While sketching a black panther at New York's Central Park Zoo, fashion designer Irena Dubrovna, a Serbian immigrant recently arrived in America, meets marine engineer Oliver Reed and there's an instant connection between them. As they walk home, Irena invites Reed up to her brownstone apartment for tea and, while spending the evening there, she tells him of the history of the small village where she was born, particularly how, after being enslaved by the Mameluks, turned from Christianity to satanic worship and witchcraft. She's particularly troubled by the part of the story that describes the most wicked of them escaping to the mountains before King John of Serbia could have them slaughtered along with the other occultists, which has always haunted her village. Reed dismisses the legend and is intent upon continuing to see Irena. Despite a couple of strange incidents, such as a kitten that he bought for her hissing at her and the animals in a pet store going berserk when she walks in, Reed and Irena confess their love to each other, although the latter admits that she had dreaded falling in love because of the fear of something evil lurking within her as a result of her village's dark past; regardless, Reed convinces Irena to marry her. After the wedding, though, it becomes clear that Irena's fears aren't going to go away by themselves, as she's disturbed when a strange Serbian woman refers to her as "sister" during the dinner afterward and she sleeps in a separate room from her husband, fearing that if she were to become sexually aroused in any way, she'll transform into a black panther and kill him. When she accidentally kills her pet canary and tells Reed that she felt compelled to throw its corpse to the panther at the zoo, Reed decides to find her a psychiatrist. During her first session with Dr. Louis Judd, who puts her under hypnosis to learn about her fears, he tries to convince her that they're nothing significant and simply stem from childhood traumas, but Irena remains steadfast in her fears. What's more, she begins to grow angrily jealous towards Reed's co-worker, Alice Moore, who loves Reed herself and whom he often confides in, and when Alice finds herself being continually stalked by a menacing, inhuman presence, it slowly becomes evident that Irena's fears and beliefs might not be so fantastical.
The wedding is tempered by Irena being disturbed when, at a Serbian restaurant for the post-wedding dinner, a woman comes up to her and calls her, "My sister," a couple of times in Serbian; the woman's strange, almost feline-like appearance makes things even worse, as Irena fears she may be one of the descended Cat People and, by extension, what her words imply. Therefore, when they arrive home for the first time as husband and wife, Irena asks Reed to give her some time to get over this feeling that there's something sinister within her, and when he says that she can have all the time in the word, she replies, "Only a little time, Oliver. I don't want more than that." They then settle into married life, although they sleep on opposite ends of the apartment, so Irena won't become overcome with passion and endanger Reed's life, but after a month of marriage, she continues to be haunted by thoughts and feelings she can't control or understand. She finds herself continually drawn to the black panther at the zoo, despite being somewhat frightened of him, and she suffers a massive blow when the canary that Reed bought for her before dies while she tries to take him out of his cage. Not only does she feel that he died from fear of her but she felt compelled to take him to the zoo and throw his corpse to the panther, which promptly devours him. This makes Reed realize that Irena's Cat People obsession is something she needs professional help in dealing with and she begins seeing Dr. Louis Judd. While under hypnosis, she speaks of them to him, saying, "They torment me. I wake in the night and the trail of their feet whispers in my brain. I have no peace, for they are in me." When Judd goes over the notes he took during the session, we not only learn the full extent of Irena's fear of what could happen for the first time but also some other details of her childhood, that she didn't know her father very well, as he died in an accident in the woods before she was born, and the other kids made fun of her and called her mother one of the Cat People. He advises her not to tell Reed of what's gone on in their session, which turns out to be the only one they have, as she later tells him, "I don't feel you can help me. You're very wise, you know a great deal, yet when you speak of the soul, you mean the mind, and it is not my mind that is troubled."
