Cat People

Recent chat in the comments section about writer/director Paul Schrader reminded me that another viewing was due for Cat People, his 1982 sex and leopards kinko movie that remade a critical touchstone, Val Lewton’s classic 1946 thriller. But while purists may have complained about how little the director imported from Lewton’s film, just a trio of key scenes albeit verbatim, some malcontent attendees were more interested in Schrader moving forward with a run of form including Taxi Driver, Hardcore and American Gigolo. Scorsese and DeNiro were faltering in the same period, but Schrader was a hot, commercial property and Cat People’s credentials for top-drawer kink are impeccable.

Cat People opens with a dream/scene very much in tune with Schrader’s pictorial grasp of mysticism (Mishima), featuring the laden synths of Giorgio Moroder and a specific title song that made a significant contribution to the Bowiefication of early 80’s cinema (The Hunger, Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence). Red filtered desert, skulls, gnarly trees, religious rituals; we get a glimpse of a tribal sacrifice in an obscure area of the world where cats are worshipped and children are sacrificed to leopards. We then jump forward into a modern world of Top Cat (glimpsed on a television screen), where orang-utans watching soap operas for some reason. Top cats Paul (Malcolm McDowell) and his visiting sister Irina (Nastassja Kinski) are experiencing extreme sexual tension in a positively moist New Orleans; Paul wants an incestuous relationship with Irina, but a third element in a romantic triangle comes in the form of zoo curator and big cat expert Oliver (John Heard).

‘Will you leap through his hoop, put his head in your mouth?’ Getting bitten isn’t the worst thing that can happen in the dream-logic world of Cat People; there’s horrible piles of bones and mutilated victims with ‘genitalia ripped out’; the kind of medical detail that horror required in this period. ‘I have a weird metabolism’ explains Paul with some portent…’I don’t eat meat,’ counters his sister; Irina’s desire is not to give into her true nature. That incest plotline crossed a line for many, although Paul’s lore logic states clearlt ‘We can only make love with our own,’

So Oliver’s attempts to stop the inevitable truth about Irina emerging becomes a good fight, and Schrader assembles his icons in time-honoroured horror film order. With a swat of a fly, we move to a straight homage to the arguably the first jump scare in movies, the Central Park bus, and the swimming pool stalking by shadow, although a seemingly chance encounter in a cafe is imported to more subtle effect. ‘We are all connected,’ is a potential takeaway, but the divisions between us run red in Schrader’s dark, almost demented vision of embryonic good and evil.