Cat People

"Cat People" works like a fever dream, it's a film that draws you in by the power of suggestion, by making you think you saw or heard something on the screen, but perhaps you didn't. It is technically a horror film, yet unlike what the title might suggest it's not a freak show, it is in fact mostly psychological, it remains a metaphor for a failed marriage, a fear of intimacy, and a fear of oneself.

When it was released, no one really thought much of "Cat People", it was a film which was given a small budget and a b-movie title. It was created by the people at RKO as a quick cash answer to Universal's horror movie lexicon which contained titles such as "Frankenstein" and "The Wolf Man". But what the head honchos underestimated was the talent behind the film.

The history of "Cat People" is the history of Val Lewton, a Producer who started out as a protege of David O Selznik. Lewton was given a chance to produce a series of horror films for RKO, only he wanted them to be something special. He was a student of classic literature and stories, he even used to write pulp fiction novels before becoming a producer. With "Cat People" he was given a crummy title and a small budget, but that meant basic free creative control.

Through the guidance of Lewton and director Jaques Tournier, "Cat People" became the story of Irena (Simone Simon) a young woman from Serbia living in New York. She meets a man Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) and the two fall in love and get married. But something is haunting Irena, a story from her homeland has her convinced she comes from an ancestry of people who worshipped the devil and being intimate with her husband will cause her to turn into a fabled cat person and killing him.

Because of Irena's superstitions, their wedding night is spent apart, time goes by and they grow more and more isolated in eachother. Oliver takes solice in his co-worker Alice (Jane Randolph) who loves him. This sparks jealousy in Irena and she begins to act even more dark and brooding. Later Oliver advises Irena to visit a psychiatrist (Tom Conway) to help her cope with her feelings. The doctor however only tries to seduce Irena causing her to become more repressed and aggressive.

This is really Irena's story, she is the loner of the film, the outcast, she doesn't seem to fit in, it's about her fears of becoming isolated from the man she loves and losing him to another women. It's also about her sexual repression, re-watching it, the film reminded me much of Roman Polanski's own horror masterpiece "Repulsion" which was also about a woman dealing with her own repression. The tragedy of "Cat People" is seeing all of Irena's horrors come true, she does lose he husband, and she does unleash the animal within her, but the beauty of this film is how it is left ambiguous.

"Cat People" could've become silly very quickly if they chose to show a woman turn into a cat, but it's much too smart for that. The horror is done by not showing, but only implying. This is done through the isolation of sound, the use of silence, and images which seem to be hidden in shadow. There aren't many scare moments in "Cat People" but when they do happen it's to great effect. Take the moment where Alice believes she is being stalked. We the audience see her being followed by the footsteps of Irena, but soon those footsteps disappear, but we still feel Alice is being followed, the climax of this sequence is one of the most famous of its kind.

Then there is the moment where Alice again feels like she is being stalked, this time in a swimming pool. There are faint echoes of sound surrounding her, and images against the shadowy wall, but again we aren't sure what if anything is there.

These little pieces of creative filmmaking is what makes "Cat People" endure as a classic of subtle horror, but it's Irena's story that still interests me the most. Her horrors are real and they manifest into something super natural, it touches on our own fears of loneliness, isolation, even death. Irena seems to be in a waking dream, on one level it doesn't seem to make much sense, we don't quite see everything, yet we feel like we have. It's a film of the subconscious, that primal level of the mind that is able to connect with these feelings on some level.

"Cat People" isn't so much a monster movie in the same way "Frankenstein" or "Dracula" are. It's more ambiguous where you're not sure who, what, or where the monster is. The story of Irena teaches us that even though we can resist it for as long as we can, the monster will appear, and the horror is knowing it could be inside us.