Cat People

RKO gave producer Val Lewton a title, a budget of under 150,000 dollars, and instructions to imitate Universal. He responded by making a film in which the monster is never seen.

Irena is a Serbian immigrant in New York who believes she will turn into a panther if she is aroused. Her husband thinks it is a neurosis and sends her to a psychiatrist who has his own ideas about her.

Two sequences invented the modern jump scare. In one, a woman is followed along a park wall and the tension breaks with the hiss of a bus door, a device still called the Lewton bus. In the other, the same woman swims alone in a basement pool while something paces in the dark beyond the light.

The horror is entirely a matter of what is outside the frame, and it is a film about sexual fear made in 1942 that is remarkably direct about it.