Walking After Midnight

I was home for Halloween this year, the first time in many years that I've been at home for the holiday. I live in small town America where Americana still holds sway, so I expected and got a steady stream of children and parents to my doorstep, holding out bags for trick or treating. I don't have children, myself, and this panoply of adorable tots in various costumes made me ache to have my own, so I could pass on a love of Halloween to them. I'm generally happy to be child-free, but Halloween is one night when that decision weighs on me. In any event, I got a side-eye from many of the parents, given that I was dressed up as Morticia Addams, if Morticia Addams had had a thing for black PVC. That, too, is part of the fun.

Halloween is a night when I want to see classic horror films, so I queued up a trio of favorites. I started the first of them just as the sun was setting.

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I Like the Dark. It's Friendly.

Jacques Tourneur's Cat People (1942) is one of those movies that's so interwoven with my love of movies that I hardly know where to start with it anymore. Maybe with this:  my mother introduced me to Cat People on one of those late nights when my dad worked very late. As such, it's a movie that I treasure not only because it's a legitimately great movie (which it is), but because it has an intensely personal association in my mind. I probably can't be objective about it. Fortunately, Cat People's place in the canon of great horror movies is secure enough without my imprimatur.

The thing that strikes me every time I've watched Cat People as an adult is how much it looks like film noir, and not just because of the shadows with which Tourneur and cameraman Nicholas Musuraca have woven this movie. It also reminds me of film noir because it's a film about night in the city. It's set in after hours offices, late night cafes, and stylish apartments. It's a modern movie (in 1942), one that I imagine had a real immediacy when it was released, given that the audience of its day was used to horror movies set in some theme park version of Eastern or Middle Europe. Over time, its association with film noir has lent the film a kind of timelessness. Film noir is an idiom of nightmare logic and a poetry of shadows, both of which were pioneered by Cat People and the other noir-ish horror movies made by Val Lewton's b-movie unit.

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