Cat People

This film is a lesson in not showing the horror. The budget was $150,000 and it came in at $134,959, ahead of schedule. Rather than build effects, producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur used darkness, sound and implication; the creature is almost never seen. The economising extended to the sets. Wartime restrictions on building materials led Lewton to redress standing sets from Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons, a park set from an Astaire-Rogers musical and an office from another picture. The coffee shop, the restaurant and the pet shop are all the same set, dressed differently. Two sequences entered the genre's history. One gave cinema a term: tension building slowly and then discharging into something entirely harmless is now called a Lewton bus. The other is the use of shadow and sound in a darkened swimming pool. The story concerns a woman from Serbia who believes she will turn into a panther if she feels desire, and a marriage that collapses around that belief. Simone Simon stars. Who it is for: viewers who like horror that withholds, atmosphere, and the moments where a budget limit turns into invention. Who it is not for: anyone wanting explicit violence and pace. It runs seventy-three minutes and its tension rests entirely on patience.