Most serious horror-film buffs will be familiar with the swimming-pool scene from the 1942 film Cat People – famous for its use of the power of suggestion, and a classic example of producer Val Lewton’s moody, abstract approach to horror (the scene has a woman being menaced by an unseen presence during a late-night swim, while we think we see something leopard-like amidst the dark shadows on the wall around the pool area). During my recent immersion in the work of John Dickson Carr, I realised that the Cat People scene may have been partly inspired by a creepy passage in Carr’s 1941 novel The Seat of the Scornful (also known as Death Turns the Tables). 
The passage has a young woman named Jane who finds herself locked in the indoor-swimming-pool section of a hotel basement late at night… then the lights go out, and she thinks she is being stalked by someone or something in the darkness. The writing isn’t too elaborate, but there is something very vivid about the setting (a twilight zone located within an otherwise plush non-threatening space) and the imagery, with the water casting shadows on the wall and the unsettling acoustics.
As discussed here before, Carr was one of the giants of Golden Age crime fiction – nearly as popular as Agatha Christie at the time – and this book came out just a few months before Cat People went into production in early 1942. So it’s very plausible that Cat People screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen had read it. A couple of short excerpts are below.
(The book itself? Highly recommended as an example of one of Carr’s non-impossible-crime mysteries; in fact, it seems obvious almost from the start that only one person could have committed the murder in question – but of course things don’t turn out to be that straightforward. The swimming-pool scene isn't central to the narrative, by the way - it's a bit of a red herring, if you can expect a red herring in a hotel pool.)
(A post about Curse of the Cat People - a sequel that is very different from Lewton's other horror films - is here)
No comments:
Post a Comment