Lewton productions, the title came first, suggesting a lurid B-movie shocker, but instead Lewton and his team crafted a subtle, creepy, and emotionally complex romance set on the island of St. Sebastian. When the young, earnest nurse Betsy (Frances Dee) arrives on the island to care for the ailing Jessica (Christine Gordon), she finds herself unexpectedly in the middle of a love triangle between Jessica, her husband Paul Holland (Tom Conway), and his half-brother Wesley (James Ellison). There's a mysterious past here, a suggestion of betrayal and illicit love that immediately preceded Jessica's sudden descent into a near-comatose condition. The film doesn't so much tell a story as suggest one, obliquely tracing the contours of a tale that mostly resides in the past, its most important scenes already played out and inaccessible. This should necessitate a great deal of exposition, but except for a too-tidy resolution of one mystery towards the end of the film, the script is circumspect and allusive. By the end of the film, the audience knows more or less what happened without having been directly told, and without having the essential mystery of the story dissipated.

This sense of mystery is created almost entirely with Tourneur's subtle atmospheric effects. The wind is practically a character in the film, the breeze rustling through the trees and creating an uneasy aura that lingers over everything. When Betsy first arrives on the island, she's woken in the night by cries from somewhere within the Holland compound, and she goes out into the darkness to explore. The mood is set by the elegant use of shadow — all the windows in this house seem to have slats, the better to create those distinctive noir patterned shadows — and the whispering of the wind, the swaying of the palms and the way Betsy's nightgown billows gently around her legs as she walks across the cobbled garden path. There's a poetic eye for detail in these scenes, and the film aims to create an eerie, creeping terror rather than going for sudden shocks or horrifying images. One gets the sense that Tourneur is going for horror as crafted by Poe, where an accumulation of small details, insignificant in themselves, combine into an image of the macabre. The film's lighting and the stalking motion of the camera, circling around Betsy like a jungle creature around its prey, turn the island mansion into a haunted house, complete with a winding stone staircase in a shadowy tower.


As the film progresses, Betsy inexplicably falls in love with Paul, and then begins to learn more about the island's voodoo traditions, eventually coming to suspect that Jessica can be cured by a voodoo ceremony where medicine has failed. Betsy leads the sleepwalking Jessica through the sugar cane fields, past a tall, skeletal zombie guard, to a clearing where voodoo priests and priestesses dance and chant. This is a masterpiece of atmospheric horror, with not a word uttered throughout the whole trek, and no sound except the beat of the drums, the moaning song, and the whistle of the wind through the fields and treetops. Along the way, the two women come across many signs of the voodoo cult, scattered across the path like markers or warnings: a cow's skull on a stick, the hanged corpse of an animal, a gourd with holes cut into it so that the wind blows a mournful song through its hollowed body, a shattered human skull laid in the center of a circle of bones. Finally, they come across the zombie guard Carrefour (Darby Jones), whose wide, staring eyes and gaunt face represent the film's only overt suggestion of supernatural powers at work. Even here, rather than using this grim visage and imposing form for shocks, Tourneur instead lingers on the image, emphasizing the towering shadow of the zombie amidst the stalks of sugar cane, or letting the light of a flashlight play across his exaggerated features.

Throughout I Walked With a Zombie, potent images like this drive the story without explaining anything too directly. The closest the film comes to proper exposition is in the form of an island singer (the calypso star Sir Lancelot) whose song about the Holland family fills in some of the background on Paul, Wesley, and Jessica. But this material is not used lazily, and Tourneur films Betsy listening to this song as the singer advances from the shadows, strangely threatening despite his lilting voice, his words seeming to portend danger to come for the young nurse. It's a haunting scene, and a perfect example of the ways in which Tourneur and Lewton could transform genre conventions — like the necessary exposition of the love triangle that preceded Jessica's coma — into a new, strange poetry.

Cat People

Cat People was the first production from B-movie producer Val Lewton, who throughout the 1940s oversaw a series of widely acclaimed low-budget horror films which Lewton and his crews helped elevate above their humble origins. This film, directed with characteristic visual flair by Jacques Tourneur, takes a sensationalist horror story and, with minimal effects and deliberate pacing, turns it into a dense psychological study in forbidden emotions and primal fears. When American everyman Oliver (Kent Smith, who looks like a more baby-faced Richard Widmark) falls for the Slavic beauty Irena (Simone Simon), he is unwittingly cast under the shadow of an ancient curse that may be affecting his new bride. Irena fears falling in love and is unwilling to submit to the throes of passion, because she is convinced that she is a descendant of Satanic witches, and that their curse would transform her into a vicious panther in moments of erotic bliss or jealous anger. This obviously creates tensions between the newlyweds, and as Oliver struggles to find a way to "cure" his wife of her sexual reticence, he finds himself increasingly remote from her and drawn towards his co-worker Alice (Jane Randolph), more of a girl-next-door type with no dark curses hanging over her head.

