On Fear: "Cat People"

One of the reasons I'm fascinated by scary movies is that by watching them one can learn a lot about what fear is.

Great, you say, so tell us: what is fear? Well, the more scary movies one watches, and the more one talks to people about scary movies and reads what is written about them, the more one begins to understand that the central defining element of fear is that it's unknowable.

Fear is at base a sensation, or a reaction, or a feeling made physical – an urge to move, or to shut one's eyes, or the skin raising itself up into goosebumps without its wearer's volition – which as soon as it is articulated begins to become something different, something more manageable, something less scary. We can talk about it, that is, and make it into something it is not. But the thing itself? Fear? It’s a vast, depthless, impregnable, unknown.

When I was a kid, one of the things that I hated the most was going downstairs at night alone. There was nothing particularly scary about the lower floor of our house. But venturing down meant returning up the stairs, which meant turning off the light (I was well trained to never leave the lights on in an unoccupied room), which in turn meant that when I did go up those stairs, there would that suddenly-vast darkness behind me. The unease and vulnerability in those moments was terrible; as soon as those lights went out, I felt the threat. My solution was the one that kids have adopted for probably as long as there have been stairs and electricity: to flick off the switch at the bottom of the stairs and then run up as fast as I could, with that physical sensation in the back of my neck that there was something behind me in the darkness, pursuing me, perhaps even enticed by my thumping flight up the carpet, coming for me even as I fled.

As an adult, one of the most visceral nightmares I have ever had opened with me facing a doorway. The hallway I was in was lit a rather banal yellow; the space on the other side of the doorway was an absolute, impenetrable darkness. I moved forward toward that shadowed doorway with a mounting feeling of apprehension. Closer and closer, pulled by the inevitability that often attends dreams of this sort. I drew near…and at the absolute peak of my anxiety, something came out of that darkness, a smallish thing that was the size and shape of a teddy bear, and furred like a teddy bear, but moved as though it was a monstrous hairy hand; faster than I could react, it caught me square in the face, smothering me, blinding me, and bore me backwards, down and down and down. I woke with my entire nervous system jangling, the adrenaline pumping through me.

We are driven to try to understand these things. What was it that spurred that fear in me as a kid, a fear that was particular to that set of stairs in my house? What was it that caused that dream, or pulled it up from the depths? Some life circumstance? Some quirk of my mental construction? Some experience I had undergone which had left its foggy trail in my neural pathways? Or perhaps something less concrete and more external, some faint rumor of disquiet in the ether, a hobgoblin whispering in the void, the feather-light brush of some greater, darker thing?

In large part, I think, one of the secrets of fear lies precisely in this lack of translation between the physical and the comprehensible. We experience, and then we try to understand that experience. We try to do this because by putting it into words, making it concrete, we can bring it under our control. But it is impossible to entirely complete this trick, no matter how much we would like to.

Fear is not a concept or an argument; it is instead by its nature amorphous, not possible to circumscribe. Experiences are experiences, and words are words, and the one can never fully become the other. This is not to say we cannot master our fears, or leave them behind. But we can never truly comprehend them, not if we are honest with ourselves.

It is the same with scary movies. The best of them succeed in putting onto the screen something that will cause us to be afraid. But to experience it is one thing, and to try to translate it into explanation, to try to know it, is something else entirely. There, we are pushing against the impossible. And yet this attempt (this delicious attempt!) is precisely what drives many of us to watch scary movies, and perhaps even to make them, in the first place.

Jacques Tourneur's Cat People, from 1942, is not a very scary film in the way we think of that term today.

No one gets killed with a chainsaw or pursued by a zombie, there is not a degenerate cannibalistic family living in the backwoods of some rural American rustbelt county, or a garishly-lit coven into the clutches of which young people bloodily disappear, or a predatory corporate structure that puts people in a macabre game in which they have to cut out each other's eyeballs if they wish to survive.

In part, this is because of the era – there weren't really many on-screen gouts of blood in 1942 – but it's also in part because of decisions Tourneur and producer Val Lewton, (famous for micro-managing his films) make regarding how to scare us. Which is exactly what makes it a great film for thinking about the uncontainable nature of fear.

The story the film tells has a distinct fairy-tale (or maybe anti-fairy-tale) resonance to it. One day, an engineer named Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) is at the zoo and he sees a pretty woman named Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) making a sketch of a black panther. Smitten, he begins trying to woo her. She resists, not because she doesn't like him, but because she's scared. She explains that she comes from a small village in Serbia in which long ago the residents turned to witchcraft. Because of this ancestral evil, the people from the village bear a curse: they have an evil inside them that emerges uncontrollably if they become too passionate.

Oliver, the good, literal-minded American engineer, dismisses this story and convinces Irena to marry him. But even after their marriage – and here the film is pretty explicit, given the standards of the day – she refuses to sleep with him, terrified that if she does she will turn into a creature, like the black panther at the zoo that she's obsessed with, and kill him. Frustrated, Oliver sends Irena to a psychiatrist (Tom Conway) who is convinced that the most "scientific" answer is that her fears stem from her some unacknowledged childhood experience. When this doesn't convince Irena, Oliver eventually decides that the marriage isn't going to work, and that he wants an annulment so he can marry his co-worker Alice (Jane Randolph).

