Today I want to walk us back to an older era of movies. An era where Monster movies would be done both as top A list films and also B movies, and horror was respected more. I want to talk in particular about how monster movies have changed since the beginning.
Monsters in movies have come a long way. The beginning was human looking monsters with actors having some makeup to make them look strange, with Lon Chaney being a master of using makeup to create a horrifying look. As the years went on, the looks changed and we began to get things like Godzilla and other rubber suit monsters. We then got more intense looking monsters later on such as Pumpkinhead before the rise of CGI in films creating more outrageous looking creatures. The downside to this however, is that it costs more to create a good looking monster.
Low budget films simply do not have the option to go all out with making a great looking monster and the end result is not often very good. But one film provided an alternative option: don’t show the monster and simply imply its there. Cat People created almost all the modern tropes of the unseen monster and did so with brilliance. The camera techniques that Jacques Tourneur used, truly brought a new storytelling technique to film that has clearly influenced many later movies. The unseen monster concept that Cat People introduced, is based on the idea that what isn’t seen will be scarier than what you do see. You let your imagination handle the monster for you and thus no two monsters will be the same.
From the way he had the actors look, to where he positioned a moving vehicle , everything was properly timed and placed. Jacques Tourneur managed to recreate the idea of a cat monster by putting in reminders of how cats act and sounds they make, and while making use of jumpscares, they were used so skillfully unlike what is done today. You could feel a sense of madness and paranoia and a monster wasn’t needed at all. In today’s age of over bloated CGI, this film is one that is more important than ever,