Having been shown to be apparently nothing more than frightened and emotionally tortured at this point, Irena begins to show a genuine dark side when she becomes angry and jealous upon learning that Reed's coworker, Alice Moore, is the one who recommended Judd, meaning that Reed told Alice about her. Her jealousy reaches a boiling point when, after an argument they have about her no longer seeing Judd, Reed heads back to the office and Irena learns that Alice is there as well when she tries to call him. It's actually a misunderstanding, as Reed goes to a nearby cafe before heading up to work and Alice just happened to be working late as well, but it's enough to send Irena over the edge and prompt her to go downtown herself. Things get even worse when Alice ends up joining Reed at the cafe and Irena spots the two of them leading together, which leads to her following Alice to the bus stop. Nothing happens to Alice, but the rustling of ferns over the concrete wall behind her and the discovery of some slaughtered sheep by a groundskeeper, with paw-prints found at the scene morphing into female shoe-prints as they lead away, strongly suggest that Irena has gone through some kind of monstrous change offscreen. Irena returns home, refusing to allow Reed to touch her, and she goes and sits in the bathtub, sobbing, before having a nightmare about cats, King John, and something Judd told her before at the zoo, "There is in some cases a psychic need to loose evil upon the world." The next day, she takes those words to heart and steals the key to the panther's cage at the zoo, which the keeper always leaving in the lock. Following another incident where Irena becomes jealous of Reed and Alice's closeness and Irena's presence at her apartment building leads to Alice being stalked by a frightening, unseen presence down at the swimming pool, Irena actually goes back to Judd, more afraid than ever, and tells him of the incidents and lapses of memory during them. Warning her that she's coming close to going insane and could be committed, Judd encourages her to try to lead a normal life and she decides to do so, preparing a romantic dinner for her and Reed and telling him that she's no longer afraid...
...only for him to tell her that it's too little, too late, as he's now realized that he loves Alice. Overcome with sorrow, jealousy, and rage, Irena shouts at Reed to get out of the apartment, murmuring insanely about loving loneliness, and rips up the upholstery of the couch. Her dark side comes out full blast now, as Reed and Alice are stalked at work by a snarling panther lurking in the darkness, which leaves when Reed demands that Irena leave them alone, and she then goes home to her apartment to find Judd waiting for her. Having become interested in her to the point of lust, he kisses Irena, which leads to a very violent struggle and ends with him getting mauled to death, but not before he stabs at her, leaving her with half of his blade sticking out of her shoulder. Deciding then to end her own life, possibly out of guilt and also because it's very clear to her now that nothing can change Reed's love for Alice, she goes to the zoo again, thinking of something else Judd told her there regarding the panther ("Couldn't you turn to him as an instrument of death?"), and unlocks his cage. The panther, which is subsequently run over and killed by a car, jumps out of the cage and knocks Irena to the ground, killing her, with Reed and Alice finding her body.
Things start to unravel for Reed afterward as he, in his naivety, begins confiding in his lovely coworker, Alice Moore, about Irena's problems, causing his wife to become angry and jealous towards her. The argument that they have over it, combined with his learning from Dr. Judd that she hasn't been back to see him since their first session, weighs heavily on his mind, especially since, as he tells Alice, it's the first time in his life he's ever been truly unhappy and, therefore, he doesn't know how to deal with it. During this conversation with Alice, Reed also admits that the way he feels about Irena doesn't fit the normal definition of love but is rather a kind of curiosity and intrigue towards her, as he says, "I'm drawn to her. There's a warmth from her that pulls at me. I have to watch her when she's in the room. I have to touch her when she's near." And yet, he really doesn't know who she is, in spite of their marriage. (I like how it kind of addresses what would really happen if two people decided they "loved" each other as quickly as people in old movies like this period do.) Things become even more strained between them when they have another argument, this time about her not going to see Judd anymore and about his continuing to talk with Alice about what's going on with her, prompting him to go back to work for a little while. He once again has a heart-to-heart with Alice, who earlier admitted that she loved him, about what's going on in his life when he goes to a small cafe before heading up to work and is perplexed and concerned when Irena shows up at their apartment very late that night, bedraggled and clearly upset. It's after this that Reed, perhaps because he feels closer to her or because he needs an escape from the nightmare his life has become because of Irena, spends more time with Alice, continuing to fuel his wife's dangerous jealousy. Soon, Reed has to come to the realization that he does love Alice and admits it to Irena, saying that he'll give her a divorce; this news sends her into a crazed state of muttering under her breath and clawing at the couch, during which she throws him out of the apartment. Talking with Dr. Judd and learning that he can either divorce Irena or have her committed, Reed decides to do whatever is best for Irena, even though having her declared insane would mean he couldn't divorce her. Irena fails to show up at a meeting arranged between them at their apartment and Reed and Alice head over to their office, having a lot of work to do, which is when they're stalked in the dark room by a snarling panther. Reed, now clearly believing that Irena is becoming a cat, tells her to leave them and she does, but not before leaving behind the unmistakable scent of her lalage perfume. Try as they might, they're unable to save Judd from her, finding his mutilated body up in the apartment, and they're also unable to prevent Irena from taking her own life, with the film ending on them looking at her lifeless body and Reed telling Alice, "She never lied to us."
