Cat People is a 1942 American supernatural horror film directed by Jacques Tourneur and produced for RKO by Val Lewton. The film tells the story of Irena Dubrovna, a newly married Serbian fashion illustrator obsessed with the idea that she is descended from an ancient tribe of Cat People who metamorphose into black panthers when aroused. When her husband begins to show interest in one of his co-workers, Irena begins to stalk her. The film stars Simone Simon as Irena, and features Kent Smith, Tom Conway, Jane Randolph, and Jack Holt in supporting roles.

Production began in 1942, when Lewton was placed in charge of developing RKO's low-budget horror films. He brought together a team of filmmakers that he had worked with in the past, including Tourneur, editor Mark Robson and screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen. Cat People was the first film upon which the team worked. They were given the title by an RKO executive, who instructed them to develop a film from it. After researching various horror films and cat-related literature, Bodeen and Lewton developed the script with Lewton doing extensive uncredited work on the story. The film was shot at RKO's studios reusing sets from previous films such as The Magnificent Ambersons. During editing, Robson developed a technique later called The Lewton Bus, a jump scare that Lewton used in his subsequent films.

Cat People had its premiere at the Rialto Theatre in Manhattan on December 5, 1942, before having a wider release on December 25. Contemporary critics were tepid, though the film did well at the box office, being one of RKO's biggest hits of the season. Several horror films of the 1940s and 1950s were influenced by Cat People, either drawing on the film's shadowy visuals or containing a female character who fears that she possesses a hereditary trait that makes her transform into a monster. The film was followed by a sequel, The Curse of the Cat People, in 1944, and a remake, directed by Paul Schrader, was released in 1982. The film has become well known, though created as a B-movie, being selected by Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry in 1993. Retrospective reviews of the original have been much more positive, with praise directed at the film's atmosphere and sophistication, with the critic Roger Ebert describing it and the other Val Lewton productions as landmark films of the 1940s.

Plot At the Central Park Zoo, Serbian-born fashion illustrator Irena Dubrovna makes sketches of a captive black panther. She catches the attention of marine engineer Oliver Reed, who strikes up a conversation. Irena invites him to her apartment for tea. At her apartment, Oliver is intrigued by a statue of a medieval warrior on horseback impaling a large cat with his sword. Irena informs Oliver that the figure is King John of Serbia and that the cat represents evil. According to legend, in medieval times, the Christian residents of her home village gradually turned to witchcraft after being enslaved by the Mameluks. When King John drove the Mameluks out and saw what the villagers had become, he had them killed. However, "the wisest and the most wicked" escaped into the mountains. Oliver is dismissive of the legend even though Irena clearly takes it seriously.

Oliver buys Irena a kitten, but upon meeting her, it hisses. Irena suggests they go to the pet shop to exchange it. When they enter the shop, the animals go wild in her presence, and Irena becomes uneasy. Irena gradually reveals to Oliver that she believes she is descended from the cat people of her village, and that she will transform into a panther if aroused to passion. Despite this, Oliver asks her to marry him, and she agrees. During the dinner after their wedding at a Serbian restaurant, a cat-like woman walks over and addresses Irena as moja sestra ("my sister").

Irena never consummates the marriage, fearful of the consequences. Oliver is patient with her, but eventually persuades her to see a psychiatrist, Dr. Louis Judd. Judd tries to convince her that her fears stem from childhood traumas. Meanwhile, Irena is unhappy to discover that Oliver has confided in his assistant, Alice Moore. Alice confesses to Oliver that she loves him. When Irena spots Oliver and Alice seated together at a restaurant, she follows Alice home. Just as Alice hears a menacing sound, a bus pulls up and she boards it. Soon afterward, a groundskeeper discovers several freshly killed sheep. The paw prints leading away turn into imprints of a woman's shoes. A disheveled Irena returns to her apartment; she is shown afterward weeping in the bathtub. Irena dreams of Dr. Judd dressed up as King John speaking of "the key". She later steals the key to the panther's cage at the zoo.

Irena, Oliver, and Alice visit a museum, and Irena is angered when the two virtually ignore her. That evening, when Alice decides to use the basement swimming pool of her apartment building, she is stalked by an animal. When Alice screams for help, Irena appears, turning on the lights, and says she is looking for Oliver. Alice later finds her bathrobe torn to shreds. After an appointment with Dr. Judd, Irena tells Oliver that she is no longer afraid, but Oliver tells her it is too late: he has realized that he loves Alice and intends to divorce Irena. Later at work, Oliver and Alice are cornered by a snarling animal. Oliver and Alice manage to get out of the building, but not before smelling Irena's perfume.

Alice calls Judd to warn him to stay away from Irena, but he hangs up when Irena arrives for her appointment with him. He kisses Irena passionately, causing her to transform into a panther and subsequently kill him, while he stabs her with his cane-sword. When Oliver and Alice arrive, Irena slips away and goes to the zoo. She opens the panther's cage with the stolen key and is struck down by the escaping panther, which is accidentally hit and killed by a car. Next to the cage, Oliver and Alice find Irena's dead body, transformed into a panther, lying on the ground. Oliver says, "She never lied to us", and leads Alice away.

