Cat People Collection

This collection exists because of Orson Welles, in a roundabout way. Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons had been expensive, difficult productions that left RKO financially strapped despite Kane's critical reputation, and studio chief Charles Koerner's answer was to create a cheap horror unit to recoup the losses, aiming at the kind of money Universal was making off Dracula and Frankenstein on a fraction of the budget. Val Lewton got the job, and the arrangement was oddly specific: RKO handed him a lurid, pre-chosen title meant to pull in an audience, a budget around $134,000, and then left him alone to figure out everything else. Lewton saved money partly by reusing existing RKO sets rather than building new ones — including, with a nice irony given how this whole project started, the grand staircase originally built for Welles's own Magnificent Ambersons.

The restraint this film is famous for was as much necessity as style. Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur couldn't afford convincing creature effects, so the actual cat appears on screen only briefly, kept in heavy shadow to hide what the budget couldn't disguise — the same basic trade-off that shows up again and again across this library, cheap constraints forcing a more effective choice than money would have bought. What came out of it was a technique specific enough to get its own name: the "Lewton Bus," for a scene where a woman being stalked through Central Park gets her scare not from the thing following her but from an ordinary city bus suddenly hissing to a stop behind her. It's still cited as a direct ancestor of the modern jump scare. None of it was a sure thing at the time — Lewton nearly got pulled off the picture after just three days of dailies, saved only by Koerner personally overruling the executive who wanted him gone.

It paid off completely: a roughly $150,000 film that brought in something like $4 to $8 million, enough to genuinely help pull RKO back from the hole Welles had left it in. Stephen King has called it the best horror film of the 1940s.

The sequel is where the Lewton formula gets interesting in a different way. RKO wanted a title that cashed in on the first film's success; what Lewton actually delivered with The Curse of the Cat People is barely a horror film at all — a quiet, melancholic story about a lonely child's imaginary friend, co-directed partway through by Robert Wise, who'd go on to direct West Side Story and The Sound of Music. The branding promised a monster movie. What's actually there is something gentler wearing that title because the studio needed it to sell tickets.