Featuring production by Chic member Nile Rodgers and lead guitar by blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan, the remake is more aggressive.

Despite the remake being the more well-known version due to its parent album's success, some critics have expressed a preference for the original recording.

Director Paul Schrader reached out to David Bowie in 1980 to collaborate for the theme song of his remake of the Jacques Tourneur horror film Cat People (1942).

[1][2] Biographer Chris O'Leary describes the original film as "a subtle exploration of sexual repression and xenophobia", while he calls the remake a "gory fashion spread".

[3] Italian producer Giorgio Moroder had already recorded most of the music at Carla Ridge Camp in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles,[4] so Bowie was approached to write the lyrics to the main theme.

[6] In keeping with the dark tone of the film, the song has some goth rock influences, with Bowie singing in a deep baritone croon while being backed up by a female chorus.

[3] Bowie's lyrics reflect the film's pretensions, taking influence from his prior songs "Sound and Vision" (1977) and "It's No Game" (1980), such as the line "those who feel me near / pull the blinds and change their minds".

[14] He did not, instead acting in the Alan Clarke play Baal and appeared in more films, including The Hunger and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, both released in 1983.

[23] After demoing tracks in Montreux, Switzerland, recording for Let's Dance began at the Power Station in New York City during the first three weeks of December 1982.

The synthesisers of the original are replaced by keyboards, the verses are "halved" and the backing vocals are run through an Eventide Harmonizer with the pitch raised a minor third.

[1] The remake of "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)" was released on 14 April 1983 as the seventh and penultimate track on Bowie's 15th studio album Let's Dance, sequenced between the cover of "Criminal World" and "Shake It".

[27] The remake was remastered, along with the rest of its parent album, in 2018 as part of the box set Loving the Alien (1983–1988) and released separately the following year.

[1] Positively received on release,[30] Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times hailed Bowie's vocal performance as one of his finest "in years".

[31] Reviewing the original's remaster as part of the A New Career in a New Town (1977–1982) box set, Chris Gerard of PopMatters calls the track "brooding" and one of Bowie's "most potent singles from the era".

[32] Author Benoît Clerc calls the song a "rich, powerful and compelling track that establish[ed] a new artistic direction for [Bowie].

[3][32] In a review for Let's Dance on release, Carol Cooper of Record magazine, was critical of the remake: "Chic dynamics over a definitive Bowie/Moroder soundtrack is gilding the lily".

[33] Debra Rae Cohen of The New York Times was also critical, remarking that Bowie's vocal performance sounds like Jim Morrison "as if to mock his own lyrics".

[34] Pegg calls the remake "decidedly wet" and notes that due to the massive success of Let's Dance, the re-recording is the more well-known version.

[36] Mojo's Pat Gilbert similarly wrote that the "alluring, Expressionist feel" of the original was "defenestrated" by the "clumpy" remake the following year.