Exactly four decades after Jacques Tourneur terrified audiences with his quick and moody werecat horror film Cat People in 1942, Paul Schrader – following the success of American Gigolo – released a nearly in-name-only remake. The cultural climate in 1982 was vastly different than when Tourneur was making his film. Schrader’s remake, after all, came in the same year as the gleefully excessive epic Conan the Barbarian, the ultra-gory remake of The Thing, and slasher films like The Slumber Party Massacre and Friday the 13th: Part III testing the limits of on screen carnage. But where was the sex?
Tag: Paul Schrader
1982 gave us a wealth of iconic, influential genre cinema: TRON, BLADE RUNNER, POLTERGEIST, FIRST BLOOD, CONAN THE BARBARIAN, CREEPSHOW and CAT PEOPLE. So, maybe that last one isn’t typically mentioned in the same breath as the others, but it should be. After all, what other film mentioned above involved the work of Paul Schrader, Alan Ormsby, Jerry Bruckheimer, Malcom McDowell, Natassja Kinksi, Giorgio Moroder and David Bowie? On paper, it reads like a film that shouldn’t be and on screen it looks and sounds like something that absolutely is, and is as deserving of a mention in the 1982 cannon as it seems defiantly opposed to such a notion.