Being asked to pen one of the BFI’s ever expanding Classics must come as a relief to an author and critic more used to scribbling very little about a lot: volumes on horror movies and westerns; editing the BFI’s Companion To Horror; and, with a calendar-eye open, the exhaustive and exhausting Millennium Movies. Newman must have leapt at the opportunity to write relatively expansively about just the one for once. His choice, the 1943 Val Lewton produced, Jacques Tourneur helmed Cat People.

And as one might hope, he makes for a thorough and exacting guide, even if he does adopt that tried and tested scene-by scene-route. (Iain Sinclair’s wonderful, remit-busting Crash has yet to redefine the BFI’s terms, it seems.) And as an unrepentant horror man, Kim Newman, thank god, calls it as he sees it: "This is not ... a respectable psychological study of a woman with a neurosis; Cat People is a horror film about a woman who turns into a panther."

Not that he repeats the mistake of Anne Billson’s tussle with The Thing: Newman the film historian springs forth whenever Newman the fan-boy looks like taking over. He locates the picture as RKO’s response to Universal and The Wolf Man, and is not afraid to reference its fantastical (and daring) take on marital frigidity and (unintentionally) lesbianism. Further, we learn how Lewton used off-cuts from bigger productions (the staircase to Simone Simon’s apartment is borrowed from The Magnificent Ambersons, apparently), and that, rather than a ‘B’ movie, Cat People was always designated a low rent ‘A’. The book’s take on that apparent mistake - where cat tracks merge with shoed footprints in mid-transformation - is that it’s no mistake, establishing what the author calls "a different category of the supernatural". And his examination of Mark Robson’s eerie The Seventh Victim as a plausible second sequel is as intriguing as it is doomed.

Really the only fly in the ointment is the relative dismissal of the genuinely creepy fairytale follow-up, Curse of The Cat People. Would that Newman had expanded the text to encompass both or, better yet, taken on Robert Wise’s marvellous second-bite in isolation. Calls for a sequel. Listening, BFI?