A fine, brief appreciation of Val Lewton’s ‘Cat People’ (1942) — which, if you’ve never seen it, is much classier than its title suggests

MostBeautifulFraud:

Like a great noir, the movie is as much about fog and shadows, sharp angles and high contrast black-and-white, as it is about the actual plot devices.  Cat People is also about sound, be it the clicking of shoes on pavement or the echoing of screams in an indoor pool.  Sound is cheap on a low budget, and John Cass, an A+ Foley artist working for RKO’s B-movie department, provides terrifying ambiance.

Of course, the Lewton method has inspired many broke, novice horror filmmakers — and this sequence in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) that explains how Kirk Douglas’s mogul started out in Hollywood.