Episode 818: Cat People (1982)

At a Westwood preview, a teenage girl turned to her friend: "Oh, my God." Paul Schrader turned to Jerry Bruckheimer: "I think maybe we went a little far." Schrader took Cat People (1982) as a for-hire genre job, and it turned out as personal as anything he ever made. For Shocktober 2026, Mike White and guest co-hosts Josh Hadley and Heather Drain follow Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell into a New Orleans thick with humidity, incest and a Giorgio Moroder score. They set Alan Ormsby's very different script against what reached the screen, dig into Ferdinando Scarfiotti's Italian look, the dubbed dialogue and the mountain lions dyed black, and measure it all against Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton's Cat People (1942). Then Schrader himself explains the burning-house ending he threw out, why Bowie's song waits for the end credits, why he wishes he had changed the title, and how falling for his star ended his studio days.

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