The film's horror works only intermittently at the superficial level on which such B-grade horror films usually stay. The suspense and growing dread that suffuse the film emanate, not so much from the admittedly effective few scenes of conventional horror, but from the tangible psychological stresses within the characters. The panther ready to burst out and devour one's lover is an obvious metaphor for restrained sexual passion, a strain that is writ large right on the face of the film. This strain exists also in the 1940s Hays Code morality that keeps the film's depictions of sexuality forcibly chaste. Irena's self-restraint mirrors the restrictions of the Code. When the couple first meet, Irena invites Oliver to her apartment for tea, and the scene quickly fades to much later in the evening, as darkness descends on the apartment and Oliver is still lounging on the couch, and yet nothing happens between the couple. This perpetual lack of consummation in the central romance arises simultaneously from the requirements of cinematic morality at the time, and from the fears of Irena, whose internal panther might as well be the cultural forces that forbid her from having or especially expressing strong sexual feelings. The film plays off of this sexual terror, the fear of losing control of one's own emotions.


The terror in the film also arises from a simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from the unknown and exotic. Oliver is as American and "normal" as they come, which the script keeps driving home by having him order apple pie every chance he gets — he even rejects an order of chicken gumbo from a black Cajun waitress, another signifier of foreignness in the film. And yet, despite his all-American demeanor and normal desires, Oliver feels himself magnetically drawn to the very foreign Irena, with her lilting accent and old-country superstitions. He describes his attraction to her as a compulsion, a need to touch her and look at her whenever she is near. And yet Irena's foreignness, so attractive to Oliver, also creates doubts in his friends, some of whom call her "odd" and worry about Oliver's marriage. Irena represents the unknown in all its forms: the foreign intruder, the most unrestrained erotic urges, and the superstitions of the old world carried into the modern city. The film suggests that some things cannot be explained, and blatantly rejects the attempts by psychoanalysis to explain and demystify human sexuality. Oliver sends Irena to the psychiatrist Dr. Judd (Tom Conway), who tries to delve into her past through hypnosis, and explains her current psychological state, somewhat predictably, as a result of childhood trauma. Irena dismisses him, though, telling him that he cannot help her: "When you speak of the soul, you mean the mind." It's a great, telling line, perfectly encapsulating the film's emphasis on the mysteries of psychological and sexual states, cutting right to the ineffable core of humanity.

If the film's growing psychological terror is effective in creating suspense all on its own, the way Tourneur films the actual scenes of suspense and horror only adds to the film's atmospheric horror. Both Lewton and Tourneur became famous for creating a horror aesthetic founded on visual restraint and minimalism, influenced in equal parts by budgetary constraints and a belief that the unseen is often more terrifying than the seen. To this end, Tourneur crafts a handful of shadowy, wonderfully evocative scenes of almost unbearable suspense as Irena, possibly transforming into a panther, stalks her prey. As Oliver and Alice grow closer over the course of the film, Irena's anger and jealousy accumulate, and in one scene she stalks the other woman through dark city back-roads lit only by street lights creating puddles of light in the darkness. Tourneur films this pursuit with clever use of misdirection, always filming the two women separately as Irena follows Alice. Their high-heeled feet on the cobbled sidewalk form the only soundtrack, creating echoing patterns of percussive clicks. At first, Tourneur cuts back and forth between the two women, but then he subtly puts the focus almost entirely on Alice as the intended victim, letting Irena drop into invisibility, creating fear through absence — nothing is ever shown but the suspense is palpable anyway. This is equally true of an unforgettable sequence at a pool, where Alice jumps into the water to escape an indistinct shadow that she sees running towards her with a growl. As she treads water in the middle of the pool, desperately turning in a circle to look all around the room, Tourneur continually cuts to her point of view, showing the dimly lit nothingness of the room outside the pool, in which shadows moving on the walls occasionally suggest a panther-like form. Cat People is an incredibly effective piece of psychological horror, rising far above its low-budget genre origins and creating an enduring work of psycho-sexual exploration.