INTRO: Near the end of the 1970s, Universal Pictures was able to gain access to the library of films that had been made by RKO decades earlier. A plan was set in motion: they were going to release a series of remakes of RKO classics. This plan led to them bringing the world updated versions of two RKO horror films in 1982. Unfortunately, both of those remakes were box office disappointments. Their failure killed the whole remake series idea. One of them was director John Carpenter’s The Thing, which is now widely considered to be among the best horror movies of all time. The other was director Paul Schrader’s take on Cat People – which may be the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw.
CREATORS / CAST: Released in 1942, the original Cat People exists because of Citizen Kane. While many consider it to be the best movie ever made, Citizen Kane was not successful at first. RKO lost money backing it, and in an attempt to recoup their losses they hired producer Val Lewton to make a bunch of low budget horror movies for them. RKO would provide the titles and Lewton would turn them into movies that should run no longer than seventy-five minutes and cost no more than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Provided with the title Cat People, Lewton hired DeWitt Bodeen to flesh out a story that director Jacques Tourneur would bring to the screen. The story centers on a young woman named Irena, who has come to New York City from a small village in Serbia that has a dark history. It’s said that, long ago, the people of her village had gotten into dark magic and Satanic practices. Some of the women gained the ability to turn into panthers, “in jealousy or anger or out of their own corrupt passions”. Many of these evil people were executed, but some escaped into the mountains. Fearing that she’s a descendant of these cat people, Irena isolates herself. She doesn’t allow herself to get close to people. Once she finally does, there are disastrous results.
When development on the remake began in the ‘70s, Paul Schrader was not the first choice to direct. Which makes sense, because he didn’t have any horror credentials at the time. The first filmmakers to get involved were Black Christmas director Bob Clark and Alan Ormsby. Who had worked with Clark on Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, Deranged, and Deathdream. These guys had plenty of horror cred going into Cat People. Clark soon departed the project, but Ormsby would remain on board as writer.
Under the guidance of producer Charles Fries, Ormsby set the story in New Orleans and made voodoo the reason for the cat transformations. His approach to the material was to play up the sexual side of the concept. The idea of a woman turning into a panther if she gives in to passion. Roger Vadim seemed to be the perfect director for this take on Cat People. He had directed horror before, with Blood and Roses and Spirits of the Dead. And sex was often a prominent topic in his films. He had a reputation for turning actresses into global sex symbols, like his exes Brigitte Bardot, Jane Fonda, and Catherine Deneuve. Vadim was concerned that a movie about a woman turning into a panther if she has sex would be perceived as sexist. So he suggested that Ormsby add a male cat person into the mix as well.
Like Clark, Vadim soon moved on from Cat People. This is when Universal turned to the unexpected choice of Schrader. Not only was Schrader new to horror, but he had also never directed someone else’s screenplay before. He had written films for major directors like Martin Scorsese, Sydney Pollack, and Brian De Palma. He was best known for writing Taxi Driver. The reception of that movie allowed him to start directing his own films. Blue Collar, Hardcore, American Gigolo. And it was the box office success of American Gigolo that made him appealing to Universal. They happened to approach him at just the right time. Schrader was working on a project that was difficult to get into production because the subject matter was too personal. All of his films had been personal in a way. So when he was offered Cat People, he thought it would be fun to do something that wasn’t personal for a change. To get off the self-examination pedestal, as he put it. He could make this movie and the focus would be on the horror and special effects instead of himself. But as it turned out, Cat People ended up being one of the most personal films of his career.
Not surprisingly, Schrader did his own uncredited rewrite of Ormsby’s script. The voodoo element was removed. In its place, we’re told that the cat people are descendants of an ancient tribe that would sacrifice children to leopards. The souls of the children then grew inside the leopards, turning them into humans. These cat people were seen as gods at the time. Now their existence is kept secret from the public. We’re given a glimpse of this ancient tribe in a prologue that Schrader added to the story. He also changed the ending, replacing Ormsby’s typical creature feature scenario of the monster being trapped in a burning house with something much more twisted.
Bo Derek, at the time very popular for her appearance in the Blake Edwards movie 10, was considered for the lead cat person role. Instead of Derek, the part went to Nastassja Kinski, who had previously earned a Golden Globe nomination for her performance in the film Tess. Schrader would later admit that her acting ability wasn’t his main reason for casting her. He said, “I had pretty well decided on her without ever seeing her act. I had seen her once in Cannes, walking out of a hotel. She had this ethereal, odd beauty. Like it fell from the sky. It seemed unearthly. Just right for this role.”
