Horror Madness returns with two stories about sad, sad monsters who never meant to hurt anybody, which lets us look at the central contradiction in all the best monster movies.
Groundbreaking and legendary pre-code fright-fest King Kong meets its match in maestro Jacques Tourneur’s ambivalent creature feature Cat People. Both films have been remade and remixed, but the originals are still justly legendary.
See the introduction and full slate here.
What do we like about monster movies? This is a question I’ve touched on before in this space, and I’ll return to it I’m sure. We’re scared of weird stuff, and we like being scared. We like testing the boundaries of what we’re able to handle, and looking at weird stuff does that. Going to a freak show back in the day would scratch the same itch, I’m sure, but I’m also sure that most of the people who went to those shows looked at the “freaks,” got a little scared, got a little excited, and then went home not feeling anything much. The nicer ones felt pity.
Pity is a more essential emotion when it comes to monster movies; that’s something Aristotle would understand. The best monster films (and monster novels, and plays, etc.) approach the tragic: they employ both pity and fear to move us. We’re frightened and excited by the difference in the other, the monstrous, from us. We’re moved - and perhaps frightened on a deeper level - by the likeness of the monstrous to us. Whale’s Frankenstein works so well because we identify equally with the monster, the creator, and the grieving father whose daughter the monster kills. That’s what the best monster movies, and the best horror movies, do: they don’t let us sit comfortably in one point of view.
King Kong and Cat People are both odd ones, then. Truthfully, there’s not much here that scares me - or rather, the monsters themselves don’t scare me. Some of that, for Kong especially, comes down to the dated quality of the effects - they were groundbreaking for the time, and still have a charm, but they’re no longer impressive in the way that, say, the makeup in Whale’s Frankenstein is impressive. Tourneur (and his producer Val Lewton) were smart in showing as little as possible, and the shadowy suggestion of the cat creature is still creepy and effective.
I’m not scared of Kong himself, and I’m not scared of Irena the cat woman. Instead, I’m afraid of the people around them. My identification, when I watch both of these films, is firmly with the monster, with the creature taken out of its context, misunderstood, captured, tortured, gaslighted, and killed in the end. All either of them wanted was love.
Cat People gets this. Irena is a staggeringly sympathetic character, beautifully played by Simone Simon, and nobody else in the film deserves our pity like she does. Her husband - her cruel, boring husband who planned to lock her up and leave her - finally admits “she never lied to us.” And she never did - she never hid herself, her fears, or her flaws. She never set out to hurt anybody. Irena just wanted help, and the people who should have helped her hurt her instead. Her crime wasn’t that she was inherently dangerous. She was just something that the modern world had no place for - someone whose identity crossed boundaries that the modern world needed firmly in place. She had to be done away with for that.
Kong occupies a similar place. He was worshiped like a god on his home island, a match there for any creature that tried to best him, but he was no match for white, western, industrialized civilization once he was brought there. The closing scene on the Empire State Building is iconic, and it still is, but when I watch it I don’t think about how big Kong is. I think about how oddly small he looks, how vulnerable he is compared to the constructions of man. He could bring down dinosaurs on his home turf. He’s brought down by the combined brain power that made skyscrapers and airplanes. There’s no place for him on the island of Manhattan.
All of this is to say: both of these films are worth watching. They work as tragedies; I’m not sure they work as horror. I’m not scared of these monsters, not once while watching. Instead I’m terrified for them; the best monster movies (and we’ve both looked at some and will look at more that will pull this off) should make you feel both things, the pity and the fear. For Kong and Irena I only feel pity, though I feel a whole lot of it.
This is a hard decision, as hard as any I’ve made here. King Kong deserves its reputation; it undoubtedly changed movie-making in all kinds of ways. Cat People is one of those movies most loved by film nerds. I like to apply the possibly apocryphal Brian Eno line about The Velvet Underground; it was dismissed by critics in its day (though it did make money), but it had a core of ardent admirers, and many of them went on to make horror movies themselves. Its critical reevaluation in the decades since 1942 has been so thorough and enthusiastic that I’d argue Cat People has gone right back to being underrated again.
It could go either way, but if forced, the feminist in me picks Cat People, if only by a whisker.