It was inevitable that a glossy studio remake of Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942) would be met with derision by film critics in 1982. In fact, Paul Schrader’s remake was panned across the country upon release. Writing for the Chicago Reader, the critic Dave Kehr typified this position, stating that “Schrader tries to elevate a set of pimply sexual hang-ups to the level of Wagnerian opera.” But his peer at the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert, represented a rare voice of dissent, writing that “Cat People is a good movie in an old tradition, a fantasy-horror film that takes itself just seriously enough to work.” Four decades removed from the release of Schrader’s remake, it’s easy, despite Kehr’s ultimate dismissal, to see where both critics were coming from. Schrader’s Cat People is less a reverential remake than a characteristically confrontational reinterpretation of its source. It’s as much a movie in the “old tradition,” to quote Ebert, as it is a “set of pimply sexual hang-ups,” which isn’t really the detraction that Kehr thinks it is.
By 1982, Schrader had directed three films in rapid succession: Blue Collar (1978), Hardcore (1979), and American Gigolo (1980). Cat People would be his first, and only, tried-and-true horror film until his ill-fated prequel to The Exorcist (1973), Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist (2005), ended up being shelved by Warner Brothers. Tourneur’s film, a 73-minute black-and-white horror programmer that feels as indebted to the conventions of film noir as it does to the shadow laden monster movies coming out of Universal, concerns itself with a young woman in Manhattan (played by French actress Simone Simon) who fears intimacy with men due to a curse that will turn her into a blood hungry feline. Schrader’s has a similar conceit, with German actress Nastassja Kinski in the lead role and the setting being changed to New Orleans. The major difference between the two films revolves around how Tourneur and Schrader portray these characters and the innate carnality of their dilemma.
Schrader’s film, due to the relative liberality afforded to him by the cultural mores and looser restrictions around censorship in the ‘80s, is a fairly sexually explicit production. The nudity that Tourneur can only allude to in the climax of his film is fully rendered in Schrader’s remake. But in spite of his remake’s amped up sexuality and gore, of which there is none in Tourneur’s version, Schrader’s Cat People is decidedly old-fashioned in its approach to horror conventions. He has an affection for the shadowy terror of yesteryear’s horror films and opts for a similarly restrained palette during certain sections of his film, painting the screen in harsh reds and blacks that offer a fantastical universe for its titular cat people. The result is an exceedingly horny throwback, the type of film that’s as interested in recreating the feeling of seeing a horror film in the 1940s as it is in turning a middle finger up at them; that’s to say, it’s the perfect marriage of Schrader’s film school reverence for classic Hollywood fare and his liberated New Hollywood edge.
Cat People screens this evening, September 17, and on September 20, at the Museum of Modern Art on 35mm as part of the series “When the World Broke Open: Katrina and Its Afterlives.”
