What Makes a Good Horror Film?

One thing that I noticed right away about Cat People was that I liked the visualization of watching a scary movie in black and white. Watching a movie in black and white gives the audience some license of their own to add their own imaginative touches to it. For example, the black and white movie made the use of shadows much more dramatic. Already the picture is not crystal clear, and when the use of shadows is used it adds a real sense of eeriness as to what that shadow is. Now with HGTV, we’d see that the shadow was clearly defined to be Irena or a panther. Also at the end when Irena is lying on the ground in front of the panther cage, the audience can’t tell if she is in human or panther form. This ambiguity may have been done on purpose by Tourneur and Lewton, but the black and white picture really helps to add to the ambiguity. It was impossible to distinguish her body shape in the black and white.

In the documentary we watched on Val Lewton, the people being interviewed talked of how Universal and Paramount were coming out with movies with monsters like King Kong and Frankenstein. Then Val Lewton started coming out with movies that worked with shadows and auditory aspects, because he didn’t have enough money to have monsters in his film. I think that what Val Lewton did in his movies is a refreshing idea compared to the horror movies that we watch today. Horror movies have become a contest of who can “out gross” who, and the horror is not that bone chilling horror anymore but instead visual overload. For example, do we really need to see a man saw off his leg in Saw or people being slaughtered by a doll names Chucky in Child’s Play? It’s better to leave it up to the viewer to imagine the horrible things that are being done. This leaves a feeling of the unknown, and the unknown itself is something that is to be feared. I enjoyed both the movie Cat People and the documentary about Val Lewton because they gave me different perspectives as to what makes a good horror film.