On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by filmmaker Jacqueline Castel to explore the roiling depths of the original Cat People.

You know the one, right? It’s a masterpiece of sublimated tension, with moral and psychosexual  underpinnings producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur could only hint at given the realities of American film production in 1942. It’s been a key genre text for eighty years now, and I was delighted to find it holds up very well — and given that Jacqueline’s first feature My Animal has some obvious resonances with it … well, we had a lot to talk about.

Want to join us? Of course you do! Subscribe at the usual locations — Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify — or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it the next time you take a lonely swim in your building’s basement pool.

And after that, you can catch up on the latest editions of Shiny Things. Last week I spun up Arrow Video’s new 4K editions of Barbarella, Blackhat and Tremors 2: Aftershocks, and wrote about the gutting loss of Canadian writer and director Charles Officer, whose death leaves a chasm in Toronto’s film community. You can find that right here, but if you subscribed you’d have already read it.

Also, because I don’t always get these posted on Tuesdays (obviously), here’s a heads-up that TIFF’s next free See the North screening is happening this coming Tuesday, December 12th, and  it’s a holiday special: We’re showing Coopers’ Christmas, the raunchy 2008 found-footage comedy from writer-stars Jason Jones and Mike Beaver and director Warren P. Sonoda, who’d previously collaborated on the really silly showbiz satire called Ham & Cheese and who achieved a demented sort of greatness with this  one.

We’re screening it on 35mm for added perversity, and Warren and producer Sean Buckley will be joining me for a Q&A. So if you’re in Toronto, come on down and share the holiday spirit. Tickets are free, and the show starts at 6:30pm. See you there?