Cat People is for all intents and purposes sold as a horror film about an exotic woman from a faraway land who cannot control her ability to transform into a large and ravenous cat. The stimulus for that transformation beyond one’s ability to control traces back to a curse caused by the adoption of witchcraft and devil worship by ancestors in her homeland which in turn was a response to a military occupation by a foreign despot. While that politically inspired curse has all the earmarks of a motif of a standard horror film not unlike, for instance, The Wolf Man which was produced just one year before. Despite these trappings that indicate a horror film in the manner of The Wolf Man in which the cat that once was people is indicated unambiguously as a voracious and villainous character, Cat People is actually a psychological thriller using horror film conventions to create an ambiguous explanation for the violence enacted by repression of female sexuality exploding to the surface of consciousness resulting from nothing more nor less than sheer romantic jealousy.
The manner in which this ambiguity that allows Cat People to tread along a narrow and very thin edge of ice is the result of influence of the talents of a director and director working together to imprint a new form of realism onto the horror film genre. This is accomplished through both an artistic decision made from without and an economic decision imposed from within. The lack of a budget essentially enforced a creative influence upon the director who rose to the occasion and excelled where others with unlimited budgets in comparison have failed. By choosing not to show the ravenous cat the result is not only the potential for much of the movie that there actually is no cat, but some of the most terrifying individual sequences in film history.
For instance, the justifiably famous scene in which the All-American potential rival for the affections of the hero is simply walking down a sidewalk to catch a bus. The result is one of the most effective shot and edited—especially the sound editing—of any scene in a horror film that purposes eschews showing the “monster” and instead creates its tension entirely throughout atmosphere and the suggestion planted in the viewer’s head of what might—or might not—be stalking the young lady. The directorial influence in the power of the “bus stop” scene utilizes a setting which is quite obvious not a real location, but a set on a movie studio, perfectly modulated lighting with the use of ominous shadows and that sound. Never before in the history of cinema had the sound of high heels clicking on a sidewalk become quite so ominous and horrifying.
The entire film is structured to present the possibility that Irena—the cat people of the title—may be a real cat…or she just may be mad. At no point in the film is there ever any scene that actually shows Irena turning into a cat—and though she is very neurotic, thank God her fear of such a transformation does not turn her into the whining Captain Bringdown that is Lon Chaney’s Wolf Man. There are, however, sounds of a cat and shadowy figures that may be a cat and ripped clothing that perhaps are the remnants of a cat…or, perhaps, the sound, shadows and ripped clothing are merely indications of the extent of madness to which a woman can be driven while in throes of extreme jealousy.