Kinski plays Irena, a young woman who has come to New Orleans to reconnect with her older brother Paul. The pair were separated when they were children, after their parents died. Schrader cast Malcolm McDowell as Paul, and McDowell said he was hesitant to sign on because he didn’t think the original Cat People had been very good. His character was not in the original. He’s the one who was added in at Vadim’s request… and he brings a whole new level of oddness to the concept. While Irena doesn’t yet know that they’re cat people, Paul is fully aware of how this all works. He reveals that cat people are an incestuous race. They can only have sex with their relatives. If they have sex with someone outside of their family, they will transform into black leopards. And then the only way to regain human form is to kill. Since Irena is a virgin, she has never transformed.
While waiting for his sister to give in to him, Paul meets up with a prostitute played by genre regular Lynn Lowry. She had previously been seen in George A. Romero’s The Crazies and David Cronenberg’s Shivers. Although the script has tied the cat transformations directly to sex, the movie doesn’t quite play by that rule. Transformations happen without sex. Paul has already turned into a leopard before the prostitute gets to his hotel room. But when something is this weird, you can’t get too nitpicky with it. Paul doesn’t manage to kill the prostitute, so he’s stuck in leopard form until he can take a life. In the meantime, he is captured by local zoo curator Oliver, played by a then-virtually-unknown John Heard. Heard is another actor who was hesitant to sign on. In his case, it was because the story was so sexually charged, he was concerned the movie would be pornographic.
The leopard Paul is set up at the zoo, where Oliver works alongside his ex Alice, played by Annette O’Toole, and Joe, played by Ed Begley Jr. We also get a fun cameo from John Larroquette as a clueless zoo official. While seeing the sights of New Orleans, Irena finds herself drawn to the leopard’s cage in the zoo. There, she catches the attention of Oliver, who instantly becomes enamored with her. Now we have the makings of a deadly love triangle, as Irena is caught in a rivalry between Oliver and Paul. Either she’s going to make love to Oliver and become a bloodthirsty creature, or she’ll end up with her insane brother.
Other characters we meet as the story plays out include Frankie Faison as a detective – but Schrader decided to have Albert Hall dub over his voice. And Ruby Dee as Paul’s housekeeper Femolly, a character who wasn’t named at birth, so her name is a mispronunciation of the word female. The scene where Femolly explains her name is pretty much her standout moment in the film. She wasn’t given a lot to do otherwise.
The panthers in the films are played by a mixture of actual black leopards and cougars that were dyed black. Since the leopards couldn’t be trained, the cougars had to handle any moments where the big cats needed to hit marks and perform specific tasks.
BACKGROUND: For Schrader, Cat People evolved from an impersonal genre piece into a very personal project because he fell for Kinski during production. He has said that he became obsessed with her. So his reality began to reflect the film, where Oliver and Paul are both obsessed with Kinski’s character Irena. He was engaged and planning to have a family with his longterm girlfriend, but he ended that relationship to pursue one with Kinski. He was ready to propose to her as well, but their affair didn’t last long enough to reach the proposal. They had broken up before the movie wrapped, which made it difficult for them to work together at times.
Matters of the heart weren’t the only things causing trouble on this set, as Schrader has also admitted that he had a serious addiction problem at the time. An entire day of filming was lost because he was in his trailer doing cocaine. When crew members were sent to get him out of the trailer and bring him to set, they would end up doing cocaine with him instead.
But despite these distracting personal issues, Schrader was able to deliver a well-crafted film. Cat People is disturbing, but captivating. Lurid, but elegant. Like the original film, it takes a goofy horror B-movie concept – the idea of people turning into panthers – and turns it into a prestige picture. But Schrader wasn’t a big fan of the original, and did not like it when viewers compared his movie to it. Aside from the were-cat idea, the two films have very little in common. A few characters have the same first names as characters in the 1942 film. A few scenes were recycled in homage. Irena sketches a caged panther in both films. She’s approached in public by a strange woman who refers to her as “My sister”. And in both versions of Cat People there’s a scene where the Alice character is stalked at an indoor swimming pool. Aside from names and those few moments, the director and writer rebuilt Cat People from the ground up. So when some viewers started saying the remake wasn’t as good as the original, Schrader began to feel they should have changed the title as well. That wouldn’t have made sense, of course, because most remakes exist solely to cash in on titles.
Attempting to cash in on the Cat People title didn’t work out for Universal. Made on a budget of twelve-point-five million dollars, the remake barely broke into the box office top ten during its opening weekend. It only made a total of seven million at the domestic box office. It did slightly better internationally, for a final gross of twenty-one million. When it wrapped up its theatrical run, Schrader was left feeling that the film’s style had worked against it. He said, “Cat People wasn’t successful. It really fell between two stools: it was an attempt to have things both ways, which is to have a classy film and a horror film. Well, the horror audience went and said, ‘Hey, this doesn’t look like a horror film, it’s not for us’, and the sophisticated audience went and said, ‘Hey, this is just a horror film.’ So it wasn’t really satisfying.”
