The Night of the She-Cats...

The moment is come.

This Thursday is the 31st of October, and that can only mean one thing.

It's Halloween!

coffee and cake will be available...

When we gather for our night of revelry, we shall dance and sing and conjure up the unholy denizens of the night. Then we shall offer up our tributes to the dark forces that dwelleth underground as we feed off the vital forces of the innocent. Also chocolate.

an unholy denizen of the night

Before we do all that, we will of course be showing our traditional Halloween film, as has become our wont at this time of year. Since the theme of our current series is Genre Fluid, I have chosen a horror film that stretched the definition of horror when it was first released in 1942.

It also happens to be one of the great films of all time.

In 1942, the horror genre was dominated by Universal Studios, who had enjoyed runaway success with their screen versions of Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man etc. 

...which were followed (very successfully) by films like Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula's Daughter and The Wolf Man's Sister-in-Law (okay, I made that one up).

Before that, the really iconic "horror" films had come out of the silent era: The Phantom of the Opera, Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to name a few.

The point is that most people in the early 40s thought of the Horror genre as a vehicle for creatures; often lumbering ones. But that was about to change.

In 1942, RKO studios set up a "Horror" department with the idea of producing (very) cheap "B" movies that catered to the audiences who had been flocking to see the Frankensteins and the Draculas and the Mummys of the past few years.

The man chosen to run the department was a young writer named Val Lewton.

Lewton quickly realised that there was very little chance of  creating any respectable monsters on the shoestring budgets they were getting from the studio, so when he received his department's first assignment (make a movie about "cat people") he decided to take the horror genre into a completely new direction.

It could be argued that Cat People is not a horror film.

French actress Simone Simon plays Irena Dubrovna, a young Serbian woman living in New York who meets and falls in love with a clean-cut, all-American guy named Oliver Reed (no relation). The two get married, but Irena is haunted by the folk tales of her village about evil women who, when aroused into passion, transform themselves into great cats and kill their lovers.

When RKO executives came up with the title "Cat People" they were probably looking for a cat version of The Wolf Man (which had been released by Universal Pictures a year earlier). What they got was a subtle, sophisticated psychological drama about extreme sexual repression. 

Val Lewton understood that no one was going to be frightened by a couple of recycled pussycat costumes, so he focussed the film on what you do not see.

Some Cat People are scarier than others...

Most of the story is told with light and shadow, and the film knows exactly how much to leave to the imagination. The result is a film that tells a serious story about a woman who is terrified of her own sexuality (and the consequences that arise) and it manages to be very, very scary.

It also single-handedly inaugurated an entirely new era of horror movies.

We will screen Cat People at 7.30 on Thursday, the 31st of October at the Victoria Park Baptist Church. Be warned!

For health & safety reasons, no virgins will be provided for sacrifice at this time.

Happy Halloween!