| RKO Radio Pictures | Release Date: December 25, 1942 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
15
Mixed:
1
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Cat People is an admirable first entry into the brainy, elegant, spooky world of Val Lewton. [09 Sep 2005, p.C4]
Recruited by RKO to knock out some cheapo horrors and recoup the losses the studio had incurred on Citizen Kane, the producer Val Newton instead made a cycle of indefinably creepy and mysteriously poetic films, of which Cat People was the most successful. [24 Dec 2011, p.26]
First in the wondrous series of B movies in which Val Lewton elaborated his principle of horrors imagined rather than seen, with a superbly judged performance from Simon as the young wife ambivalently haunted by sexual frigidity and by a fear that she is metamorphosing into a panther.
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Cat People sinks its claws into the psyche for an erotically tinged horror-thriller. [29 Oct 1998, p.F7]
This chilling, weirdly plausible tale centres on a New York dress designer (French star Simone Simon) obsessed with the notion that she's living under an ancient Serbian curse. It achieves its effects obliquely. [11 Dec 2005, p.123]
While other B-budget horror producers were still using gorillas, haunted houses, and disembodied arms, Lewton and the director, Jacques Tourneur, employed suggestion, creepy sound effects, and inventive camera angles, leaving everything to the viewers' fear-filled imagination.
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