“Cat People” was Mark Robson’s second solo editing job. He had cut his teeth as an uncredited assistant editor on what many critics consider the greatest film of all time, Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane” as well as Welles’ next film, “The Magnificent Ambersons.” But it was his work with the writer-producer Val Lewton — first as an editor and later as a director — that launched his Hollywood career.
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One of his later horror films for RKO and Lewton, 1943’s “The Seventh Victim” included a scene that some critics believe influenced Alfred Hitchcock’s infamous shower scene in “Psycho,” per “Historical Dictionary of Horror Cinema.” Throughout Robson’s horror film career, he continued to use jump scares. Although he invented it, the name for the specific type of jump scare in which a scene slowly builds up tension before the sudden introduction of what turns out to be something innocuous — in the case of “Cat People,” a bus — was named after the film’s producer.