The film only has those four main characters but there are a very peripheral ones who are significant in their own ways. One of them is the zookeeper (Alec Craig), who spends most of his time sweeping around the cages, but he does have a significant scene where, after Irena describes the panther as beautiful, he tells her, "No, he ain't beautiful. He's an evil critter, ma'am. You read in your Bible, Revelations, where the book's talkin' about the worst beast of 'em all. It says, 'And the beast which I saw, was like unto a leopard...' Like a leopard, but not a leopard." Little does he know that he's added fuel to Irena's paranoia, as she believes that last statement describes what she believes she is. He's also so absentminded that he's constantly leaving the key in the cage's lock, which Irena eventually steals and uses to kill herself at the end. Another one who only appears in one scene, Mrs. Plunkett (Elizabeth Dunne), the old woman who runs the pet shop, has a very significant line of dialogue when she's seen how the kitten and all the other animals in the shop react to Irena's presence: "You can fool everybody but, landie dearie me, you can't fool a cat. They seem to know who's not right, if you know what I mean." But the most significant character who only has one brief appearance in the film is the Serbian woman (Elizabeth Russell) who calls Irena her "sister" when she sees her at the restaurant. It's not just her Serbian nationality and what she says to Irena that disturbs her but also her odd, rather feline-like appearance, which one of Oliver Reed's coworkers even comments on. This fills Irena with the feeling of dread, that the woman may be one of the Cat People and that she's recognizing her as one too (significantly, when the woman speaks, it's actually Simone Simon's own voice dubbed over her). She's never seen again afterward, so whoever she truly was and what exactly her greeting to Irena meant remains a mystery.
There a few other minor characters who aren't all that important but interesting enough to where they're worth a mention. The commodore (Jack Holt) who owns the shipping company that Reed and Alice work for talks to the latter during the post-wedding dinner, mentioning how he's heard that Irena is a bit odd, and he's also the first to notice the Serbian woman when she's watching their party from nearby. Doc Carver (Alan Napier), one of Reed's coworkers, is the one who describes the Serbian woman as looking like a cat, but otherwise, he's mainly a source of comic relief, realizing that a Serbian term he was taught means something other than what he was told and making this joke after the dinner: "Why would my wedding be a dollar and cents wedding?... Because I haven't a dollar and the girl hasn't any sense." (Alice comments that that was a lame joke, even for him.) I also have to mention Mrs. Agnew (Dot Farley), the cleaning woman who both Reed and Alice talk to when they go down to their company to work and who has a memorable habit of flicking dirt off of her blouse; Minnie (Theresa Harris), the African-American waitress at the cafe Reed and Alice both go to who can't understand why nobody wants any of her chicken gumbo and, when Alice asks, "Could you squeeze a coffee pot for me, Minnie?", she responds, "I sure could, only this coffee's been workin' so long, its got muscles!"; and Blondie (Mary Halsey), the woman working the front desk at Alice's apartment building who comes to her aide when she screams in fear down at the pool and discovers that her robe has been torn to shreds.
