The forties are an interesting period for horror films. The genre had largely started to die off in the late thirties, and though there was a brief flurry of revivals and sequels at the start of the decade, horror had started to become somewhat “kiddified” as the decade wore on, with novelty pictures such as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and the later sequence of Abbot and Costello films were they meet with various horror icons. It seems like audiences were having trouble taking monsters and ghouls seriously (understandably, given the war) and sophisticated audiences were looking increasingly towards crime thrillers and noir films for scares, human monsters feeling much more plausible than magical European beasts. Jacques Tourneur’s 1942 Cat People is perhaps a reflection of those changing tastes. Originally conceived by RKO bosses and producer Val Lewton as a cheap, quick money maker with a catchy title, it surpasses it’s exploitative origin as a means of recovering some of that money that Orson Welles kept costing the studio.
Serbian fashion designer Irena has a romantic comedy “meet cute” with engineer Oliver at the zoo. She’s sketching panthers, he’s creeping on girls. After a brief, sudden courtship that catches Oliver’s friends off guard (notably his gal-pal “office wife” Alice and her lecherous psychologist friend Dr. Judd) Irena and Oliver wed, but some challenges to their relationship arise almost immediately. Irena is haunted by a legend from her homeland about evil women who transform into cats when their passions are inflamed, driven into the mountains by King John (images of whom mid-cat spearing occur throughout the film, notably in Irena’s home decor). A chance meeting with a strange, cat-like woman at her wedding dinner cements the notion in Irena’s mind that she is one of these cursed women as well, and she rejects the physical consummation of her relationship with Oliver, locking herself in her room at night. Oliver enlists Alice in arranging for Dr. Judd to take on Irena as a patient, a marital faux-pas so jaw-dropping it beggars belief and makes Alice’s later play for Oliver come as no surprise. Dr. Judd’s therapy proves ineffective, driving Oliver right into Alice’s arms, and shortly Alice finds herself stalked by a mysterious cat-like creature that seems to follow her in the shadows. Convnced now that Irena really is a cat woman, Alice persuades Oliver and Dr. Judd to have Irena committed to an asylum. Oliver and Alice are menaced by a panther in their office, while Dr. Judd waits for Irena in her apartment. When she finally appears Judd makes his lecherous intentions towards her quite plain. When he forces her to kiss him, Judd is horrified when Irena does transform into a cat and kills him. Seemingly distraught over shedding blood, Irena runs to the zoo and release the panther from its cage, and it kills her in its escape, leaving Alice and Oliver free to live their lives together.
Cat People is pretty firmly in the sympathetic monster camp. It helps that Irena is pretty much the only sympathetic character in the film. Dr. Judd is an aggressive creep, Alice pretty openly steals another woman’s husband and Oliver is so devoid of backbone he pretty much just goes along with adultery because Alice asks him to. Not only is Irena struggling against the darker part of her own nature, but she’s completely surrounded by people either actively hurting her or taking advantage of her. You feel great sorrow at her death, not only for her, but also because she didn’t take more of these horrible people with her. Most of the film plays like a melodrama, with heavy emoting and dramatic reactions, with the reltionships between Irena, Oliver and Alice driving most of the story forward. The horror elements become remarkably subdued, and Tourneur mostly keeps the reality of Irena’s transformations ambiguous. We never see a physical transformation, when we do see a cat it is almost always in shadow, and apart from an ill-considered sequence showing cat prints changing to shoe prints, the monster is mostly off-screen. The horror then comes from Irena’s psychological struggles to contain her animalistic impulses, and so despite the seeming inevitability of her transformation, we still feel for her, that her husband’s adultery basically triggers her transformation and ultimately her death. It’s easy to imagine a happier ending; one in which a less sexually inhibited Irena comes to a happier end, and the “happy ending” coming to a man who essentially cheated on his spouse is odd for the period, but understandable in light of the “the foreign and unnatural must be destroyed” morality of the era.
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