Critics reviews

This little miracle is still taken for granted. This is a mistake. Its insouciant sexuality is still titanic. Its frankness is as scary as it is vital and engrossing. It's the first American horror movie about ordinary people giving into temptation with complete awareness and agency.

Lewton and Tourneur's Cat People, now out on Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection, holds a place in film history as a landmark of the power of suggestion: the idea that you could make a good horror film on the cheap by simply not showing what everyone is supposed to be frightened of.

Cat People, Lewton's first and most famous title for RKO, as well as a collaboration with the elegant director Jacques Tourneur, weds avant-garde symbolism with a variation of the classic story of the were-creature. It begins with boy meeting girl.

Fans and commentators have sifted every shot and every situation... Yet a fundamental mysteriousness remains... Cat People's most famous gesture—keeping the object of dread concealed in the shadows, and trusting to the human impulse to people the dark with the most unspeakable fears—is only the most blatant of the many ways in which the film leaves spaces deliberately blank. It presents us with a series of unforgettable moments and obliges us to imagine connections among them.

Rewatching the still-shocking psychosexual masterpiece Cat People, one cannot help but be mesmerized by the brilliance with which Tourneur works within the magnificent limitations of Lewton's RKO unit, and the tragic empathy and sophistication he imbues in this yarn about a Serbian émigré (Simone Simon) whose talons come out when she gets hot and bothered. Tourneur made many great films, but Cat People alone cements his standing.

It resounds as one of the great films about sexual repression... Rather than assuming the role of a femme fatale, Irena becomes a victim of society. Her husband's journey is to overcome his "mistake" in trusting in someone outside of his pack, and Irena's mistake was to trust him. The horror of the film comes as much from the idea that there is no happy solution to their marital problem as it does from the idea of a humanistic black panther roaming the streets.

A moody and deeply uncomfortable excursion into inner monstrousness. Tourneur pulls no punches, filling every frame with lurking menace and just-around-the-corner savagery.

An unmistakably European vision, with its traces of Freud and Ibsen and tacit acknowledgement of escapees from the war across the ocean; nothing is lost on Jacques Tourneur, who splendidly visualizes immigrant dislocation and marital anxiety as spiritual states suspended between planes of light and shadow.

For Martin Scorsese, who featured it prominently in his PERSONAL JOURNEY THROUGH AMERICAN MOVIES, the film was a breakthrough for its integration of subtext into genre storytelling. In this regard, it's "as influential a movie as CITIZEN KANE." Even though this is quite clearly "about a woman's fear of her own sexuality" (Scorsese again), it remains evocative as horror--in part because Simone is so believably vulnerable that we fear for her no matter what happens.

Cat People was shot for nearly nothing, and the lack of budget shows, if you're looking for that kind of thing. There aren't too many locations, the cast is small, the film is short … but it is evidence of how much you can do with almost nothing. The encounter with The Cat Woman in the Belgrade is a perfect example. A director needs to cast well (the actress is frightening looking), set up the "event" of the scene, and let the cameras roll.

Possibly the only American movie thus far to feature a Serbian "monster," this Freudian chiller was the first movie Jacques Tourneur made for Val Lewton's "B" unit at RKO; championed by savvy critics like Manny Farber and James Agee, it helped save the studio and jump-started Lewton's career as the most literate horror maven in Hollywood.

The film can be dissected according to any number of theoretical approaches, and, as such, is a bit of catnip for intellectuals. Its incredible popularity at the time can probably be ascribed to its forthright discussion of sexual feeling – and its seeming demonisation of the same. The brief shot of water glistening on the heroine's naked back as she crouches, sobbing, after a kill, is one of the more disturbing moments in 1940s film.