Even though it was made for a little over $140,000, Cat People does not look at all like a cheap film. It not only simply looks like a glossy A-level movie but its sets were all leftovers from much bigger films that RKO produced at the time, so the filmmakers had the best that they could possibly work with. The most notable sets are the immediate interior of Irena's brownstone and her apartment itself, the former of which features a nice-looking staircase from the Orson Welles movie, The Magnificent Ambersons and really helps in giving the movie some scale. Irena's apartment, filled with her sketching materials and objects that link to her home-country and her fears, looks quite good as well, and the same goes for the large lobby of Alice Moore's apartment building, the swimming pool down in the basement, and the main office of the shipping company where Oliver Reed and Alice work. The sets that are meant to represent outside locations, like the zoo (with real animals in cages), the streets outside the buildings and shops, and the long, tunnel-like stretch of sidewalk leading to the bus stop, are so well-shot and constructed that it's kind of hard for me to believe that was all in a studio. I would say that some of that had to have been real location work but, remembering the low budget and short shooting schedule (less than a month, and by the time it was done, they had two crews, one filming during the day and the other at night, working to get it in on time) they had to produce the movie, they probably couldn't afford to film anywhere other than a studio, where they could completely control the lighting and elements.
Just as, if not not more, important than the sets is the cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca, who would go on to work with Jacques Tourneur again on the 1947 noir film, Out of the Past, which starred Robert Mitchum. That movie is considered by many to be a seminal entry in that genre, particularly due to its cinematography, and it's almost as if Musuraca and Tourneur warmed up for it when they did Cat People, as this often feels like a film noir. It's amazing how this film can take fairly ordinary environments, like the lobby of Irena's brownstone, her apartment, and Reed and Alice's workplace, make them feel just as innocuous during the day when it's brightly lit, and then turn around and make them look very foreboding and eerie at night, with the deeply black shadows that they use. Irena may view the dark as friendly but during the scenes in her apartment when it's very dimly-lit, like when she's in her bedroom or when she's clawing at the couch when Reed tells her that he loves Alice, and in the lobby where she hides in the shadows on the staircase, it looks anything but, and the same goes for the workplace at the shipping company. There are a couple of scenes where people are working there at night and the only source of light come from the lit tables that dot the floor, making them stand out amidst complete blackness. The place's main lobby is similarly lit, as you see it when Reed and Alice make their way up there after having managed to drive off Irena's panther form. The swimming pool in Alice's apartment building, which she jumps into upon realizing she's being stalked, is made creepy by the darkness, the shimmering reflections of the water on the walls, and the occasional shadow of something creeping around the edges of it, while that sidewalk leading to the bus stop where she's first stalked by Irena is lit only by the street-lamps, making her realization that she's being followed all the more frightening for her. It all helps to create the feeling of a world that's not only as melancholic as its inhabitants but also a place where it's possible for unseen danger to be lurking around every corner.
The cinematography adds to another aspect of this movie that's very important: its atmosphere. The lighting and the camera angles are only part of it, as there's also the use of sound and environmental effects. Before things start to become sinister, you have downpours of rain outside during the moment when Irena and Reed visit the pet store and the snow that gives their wedding night a magical feeling, only for that to give way to the terror that hangs over Irena when she sleeps on the other side of the apartment from him and hears the sound of the panther screaming in the nearby zoo, as if to remind her that the curse she fears is still there. When Irena stalks Alice for the first time as she walks home, her dimly-lit surroundings are made more unsettling for her when she hears the unmistakable sound of echoing footsteps behind her, leading to an effective early jump-scare when a bus suddenly pulls up from the right, with a sound that's akin to the snarl of a panther. The scene in the swimming pool is just as frightening as it looks because of how the screeches of the panther and Alice's own screams echo throughout the place, creating a very frantic feeling to it overall. And some of the nighttime exterior sequences have a thick mist hanging over them, which is simultaneously noirish, eerie, and downbeat, especially during the finale at the zoo (just look at the third image here, with her walking in the mist underneath that street lamp, and tell me it doesn't evoke all three of those feelings).
