Delayed Reaction: Cat People

The Pitch: What's the least expensive way to scare the shit out of people?

A man marries a woman who believes she will turn into a ferocious cat when she gets aroused or angered.

You can make almost any kind of movie with little or no budget. Clerks did it for $27,000 by filming in black and white. Tangerine was filmed on an iPhone. Primer is perhaps the greatest "no frill" SciFi movie of the last two decades by being more about questions than effects. But, horror is historically the king of the micro-budget film. The Blair Witch Project is the most profitable movie of all time in terms of return on investment. It launched the found footage horror genre, which is ubiquitous these days. I sometimes think it's physically impossible to make a found footage horror movie for more that a few million dollars. Even non-found footage horror is pretty cheap. Check the production costs of films in any year and horror is among the cheapest (especially of films that get wide releases). Just last year, It made back 10x its modest budget. Split made 15x it's reported budget. Halloween was made on an infamously lean budget back in 1978. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was pretty cheap as well.

There is a reason for this. Horror lends itself nicely to small budgets. A scary movie is scariest when it feels real, and real-life isn't polished and produced. The movie can look a little shoddy, because that makes it feel authentic. Cheap, unknown actors are less likely to remind the audience that it isn't real. Those actors don't even need to be good either. Screaming and crying are easy to fake and require no subtlety. A horror movie can get by with having a single or few locations, because that tension and restriction is good.

Cat People is one of the best and earliest examples of scares on a budget. At the time, the bigger studios were making big spectacle monster movies. Everything was big and front-and-center and expensive. Producer Val Lewton, working for the B-movie division of RKO pictures, didn't have the same budget to work with, so he had to get clever to save money. The two most famous money-saving techniques were the two things I liked most about the movie. The first is what's called the "Lewton bus". That's the moment in the film when Alice thinks she's being followed by one of the cats. The audience then hears a lot hissing like a panther, and it turns out to be the sound of a bus pulling up. That part tricked me good. The other is the use of shadows in place of showing the cat/monster. What other genre can get more out of not showing something than showing it? Only horror, using the fear of the unknown.

None of the actors blew me away. Kent Smith and Jane Randolph are as generic as it gets. I'm not sure Simone Simon would've been very effective if you took away the accent. The direction and production do most of the work. Cat People is a limited film, but I enjoyed it enough.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend