Cat People is the first collaboration of Val Lewton with Jacques Tourneur as RKO's "B horror film unit". Lewton was unhappy with the designation of his films as "horror films" and prefered they be called "terror films". His unit was in a sense in direct competition with Universal Studios horror unit which had made Dracula, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and so on. Lewton felt that showing the transformation was the horror part and that letting the audience imagine it was much greater. His emphasis therefore was on building tension, suspense with occasional jolts of shock. Often several "shocks" with no payoff would occur in a row as a way of taking the audience off guard when the actual terrifying event took place.
Lewton's director for his first three films (Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and Leopard Man was Jacques Tourneur. Later films had other directors like Robert Wise. Both Tourneur and Wise made films which saluted the Lewton style. Tourneur made Night of the Demon while Wise made the A level film The Haunting.
Lewton as a producer had an enromous impact on the look of the films - moreso than the directors since most of the Lewton films have a similar style regardless of director. Lewton was famous for scrounging bits of sets and costume from A level productions such as Magnificent Ambersons and Gone with the Wind which gave his films much higher production values than one would expect for films made for about $150,000. as Cat People was. (The stairway inside Irena's building was from Magnificent Andersons.
Cat People starts on a very scientific note and Irena is seen initially as some one with a psychological problem, but the film slowly gives way to the idea that the problem is not so much psychological as supernatural and quite real. From the opening quote from The History of Atavism to the closing quote from John Dunne's The Holy Sonnetts the trajectory of the film is clear.
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