Cast

Production Development

In March 1942, producer Val Lewton ended his working relationship with independent producer David O. Selznick to work for RKO Radio Pictures' Charles Koerner, becoming the head of a new unit created to develop B-movie horror feature films. Writing in 2009, the film critic Kim Newman compared the Lewton productions to RKO's own B-movie mystery series based on The Falcon, which were, unlike Lewton's productions, "churned out". The Lewton productions were modestly budgeted compared to Universal productions like The Wolf Man (1941), or Paramount productions like The Uninvited (1944), but had larger budgets than those of Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) films like The Mad Monster (1942), or Monogram films like The Ape Man (1943). Cat People had a budget of around $135,000, which was significantly less than Universal spent on Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), but more than the $97,000 that the poverty row studio PRC spent on The Devil Bat (1940).

Lewton selected most of the film's main crew, including director Jacques Tourneur and writer DeWitt Bodeen, who all worked on the treatment. These were people Lewton had connections with through their work with Selznick, as Tourneur had worked as part of the second unit teams for Selznick's production of A Tale of Two Cities (1935) and Bodeen had been a research assistant on what would become Jane Eyre (1943).

The germ of Cat People was Lewton's short story, "The Bagheeta," published in Weird Tales magazine (July 1930), about a legendary panther, a "half leopard and half woman . . . were-beast," that lives in the Caucasus mountains and plagues local farmers. Tourneur and Bodeen offered conflicting accounts as to how Cat People was conceived. Tourneur said that Lewton called him from RKO to direct the film after Koerner attended a party where it was suggested to him that he develop a film with the title Cat People. Tourneur added that Lewton was not sure what to do with the title and recalled Lewton deciding to not make a "cheap horror movie that the studio expected but something intelligent and in good taste". Bodeen's version involved him being hired by Lewton at RKO as a contract writer. He had previously watched British and American horror and suspense films that he felt were "typical of what we did not want to do". According to Bodeen, Koerner felt that werewolves, vampires and man-made monsters were over-exploited, and that "nobody has done much with cats". Bodeen added that Lewton was unhappy with the proposed title of Cat People and said, "if you want to get out now, I won't hold it against you."

Bodeen then began researching cat-related literature, including Ambrose Bierce's "The Eyes of the Panther" and Margaret Irwin's "Monsieur Seeks a Wife". Lewton decided to base the film on Algernon Blackwood's 1906 short story "Ancient Sorceries". Blackwood's story had a contemporary setting and involved a Medieval architecture French town inhabited by a group of devil-worshipping cat people. According to Bodeen, as the rights were about to be purchased, Lewton changed his mind at the last minute and told Bodeen that the film would be set in contemporary New York and involve a love triangle between a man, a foreign woman obsessed with abnormal fears, and a female office worker. According to Tourneur, he was not content with the period setting of "Ancient Sorceries", stating, "if you're going to have horror, the audience must be able to identify with the characters in order to be frightened." Lewton contributed heavily to the screenplay. During the writing process, Tourneur recalled driving by Lewton's home in the evening to find a light turned on where Lewton was still working on the screenplay. Bodeen described the screenplay as a "group project", saying Lewton had the original idea and he wrote the treatment and screenplay, collaborating with Tourneur and Lewton, and later the film's editor Mark Robson. Bodeen concluded that "Tourneur was entirely responsible for the style of Cat People, but if you read the screenplay you would find everything in the film was in the original script – and that's simply because it was a group project. Val, Tourneur, myself, Robson – we all talked about it and I put it down on paper." By May 1, 1942, Bodeen had a fifty-page treatment completed for Cat People.

Pre-production

Simone Simon was cast in the role of Irena Dubrovna by producer Lewton. Lewton commented that, "I'd like to have a girl with a little kitten face like Simone Simon, cute and soft and cuddly and seemingly not at all dangerous." He compared his decision to the casting of Kathleen Burke in Island of Lost Souls (1932), where she portrayed the Panther Woman, stating that any attempt at securing a wild, cat-like appearance in their casting would be disastrous. Simon, a star in her native France, had recently garnered fame in the United States for her role in The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941). Opposite Simon, Kent Smith was cast as Oliver Reed. Smith allegedly received the role after Lewton spotted him cycling across the studio lot.

The Los Angeles Times reported in August 1942 that Jack Holt had been cast in a supporting role, following Simon's casting as the lead. Tom Conway was cast as Dr. Judd, a psychiatrist who evaluates Irena and initially believes her fears to be delusional. Jane Randolph, then a young actress who had recently begun her film career, was cast as Alice Moore, a woman vying for Oliver's affections. Lewton had wanted Jennifer Jones to play Alice, but was prevented from casting her by Selznick, who had other plans for Jones. Among the rest of the crew was the composer of the score Roy Webb and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, who were seasoned veterans at RKO.

Filming