It's interesting to note how Cat People seems to be an inverse of The Wolf Man, which was released the previous year, in every possible way. Not only is its focus on a woman becoming a monstrous cat instead of a man becoming a wolf but, also, the film is set in (at the time) contemporary New York rather than the fairy tale-like Welsh countryside in that film and, as per Val Lewton's sensibilities, you never get a brightly-lit, full-on view of the monster, the antithesis of the much featured, iconic werewolf there. In fact, its construction is akin to the original conception of The Wolf Man, which was to leave it ambiguous as to whether Larry Talbot is actually a werewolf or if it's all in his mind. Indeed, for the first half or so of this movie, you're not quite sure if Irena is just a troubled woman with dark delusions or if she really can transform into a deadly panther when aroused or angered but, as it unfolds, it becomes abundantly clear that the latter is the case. We may never see Irena transform, and some may still make arguments that it is all in her mind, in spite of what we are shown, but I don't see how any other explanation is possible. Aside from the more subtle hints, like how her hands are sometimes in a paw-like manner and the shot of her actually ripping the couch with her fingernails (they look longer and sharper in that shot), the scene with Alice walking to the bus leads into a moment where someone finds some dead sheep, with lion-like paw-prints in the mud, and we see the same prints trailing across the sidewalk else and then morphing into those of a woman's shoe, as the camera catches up to Irena walking around in a daze; the swimming pool sequence shows us the shadow of something large and inhuman coming down the stairs after we saw that Irena followed Alice down there, the sound of it screeching as it circles the pool, and Irena suddenly appearing out of the shadows, which is to say nothing of her bathrobe being found clawed up; you can clearly see the panther, albeit in very low lighting, skulking in the darkness of the workroom as Reed and Alice back into a corner, and afterward, they say they smell Irena's perfume; and finally, after Dr. Judd kisses Irena, her eyes give off an unearthly shine as she approaches, Judd is clearly horrified by what he sees, and after a struggle that's show mainly through shadow and the sounds of snarling and growling, we even see a panther jump on him after he falls to the floor. Plus, he stabbed it with his cane's blade and Irena appears with a broken blade sticking out of her shoulder. I don't know how much more proof is necessary. However, I must add that the scenes that most definitely point to Irena's being one of the Cat People were forced on Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur by production supervisor Lou L. Ostrow, who tried to get Tourneur removed because of how dissatisfied he was with their approach. They still tried to have their cake and eat it too by not blatantly showing the panther but, had they had their druthers, the movie would have been even more psychological than it already is.
Although I do think it's clear that there is a monster, the way the movie keeps it in the shadows offscreen and often only hints at its presence is one of the things that makes it work. The first stalking scene with Alice begins with the unsettling bit where, just as she's leaving her workplace, she gets a phone call but when she picks it up and says, "Hello," she gets no response, and we then see that it's Irena who called. Having obviously gotten the wrong idea from hearing Alice's voice where she expected her husband to be, she heads out and that leads to the moment where she spies on Alice and Reed in the cafe. Once they come out and go their separate ways, Irena, who was hiding from them, begins following Alice at a distance, her footsteps having a distinctive reverberating sound to them when compared to Alice's. After some shots where the film cuts back and forth between the two women as they walk, and one where it shows them pass by the same street-lamp, the camera pulls Alice when she passes, as Irena's footsteps suddenly slow down, become very soft, and then, as Alice stops and turns around, suspecting that she's being followed, stop altogether. Becoming frightened, she runs down the sidewalk, stopping once to look behind her, and runs another bit of distance before stopping again. At this point, aside from the occasional echo behind her, her own footsteps are the only sound, and Irena is nowhere to be seen. That's when the bus suddenly pulls up from the right side of the screen with a snarl-like sound and Alice, just as she's getting on, turns around to see the ferns on the other side of the wall behind her rustling. I wonder if Irena, having transformed, was stalking Alice along the top of that wall and that the growl heard when the bus pulled up actually was her, right at the moment of pouncing on her, only for the rest of her roar to get drowned out by the bus and she then quickly escaped, which was the rustling Alice saw at the end there.