Angered by Oliver and Alice's relationship, Irena stalks Alice, perhaps even changing into a black panther in the process (the film leaves this metamorphosis vague at first). At this point, the psychiatrist enters the scene again; he has fallen in love with Irena, or at least has discovered an attraction to her. He kisses her. When he does, she indeed turns into the monstrous cat – we actually see it this time – and kills him, although in their struggle he mortally wounds her with that most wonderful of old murder-story items, a cane concealing a sword. Irena shifts back into human form and staggers to the zoo, where she releases the black panther. This creature runs frantically into the street and is crushed by a bus; Irena dies, freeing Oliver and Alice to pursue their (presumably more wholesome) love.

It is a film of layers and mysteries. It is a film that is so delightful, I think, to those of us who like this kind of stuff, because of how well it manages to delve into the unknown and the unknowable, finding ways to picture them on the screen and allowing us to grapple with them, while at the same time insisting on the truth of the paradox – and thus the truth of fear itself – that while we are driven to try to explain the inexplicable, to try to enter into it and experience it so that we can understand it, it is precisely our inability to do this that makes us afraid.

Take Irena. She tells Oliver that she has been cursed by the actions of her evil ancestors, but does she know this? She does not. She suspects it, and believes it, and perhaps is even mesmerized by it – for she spends her days drawing the black panther at the zoo being impaled by a sword, in exactly the way she will be impaled by the sword-cane at the end – but what scares her is that she doesn't know. It is the possibility that terrifies her, the idea that it might be true, or maybe even her belief that it might be true balanced against some desperate hope that it is not true.

This impenetrability of what is inside her is mirrored in the extraordinary way the film pictures, and doesn't picture, the thing that Irena turns into. In one sequence (which ends with one of the most famous jump scares in Hollywood history) Irena pursues Alice through the city streets; or, rather, something pursues Alice, which neither we nor she ever sees.

What we do see is a set of wet footprints leading away from some freshly killed sheep: these prints begin as a cat's paws, and slowly turn into a woman's shoes. Yes, okay, it seems clear that Irena has turned into a cat-monster, pursued Alice, and then turned back into a woman – as indicated by the footprints – with the cooling of her passion. But the thing, the exact monstrosity of it, is no more envisioned than was the thing which pursued me up those darkened stairs so long ago.

This effect is even more brilliantly realized in a pair of sequences later in the film. In one, Alice is confronted by something while she's in a swimming pool. This monstrosity seems to prowl around the edges of the brightly-lit pool, but is pictured only as a set of rippling shadows on the wall; the moment pushes us into the center of the deep un-knowability that pervades so much of the film, for the room is small and there is no way to hide – there is no way that Alice could not see a monstrous form at the edge of the water…and yet she does not quite see it, cannot quite see it, although she knows it's there, because it shreds her bathrobe.

In another pivotal moment, a snarling thing stalks Oliver and Alice in their office. Again, it is there, certainly, for we and they hear it and are terrified, but it is only indistinctly glimpsed. What we get, instead – in a masterful display of direction, gaffing, and set decoration – is the creation of fear out of lighting, sound, and emotional response itself, as embodied by the terrified actors. The fear is there, but the source of it cannot be located, cannot quite be understood.

There are two important notes here. First, one cannot wish away what is happening here by invoking the old (and sometimes true) saw that what the audience doesn't see is always scarier than what it does; nor can one comfort oneself by claiming that Tourneur and Lewton simply did what they were doing because of budgetary constraint.

Many times in films of the era – like Frankenstein (1931) – the monster is clearly seen. Other times – as in the scene where a man is skinned alive in The Black Cat (1934) – the action is pictured in such a way (in this case, through a shot showing a shadow of on the wall of the victim and the torturer that indicates what's about to happen) that leaves no doubt of the action. These moments do not make fear itself any more comprehensible; they simply push its impenetrability to another location than the visual. What makes Cat People so delightful in this regard is not the way it leaves its monstrosity up to the viewer's imagination – although it does – but the way it uses its technique to so incisively get to the heart of the nature of fear.

Secondly, this untranslatable nature of fear does not mean that we cannot make sense of the film, or talk about what it means. One can offer a convincing reading that Cat People is at least in part about female sexuality, and the terror this carries for many people. There is the obvious fact in this regard that Irena's transformation into the monster is spurred by sexual activity (her hesitation about consummating her marriage, the psychiatrist's advances), and by her jealousy about Alice's intrusion into her relationship with Oliver.

There are also the less obvious facts. Irena's claim that she is cursed, for example, draws both main male characters into trying to "solve" that curse, or master it, or dominate it by proving that it does not exist. This can clearly be read, if one wishes, as a commentary on (certain) men's responses to sexually alluring women, or perhaps the culture's response to them.

Along these lines, it also seems not incidental that both Irena and Oliver (as well as Alice) operate in the realm of the visual itself. Irena is a fashion illustrator, an artist who deals in appearances and the things we cover ourselves with; Oliver and Alice spend their days looking at schematics. Is it any wonder that the latter two – mechanically-minded as they are, operating in a world in which the schema of things can be reduced to numbers and straight lines and cleanly-measured angles – are at a loss when confronted with the mysteries of passion?

All of which is to say that the movie can be understood, in a sense. It would be inane to say that it cannot be. But, like the thing that is inside Irena, the thing that scares her and us, the thing that kills the psychiatrist and drives Oliver and Alice back to the safety of their ordinary, mechanical lives;– like this, the thing that lies at the heart of the film – fear – cannot be captured, cannot be fully comprehended, precisely because of what it is.

Instead, it can only be experienced.

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