Sleep throws back to the mysterious horror impulses of Cat People

Shirley Jackson once wrote in her journal: “who wants to write about anxiety from a place of safety? although, i suppose i would never be entirely safe since i cannot completely reconstruct my mind.” That verb “reconstruct” is an apt one for Jackson, whose most famous novel The Haunting Of Hill House follows characters stuck in the winding, shifting halls of a haunted mansion. Over the course of that narrative, the house is portrayed as something alive, beating and warm and ugly—being lost in it is like being trapped in someone’s mind, or locked in someone’s body.

That idea—that we could spend years blindly feeling out the shadowy corridors of our own bodies, only for them to remain fundamentally unknowable—is the basis of Jason Yu’s feature directorial debut Sleep. It’s the middle of the night and a heavily pregnant Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi) is shifting restlessly; her husband Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun) is sitting upright, muttering something in his sleep. But soon the horror narrative unfurls, ominous bangs and thumps emanating from their apartment. From there Soo-jin witnesses her husband descend further into sleep-addled madness, raiding the fridge of raw meat and leaning out of open windows. Hyun-su’s first sleep-talking utterance, “someone’s inside,” takes on more meaning as Sleep progresses—a detriment to the sense of unspecified foreboding plaguing Soo-jin in that first act.

Jacques Tourneur’s provocative 1942 thriller Cat People is similarly obsessed with that slippery idea of safety, and is a film that fails to settle on a single kind of evil, arguing that the real villain is something less definite, more intrinsic to our biology. As such, it’s no coincidence that the first voice heard in the film is Cat People’s resident psychiatrist, Louis Judd (Tom Conway), a character tasked with untangling people’s complex inner evils. His opening quote says, “Even as fog continues to lie in the valleys, so does ancient sin cling to the places, the depressions in the world consciousness.” 

Cat People is about the fog that clings to each person, destabilizing the landscape of married life—in Jackson’s words, Cat People is not written from “a place of safety,” relishing its dangerous outlook. Cat People follows the alluring Irina (Simone Simon) and eager Oliver (Kent Smith) as they embark, ill-equipped, into marriage, despite her dark secret: Sex is off the table for these newlyweds, held at bay due to Irina’s assumption that she will transform into a cat at the prospect of intimacy. Tourneur’s film considers how passion and repression are the twin pillars of sex. It is a strange, bold way of approaching the idea of relationships; making the ways women’s bodies betray them in relation to men explicit in the text.

There is fog (both literal and, as Dr. Judd suggests, figurative) in Sleep and Cat People, both of which are consigned to winter, crouched in nighttime. Cold is always pressing in, cutting through walls and blankets and coats to leave characters vulnerable. Yu and Tourneur obscure people’s bodies at crucial turning points. Characters will be subject to the camera’s focus for long tracking shots, and then, at the point when something is finally about to happen, the subject is bathed in darkness, or hidden by an object. Trails are laid and then cut off inexplicably, preserving the mystery and letting the evidence go cold. 

Midway through Cat People there is a particularly tense set piece where Irina follows Alice (Jane Randolph), one of her husband’s infatuated coworkers. The road is dark and dappled with rings of light, overhead street lamps casting makeshift stepping stones across the abandoned street. Tourneur trains the camera on the ground, following Alice’s hurried pace, as she trips and skips in her haste to escape the approaching shadow. By comparison, Irina is a steadily approaching specter, matching Alice’s scramble with even strides. The rhythm of the scene (cutting between Alice and Irina’s shoes) is broken when Irina steps out of one ring of light and never enters the next one, charging the scene with a new, paranormal energy, achieved through animalistic growls and the rustling of bushes. It is an elegant way of pinpointing the moment unreasonable impulses seize upon us, and we descend into an out-of-body experience.

Sleep’s first half is littered with such intriguing moments, similarly exploring the point where bodies and minds disconnect, where primal needs upend the everyday. If, as Dr. Judd argues in the opening moments of Cat People, “ancient sin” clings to “the depressions in the world consciousness,” Sleep is about what happens when we are unconscious, so it is uniquely and perfectly positioned to excavate such bumpy terrain. Sleep leans into the destabilizing familiarity of hopelessly clawing yourself back from the inky abyss of slumber—balanced on the precipice of something routine yet deeply unknowable. Hyun-su’s behavior is untraceable, occurring in the vacuum of sleep. As such, Yu leaves the camera focused on husband or wife drifting off and the next shot is framed exactly the same, with the couple newly bathed in daylight and the audience left wondering what could’ve happened in the interim. 

This occurs a few times, all indicating new degrees of unnerving terror as Sleep continues, but it is most effectively conceived early on. Hyun-su scratches his face in his sleep—itching hard, like something is crawling beneath his skin. Soo-jin pulls her husband’s hand away, concern etched in her frown lines before he settles back to sleep and she follows suit. Yu’s camera then quickly cuts to the next day, holding on Soo-jin’s barely awoken disgust as she recognizes her partner’s exposed cheek, clawed to a bloodied pulp. It is a visceral rendering of the unconscious forces threatening to take control of our bodies, and one captured with pitch-perfect horror precision as the camera pulls back, the score building and then cutting out for the couple’s shared scream.

But unlike Cat People, Sleep ultimately refuses to sit in the discomfort of its own unknowability, resorting to the idea of possession as an explanation for the gory goings on. This tangibility frustrates Yu’s earlier unnerving world-building, which imagined its antagonistic sleep as something insidiously common, buried too deep in the body to be scratched out, rather than a cover for a more traditional villain. Instead, Soo-jin can simply rid herself of these ill-intentioned external influences, making a way for Hyun-su to, as Shirley Jackson put it, be “entirely safe” in the strictures of his mind. 

Cat People never rests on such promises. Instead, its final scene follows Irina, taut like a coil, clutching her coat with a vice-like grip and sauntering over to the zoo. It is a harried and unstable conclusion, almost rushed were it not for Simon’s cryptic expression and unhurried pace. Moments later, she is struck dead by the panther she just released; betrayed by her kin, her blood, herself. It is a bleak final note, granted no resolution. While Sleep ends with the couple (one half of whom is newly exorcized), Cat People ends with Irina dead, her stories and confessions consigned to the soulless pile of black cloth Oliver leans over. These dramatically different conclusions represent the discrepancy in their horror—one is granted a particular resolution while the other stretches on indefinitely, even into death.

Cat People and, at times, Sleep are intrigued by the evil wriggling beneath the hard shell of mindful reasoning. Films like these remind us of cinema’s potential to give form to those formless desires and nebulous fears. At its best, horror can treat bodies like conduits to channel some insensible evil, rather than just canvases for evil to perform upon. Tourneur and, to a lesser extent Yu, explore how people’s inherent ugliness expresses itself boldly across our physical forms, twisting limbs and breaking bones; the reason and result of our madness.