The pool scene is my personal favorite one in the whole film, as I think it's even more terrifying than the bus one. Just as Alice is about to hit the water, a little kitten that belongs to the woman who runs the front desk is frightened by something off-camera and arches its back up before running away. Alice doesn't think much of it and turns the lights off, only to glance out the door where it was looking and hear a growl, followed by a large shadow on the wall made by something that's obviously descending the stairs. Terrified, Alice backs away, throws off her bathrobe, and runs and jumps into the pool in the next room. She wades into the center of the pool and floats there, hearing whatever it is growling and breathing as it enters and sees its shadow trailing across the walls and the ceiling. She frantically looks around the room, as she continues to hear it growling and see its shadow, and when it roars, she panics and lets out a frightened scream that echoes throughout the place before calling for help. Two women upstairs hear her and rush down to see what's going on, as Alice continues screaming, when Irena appears and turns on the light. That's when the two other women show up and Alice, telling them that Irena's sudden appearance simply scared her, asks them to stay behind as she gets out of the pool. There's a moment where she swims for the ladder, only to back away when Irena walks over to it and doesn't come near it until she leaves. Climbing out of the pool, she asks the woman named "Blondie" to fetch her robe, which is when she sees that it's been clawed.
The scene in the workplace with Reed and Alice starts off in a similar fashion to the first stalking sequence: as they're working, Alice gets a phone call and, when she answers, no one says anything. Hanging up, Alice then remembers that it happened before, that she could tell someone was on the other end, and that it happened the night she was followed. She then tells Reed that she believes it was Irena and that she may have called from downstairs and is on her way up. The two of them prepare to leave, turning out the lights and intending to use the light from the open door to make their way to the hall... only to then see that, in the short time they looked away from the door, as they were putting on their coats and hats, the door is now closed. They rush to it and Reed tries to open it, only to find it locked. A snarl cuts through the air and they see a panther roaming in the darkness, implying that Irena slipped through the door, locked it, and sneaked into the shadows to transform, all without them seeing or hearing her. The two of them back up into the only lit corner in the room, and as the panther approaches, Reed tries to talk to Irena, demanding that she leave them alone. He grabs one of the T-squares hanging on the wall, brandishing it as a weapon, and tells her, "In the name of God, leave us in peace." With that, the panther disappears with one last snarl and the room becomes as quiet as it was before. Feeling that it's safe, the two of them get out of the room and into the hallway outside. They initially go for an open elevator door nearby but decide instead to go down the stairs, which may have been the best idea, as the following ominous shot of it closing shut hints that something may have been waiting for them in there. When they reach the lobby, they see the circular front door spinning, indicating that something just walked through it, and the two of them then catch a whiff of Irena's perfume before rushing out to the street.
Following that, Alice calls Dr. Judd from a bar as he waits for Irena at her and Reed's apartment and warns him of how dangerous she is. Just then, Irena walks into the room and Judd hangs up the phone, prompting Alice and Reed to rush to the brownstone. There, Judd tells Alice, "You're late, aren't you? I kept my appointment. You see, I never believed your story. I'm not afraid of you. I take you in my arms. So little. So soft. So warm. Perfume in your hair, your body. Don't be afraid of me, Irena." He then gives her a very deep kiss and, as he pulls, Irena has a strange expression on her face and, as she moves towards him, her face pulling off-camera, the light around her darkens and her eyes give off an unearthly shine. Judd then backs away and whips out the blade hidden within his walking stick, knocking over a lamp as he does. In shadow, we see him struggling with and stabbing at the large form of a panther, as loud growls and snarls are heard. He gets thrown to the ground a couple of times and is shoved back, as Alice and Reed arrive at the building. You then get a quick glimpse of the panther jumping on Judd as he's on the floor, as Alice and Reed enter the building and hear him yell upstairs. They race up there and Irena, who comes down the stairs, holding her shoulder, is forced to hide from them in the shadows. They join a group of onlookers outside the door, while Irena slinks out of the building and heads to commit suicide through the panther at the zoo.
