SOURCE: "Structures of Absence: Cat People" in Dreams of Darkness: Fantasy and the Films of Val Lewton, University of Illinois Press, 1985, pp. 21-39.

In the following excerpt, Telotte argues that elements of the mise-en-scene in the film Cat People (for example the shadows that dominate many of the scenes and the off-screen depiction of horrific events) represent a thematic concern with mythological, psychological, and philosophical notions of absence—that is, an absence that implies the presence of something too awful to imagine concretely.

From seeing the bars, his seeing is so exhausted
 That it no longer holds anything anymore.
 To him the world is bars, a hundred thousand
 Bars, and behind the bars, nothing.
 —Rainer Maria Rilke, "The Panther"

While Val Lewton, like few other producers in Hollywood, generally wielded a free and creative hand in crafting his unit's films, his first production, Cat People (1942), demonstrated the typical...