IMDb 7.2 / 10
IMDb 6.0 / 10
Cat People exists twice, and the two films are a clean experiment in horror technique. In 1942, Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur made a film about a woman who believes she’ll turn into a panther if she’s touched, and never showed the panther. In 1982, Paul Schrader made the same story and showed everything.
The ratings here come from IMDb. It’s been too many years since I watched either for a rating of mine to mean anything, so the crowd’s numbers stand: 7.2 for the original, 6.0 for the remake.
The interesting part is why the gap exists, because the remake is the more expensive, more explicit, more technically accomplished film.
My sympathies are with the 1942 film, and they’d be there without the numbers. I prefer horror that makes me build the monster myself, and Lewton’s Cat People is the purest case of that approach I know.
Cat People (1942): IMDb 7.2
Irena Dubrovna, a Serbian illustrator in New York, believes she comes from a village whose women turn into cats when they’re aroused or jealous. She marries Oliver Reed, refuses to consummate the marriage, and watches him drift toward a colleague at work.
Val Lewton produced it for RKO on about $134,000 with a title the studio handed him and instructions to deliver a horror picture. What he made instead is a psychological study in which the audience is never told whether anything supernatural is happening.
It was a large commercial success at a moment when RKO badly needed one, and it launched a run of low-budget Lewton horror films that ran through I Walked with a Zombie and The Body Snatcher. IMDb has it at 7.2.
Two Famous Scenes
The first is the walk. Alice, Oliver’s colleague, walks home along a park wall at night, footsteps behind her stopping when she stops. The tension builds until a bus brakes at the curb with a hiss that sounds like a scream. The device was copied so widely that it’s been called the Lewton bus ever since.
The second is the swimming pool. Alice swims alone in a basement pool, hears something, and the water and tiles throw light on the walls in shapes that suggest a large animal moving around her. Nothing is shown. The film cuts to a torn robe.
Both sequences work because Jacques Tourneur and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca refuse to resolve them. The audience supplies the cat. I think the Lewton bus is the smartest cheap trick in horror history, and I’m glad it carries his name. A hiss of air brakes did more work than a panther suit ever could have.
For Writers
Lewton’s team had no money for a convincing panther, so they built two of the most frightening sequences in 1940s horror out of sound, shadow and what the audience imagines. A threat the reader completes is stronger than one you describe in full. When you write horror or suspense, withhold the clear look at the thing, and give the reader enough detail to assemble it themselves. Take your scariest scene and cut every direct description of the threat. Replace it with what the characters hear, what moves at the edge of sight, and what they find afterward. Whatever the reader builds will frighten them more than your description could.
Cat People (1982): IMDb 6.0
Paul Schrader’s version moves the story to New Orleans and gives Irena a brother. Malcolm McDowell plays Paul, who has already accepted what they are and wants his sister to do the same. That turns the film into a story about a family that can only mate within itself without killing anyone. Nastassja Kinski plays Irena and John Heard plays the zookeeper who falls for her. It’s explicit where the original was oblique, in both violence and sex, and the transformations are shown in full with Tom Burman’s effects. David Bowie sang the title song over Giorgio Moroder’s score, and the film looks superb. IMDb has it at 6.0, and the usual complaint is that showing everything cost the story its unease.
Simone Simon and Nastassja Kinski
Simone Simon plays Irena as small, soft-spoken and permanently apologetic, and the performance is why the 1942 film isn’t camp. She’s frightened of herself, and the audience is asked to pity her before it’s asked to fear her.
Kinski takes the opposite route. Her Irena is quiet and watchful too, and the 1982 film gives her a brother who tells her exactly what she’s in the first act, so the performance has to carry acceptance where Simon carried denial.
Both are good. The difference is what the scripts allow. Simon’s Irena has a secret she can’t say out loud in 1942, and Kinski’s has a family explaining it to her over dinner.
For Writers
Simone Simon plays a woman who can’t name what’s wrong with her, and forty years later Kinski plays one who’s told in act one. The same character becomes a different story depending on how much she’s allowed to know. When you write, decide what your protagonist understands about their own situation and when, because that timing shapes every scene. Write down what your hero knows at the start, the midpoint and the end. If those three answers are the same, nothing is happening inside them.
What Changed Between Them
The 1942 film is about repression. Irena can’t be touched, the horror comes from her refusal, and the film belongs to a period when the Production Code made the subject impossible to state directly. Appetite is what the 1982 film is about. Nothing is repressed, everyone knows what’s going on by the second reel, and the horror has to come from the transformations themselves.
That’s the trade. Schrader gains explicitness and loses the ambiguity that made the first film linger. The remake is more shocking on a first viewing and much less unsettling afterward.
I’d take Lewton’s side of that trade without a second thought. Schrader has Bowie, Moroder and gorgeous photography, and I still think he gave away the one thing that made the story frightening.
For Writers
The original works because nobody can be certain whether Irena is cursed or ill, and the remake removes the question in its first twenty minutes. Ambiguity is a resource, and answering your story’s central question too early spends it. When you write, decide how long you can hold the reader’s uncertainty, and protect it from your own urge to explain. Find the moment your book confirms what’s really happening. Ask whether the chapters after it are as strong as the ones before. If they aren’t, the reveal came too early.
The Lewton Method
Lewton had a formula at RKO: a title from the marketing department, a budget under $150,000, a running time around seventy minutes, and complete freedom inside those limits. He used it to make some of the most literate horror films of the era. His pictures share a distrust of monsters and an interest in the people who believe in them. The horror is in the psychology, the suggestion and the sound design, and the budget made that approach necessary before it became a style. Directors from Robert Wise to Martin Scorsese have cited those films. The 1942 Cat People is the one that started it, and it’s the reason the original has a reputation the remake never earned.
Which to Watch
For the two set pieces alone, the 1942 film. It runs seventy-three minutes, it’s on most lists of the best horror films of its decade, and it holds up because almost nothing in it has been made obsolete by better effects.
Schrader’s version is worth seeing if you like the look of early-1980s horror and want to watch a talented director take the opposite approach to the same material. It’s handsome, strange and much less frightening.
No rating from me on either. The IMDb scores, 7.2 and 6.0, describe the gap accurately enough.
Craft Note
Craft Note
The two Cat People films run the same experiment with opposite settings: hide the monster or show it. The hidden one is still frightening eighty years later and the visible one dated within a decade. Effects age. The reader’s own imagination doesn’t.
Which Cat People is better?
The 1942 original, by every measure the public applies: 7.2 on IMDb against 6.0, a permanent place in horror history, and two sequences that are still taught. It cost almost nothing and it works on suggestion alone. There’s no rating from me on this page, since it compares two films instead of reviewing one. If you’re choosing between them, I’d point you to the 1942 original without hesitation, and I’d send you to the remake only after you’ve seen what Lewton did with a hiss and a shadow.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Cat People (1942), AFI Catalog
- Cat People (1942 film), Wikipedia
- Cat People (1942), IMDb
- Cat People (1982), IMDb