Although the sole example of the titular monsters is kept in the shadows through the majority of the film, cats are prevalent throughout the movie, both in literal and symbolic form, and act as both signs of evil and, in the case of the kittens that recoil away from a threat, warnings of its presence. A major focus of these thematic elements is the black panther in the Central Park Zoo, as the movie opens with Irena doing a sketch of him and she often returns to see him, as she says she finds him beautiful, despite his ferocious nature. Given what she believes, she may see something of herself in him and, as Dr. Judd points out, she seems tempted to let him out of his cage when the zookeeper keeps leaving the key in the lock. However, he's definitely a symbol of evil, as he appears to remind Irena of the deadly, animalistic side of herself, a feeling that's compounded by the zookeeper's reciting a biblical passage pertaining to him and, what's more, when her pet canary dies, she feels a powerful compulsion to take his body to the zoo and throw it to the panther. Moreover, when we finally see one of the discarded sketches that she was working on when she first meets Oliver Reed, it's revealed to be the panther with a blade through him, akin to the statue in her apartment of King John holding up an impaled cat on his sword, which itself is meant to represent evil, i.e. the Cat People of Irena's village, and it's his cries at night that appear to remind her of the curse that's hanging over her, marriage or not. Following the scene where Irena stalks Alice, she has a nightmare when she's back in her apartment and we see a literal representation of what she said to Judd under hypnosis, about the cats tormenting her at night, in the form of animated cats appearing to walk through her mind, followed by an image of Judd dressed as King John and the key to the panther's cage. This, combined with what he told her about there being a need for some people to let evil loose upon the world, prompts Irena to take the key the next day. Exactly what she may have intended to use it for at that moment is up to debate but, at the end of the movie, she does indeed use the panther as an instrument of death, as Judd said, and lets him fatally injure her by releasing him, after which he himself runs into the street and is run over by a car.
If it turned out that Irena really wasn't one of the Cat People and just imagined it, it wouldn't be hard to see how such a delusion came about, as she surrounds herself with constant reminders of the old legend in her apartment, from the aforementioned statue of King John to a big drawing of a snarling panther, which is seen in a good number of shots, including behind the opening credits, and a picture above the fireplace of two cats watching whoever is in the room. As if that wasn't enough, during her post-wedding dinner, she has that brief but unsettling encounter with the Serbian woman, whom is very cat-like in appearance and serves to fuel her fear of what she herself might actually be. (Doesn't that woman really kind of look like Catwoman, with that black dress and that bow looking like ears in some shots? All she's missing is the mask.) But, as the film unfolds and Irena starts to become jealous of her husband's friendship with Alice, there are moments that allude to her actually being one of them, like a shot in the museum where she's clearly agitated at the two of them having removed her from their conversation and you see her standing behind a statue of Anubis, whose head may be that of a dog but it's shot and positioned in a way where, if you didn't know that, you might think that it was a cat, as well as her clawing the couch. Speaking of which, I mentioned before that there are moments where Irena's hands are positioned in a manner that makes them look like paws with their claws drawn, including in her final moments as she dies at the end, and one scene that uses this to great effect is when Irena accidentally kills her canary. It seems innocent enough at first, as she whistles at him and then tries to get him out of his cage, but when you look at her hand as she reaches towards the cage's door, it has that creeping, cat-like look to it, and you don't see what's actually going on inside the cage when she's grabbing at the bird; you just see a close-up of her smiling face. In fact, you don't even know quite how the bird died: if he slammed into the cage too hard, if he died of fright, as Irena later claims, or if she, in a moment where she lost control of herself, did something to him with her hand. Given how she felt compelled to feed his dead body to the panther, it's possible that she has these moments where her animal instincts kick in, even when she's not in full-blown panther mode.