The film did eventually find its own audience, and has gained a cult following – as well as more respect – over the years. It has received special edition releases on both DVD and Blu-ray with commentaries and interviews that allow fans to gain further insight into the production. It was also briefly covered in Peter Biskind’s popular book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. But the most famous and enduring thing about the movie may be the theme song “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)”, performed by David Bowie. Bowie later re-recorded the song for his album Let’s Dance. Over the years it has been covered by several other artists and featured in movies and TV shows like Inglourious Basterds and The Office.
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: Schrader saved the Bowie song for the end credits, but there are elements of it throughout the film, in the incredible score composed by Giorgio Moroder. The sound of Moroder’s synthesizer helped the director achieve a very dreamy tone for his movie. Schrader has said that while his previous projects were about daydreams, this was his first movie about nightmares. It is a rather subdued nightmare, though. There are shocking moments and bursts of bloody violence, but the film’s main goal is to immerse the viewer in its strange atmosphere.
The low-key approach extends to the presentation of the cat transformations. Cat People was released around the same time as several other horror movies that featured stunning special effects sequences. Rather than try to compete with the likes of The Howling, Schrader decided to take a more psychological approach to his movie. He keeps the transformations off screen as much as possible. We mostly see the beginnings of transformations or the gross aftermath. Including one disgusting scene where Paul pulls some skin off his stomach and pops it in his mouth. But, when Schrader had already shot about seventy-five percent of the movie, Universal decided they wanted to see a more graphic transformation in Cat People. Something along the lines of the transformation scene in their new release An American Werewolf in London. So toward the end of Cat People, Schrader shows us more of a transformation – and special effects artist Tom Burman brought Ormsby’s vision of a leopard tearing itself out of a human’s skin to the screen.
The movie is filled with stunning visuals even when people aren’t turning into monsters. With the help of cinematographer John Bailey and production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti – who is credited as a visual consultant because he was non-union. The most showy of these visuals come in flashbacks and visions of the desert the cat people tribe used to inhabit. The sand of this desert is red, and as it blows through the air the entire screen is saturated in red.
Aside from impressive imagery, Cat People also features strong performances from its cast. McDowell plays unhinged very well, and Kinski makes us care about Irena as we watch her struggle to deal with the mind-blowing, terrifying reality of her ancestry. She fights against her true nature for as long as possible, even though it seems like a hopeless situation. Oliver may be just as obsessed with Irena as Paul is, but Heard makes sure his interest in her never comes off as creepy. He loves her, he wants to take care of her. He’s a good protagonist character who isn’t really able to stop anything bad from happening. In a way, O’Toole’s character Alice accomplishes more than Oliver does. So it is somewhat odd that she has a heroic moment that’s soon followed by the scene of her being naked and vulnerable in the swimming pool.
BEST SCENE(S): The scenes Cat People ‘82 re-used from the 1942 version don’t feel completely necessary, but the swimming pool scene is one of the most popular moments in the first movie. If it wasn’t in the remake, viewers probably would have been disappointed. It was so well-known, Schrader did his best to replicate it. For traditional horror scenes, it is one of the standout moments in the remake as well – and in an interview O’Toole confirmed it was an unnerving scene to film. She said, “It was scary, because it was shot in Pasadena at this really old YMCA. It was the first time I had ever experienced being followed by this camera that was being operated from another room. So there was no one in the pool room, except me and this enormous crane thing with the camera following me. It really was quiet and creepy and my voice would echo in the place, so it was not hard to be scared out of my mind. Plus I was wet and cold and I was naked, which helped.”
All of the cat attack sequences in the film are great. Genre fans will also be happy to see the special effects displayed in a scene where Oliver performs an autopsy on a cat person’s corpse. Schrader somewhat regretted shooting this scene because he said it was “too genre” for his taste. But he also admitted that horror movies should have moments like this.
Another great aspect of the film is the ending that Schrader wrote to replace Ormsby’s burning house climax. It may not be as exciting as the fire sequence would have been, but it’s the perfect ending for this weird, dreamy, low-key movie.
PARTING SHOT: Oliver can’t be with Irena. Every time they make love, she’ll turn into a leopard and have to kill somebody to become human again. But he finds a way to take care of her and give her what she wants. As Schrader describes it, Oliver enshrines the object of his affection. Like the obsessions characters have for Irena reflected the obsession Schrader had for Kinski, the ending of the film sort of reflects the end of their relationship as well. They didn’t end up together, but Cat People feels like a shrine to Kinski. It’s also a fascinating, troubling horror movie that still holds up as something special decades after it came and went at the box office.
A couple previous episodes of the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series can be seen below. To see more, and to check out some of our other shows, head over to the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!
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