My Top 10 Favorite Scary Movies: "Cat People" (1942)

"But take a sweet love story, or a story of sexual antagonisms, about people like us, not freaks, and cut in your horror and there by suggestion, you've got something" has never been truer than Val Lewton's first masterpiece, 1942's "Cat People" starring Simone Simon. According to the critics and historians, this is indeed a "story of sexual antagonisms" centering on a core hypothetical about women who do not let their husbands touch them. 

Irena Dubrovna, a Serbian living in New York City, has a chance meeting with a very handsome Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) who she immediately invites to tea. Although there is clear attraction, there seems to be a psychological inevitability within Irena. Even while she explains the history of a statue of King John of Serbia impaling a cat kept in her apartment, she becomes lost within her own thoughts finding herself cold towards Oliver who is only further entranced by her. He marries her despite her fears, whether psychological or sexual or even religious, but does not realize she will never let him have her sexually. 

It's clear that Lewton has a gift for the ambiguity which is why my take on "Cat People" comes across like a game of Chutes and Ladders. On one hand, you do have the "sexual antagonism" covered up by fantasy or, to take it even further, her ancestry and heritage. We are to assume Irena is in her early 30s and was raised in the Serbian Orthodox Church with a strong sense of what is good and evil. Even in her explanation of the statue, she explains that marmelukes initially enslaved her people, which led them to "[bow] down to Satan and said their masses to him. They became witches and were evil" which brought King John to kill most of the masses except for the few who escaped into the mountains. Although she never says it directly, it seems keeping the King John statue around keeps her emotionally and possibly even devoutly in check as he is one of the many Orthodox saints.

Where Irena cannot satisfy her husband sexually, she intends to please him by going to see psychiatrist Louis Judd although Oliver is off falling in love with a coworker. But even there, we are told secondhand through hypnosis of the "women who, in jealousy and anger or out of their own corrupt passions can change into great cats, like panthers and if one of these women were to fall in love, and if her lover were to kiss her, take her into his embrace, she would be driven by her own evil to kill him." Judd also tells the audience that Irena didn't know her father who died before she was born, being raised by her mother who was called a witch and a cat woman. "These childhood tragedies are inclined to corrode the soul to leave a canker in the mind," Judd continues slipping in some inadvertent Freudianism.

But the real question of the whole movie, and the principle I base my love of this story on, is if the world Dewitt Boden had written, is a world capable of magic realism or one of total cynicism oblivious to situational inevitability. The horror lies in the Oliver's decision to divorce Irena having fallen in love with Alice. Now Irena has nothing left to lose but to give into the cat people-like paganism she feared, as territorial anger blinds her to pursue Alice twice. The horror lies in bloody paw prints on the sidewalk that slowly morph into the imprints of high heels, a panther-like cat weaving in and out of the shadows around the pool containing the horrified Alice. Even when Irena finally pursues the aroused Dr. Judd, her feline-like eyes twinkling the darker the screen gets, it is the purest indication that she is a cat woman, or giving into murderous inclinations simply as a person.

But are these elements of horror merely what we perceive Irena's anger to the ignorant as or an extension of the prowess of a cat woman? That is the genius of Val Lewton's auteurship! As a viewer, to go back and forth if whether Irena needs to be authentic to her feline pagan roots or to continue to live in an ignorant world is truly a testament to what kind of person the audience member is. Do you believe in inevitability in all its good or bad? Do you believe in a woman and her tragedy of what her mind or soul perceives? Simon's Irena tells Dr. Judd "Yet when you speak of the soul, you mean the mind and it is not my mind that is troubled." Where critics and historians most often focus on the core hypothetical or treat Irena has a person with mental illness via her sexuality, I see someone who is victim to her circumstances, inevitability, ancestry, and everyone who will not listen to her. We are our ancestors to a degree. That is Irena Dubrovna's tragedy, horror is merely an act, a decoration.

"I wake in the night and the tread of their feet whispers in my brain.

I have no peace for they are in me, in me."

Listening Material:
Val Lewton Discussion | Historic Hollywood | Popcorn Talk Cat People | Watchalong! | Popcorn Talk