There's definitely some occasional religious points in the story as well, particularly in how the Cat People came about because of how the Serbs in the village turned from Christianity to Satanism and King John had no choice but kill them all because they were so wicked, although some escaped. The cat impaled on his sword on the small statue of him creates a vague, cross-like shape, as it's a vertical line passing through a horizontal, and when the Serbian woman speaks to Irena, she crosses herself out of fear. The most blatant image of a cross is seen in shadow when Reed grabs one of the T-squares on the wall. While I personally feel that he was simply grabbing whatever weapon he could and said, "In the name of God," simply to add emphasis to his plea to Irena to leave them alone, you could also look at it as him remembering the Cat People's satanic origins and deliberately using the symbol to ward Irena off, especially since he does call the snarling animal lurking in the darkness by her name. In addition, while it's not silver as in werewolf or vampire movies, there is something significant in the idea of a long blade being used to kill a monster of purportedly satanic origins. And the movie begins and ends with quotations about sin, albeit with the first one coming from a psychological point of view (possibly by Freud), but still.
All the praise aside, I can't say that I feel Cat People is 100% perfect, even though one of the only criticisms I have with it is that it's unavoidably dated. Granted, every movie ever made becomes dated in one way or another but with this film, I've always felt that the conservative period in which it was made hinders its exploration of some subversive material, such as the sexual angle. Some may feel that makes it more effective, as it becomes subtext instead of being right in your face, as is the case with the 80's remake, and I do agree with that to some extent, such as when Irena tells Reed after their marriage that she wants to be Mrs. Reed "really. I want to be everything that name means to me," and how her slumping down against the door when they sleep in separate rooms that night suggests that she does want him desperately (plus, we don't need to be told exactly why they have to sleep on opposite sides of the apartment, or what Irena comes to suspect her husband of later in the film, as we can easily figure it out). But, when they're talking about it frankly, such as during her sessions with Dr. Judd and his unprofessional interest in her, it feels kind of constrained by the attitudes of the time. Obviously, we understand that there's more to what causes Irena's transformation than simply the mere act of a man kissing her but that's all they can say about it and it feels archaic, especially by today's standards. What's more, some have seen Irena's inability to be with men as being linked to repressed lesbianism on her part, particularly in the scene with the Serbian woman and her referring to her as "sister." If that's what that scene was going for, it completely went over my balding head, as it was subdued it never even crossed my mind (it definitely gives a whole new dimension to both the backstory and Irena crossing herself when put into that context). It may not be right to criticize a movie for the time in which it was made, and as I've said, the film does get a lot of things right, but I can't help but wonder how more effective it would have been had it been made in the Pre-Code era.
Val Lewton's most constant collaborator during his career was composer Roy Webb, who scored a good number of movies for RKO (as well as nearly 300 movies altogether) and, except for Isle of the Dead, did the music for all of the horror films Lewton produced at the studio. Another thing these movies have in common is that nearly all of them begin with a foreboding variation of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony when the RKO radio tower logo comes up, before transitioning into the film's main title (I'm not sure if Webb himself arranged that); in the case of Cat People, it's a monstrous and threatening piece that actually turns out to be the first variation of what becomes Irena's leitmotif. It's a melody that you hear her humming when she and Oliver Reed are in her apartment after they first meet and you later hear the actual piece of a music it's from, called "Do, Baby, Do," being played on a record, as Reed, Alice, and Judd wait for her in the apartment. You hear this melody, along with the first few bars of the opening theme, in many different versions through the film, always hinting at either Irena's mood or merely suggesting her presence. The opening theme itself transitions from monstrous and frightening to sounding more sad and tragic, before ending on a warm, loving last bit, all of which can be used to describe Irena's character. It's definitely the most memorable aspect of the score, as the rest of it, while good music, fits the scenes it's put to without being too catchy, at least to me. Plus, the more tense scenes are often done in complete silence, making them more effective than if they'd had constant music over them. Although, I do have to bring up this little song the zookeeper sings, "Nothing Else To Do," as it is quite catchy and Irena finds herself humming it at one point (it's from a score that Bernard Herrmann had done for a previous RKO film).
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