Cat People

Irena is a beautiful young woman who is terribly lonely and has a dreadful secret. She longs for companionship but she knows that she will only bring destruction upon those she loves most, so she does her best to keep her distance. She is successful in her isolation until she meets Ollie, whom she falls madly in love with and marries. However, her dark and unnatural biology drives a wedge between them and nullifies their marriage since a loving embrace from Ollie will initiate Irena’s transformation into a panther that will kill Ollie. However, Ollie is a man in need of love, and he finds that with his co-worker Alice. Unfortunately for Ollie and Alice, jealousy is another trigger for Irena’s frightening transformation.
According to Noël Carroll, Irena is both a fission and metonymy monster. It may be difficult for someone to view Irena as a true monster according to Carroll’s specifications, because a monster must be not only frightening but also disgusting. While there is no argument that a fearsome man-killing big cat is frightening, it could be argued that these animals are in no way disgusting. However, what I feel is disgusting, impure, or simply biologically impossible according to modern science about Irena is the fact that she is able to transfer from one biological category to another, from human to feline. This interstitial ability of Irena’s is what makes her disgusting to audiences, and is one part of two that makes her a true monster that generates art horror emotions. Irena is a fission monster much like a werewolf because of her interstitial ability. She can go from a sweet innocent fashion designer to a destructive animal with the right set of circumstances. According to Carroll, “the animal and human inhabit the same body; however they do so at different times.” We do not see the human Irena walking around with a cat tail and pointy ears because her transformation from one category to the next is a complete one. Irena is also a metonymy monster because Irena the human does not invoke disgust or horror, but her surroundings do. The first clues to her being a monster were the decorations in her apartment. They were images of powerful and fierce cats, and one picture in particular was one of a cat eyeing a bird maliciously. The most prominent display in her apartment, though, was the statue of King John spearing the very animal that her apartment’s décor was paying homage to. Ollie was disturbed by this imagery but Irena tried to explain it away as very normal for people from her homeland to have displays of. She explained to him that was King John who helped bring Christianity back to her land and to get rid of the cat people. This revelation falsely comforted Ollie because by the looks of the apartment she was a strange worshipper of cats herself! It is here that we are sympathizing with Irena because we know that she longs to be normal; she does not want to hold herself back from other people, but we also get the sense that it is simply her fate to be one of the cat people. Another form of metonymy is the fact that normal household pets are frightened to bits when Irena enters their vicinity. It is mainly cats that hiss and recoil in her presence, but other animals are intimidated by her also. These reactions from animals that we believe to be more in touch with the supernatural and possibly the sublime show a serious sense of foreboding that surrounds Irena.
The producer of Cat People, Val Lewton, felt that not showing the monster would create a more effective horror movie. Today’s horror films aim to instinctively shock, disgust, and horrify us as a knee jerk reaction very frequently. The increase in technology enables movie makers to do this very effectively without the movie looking ridiculous and invoking laughter from the audience. The technology in 1942 did not compare with today’s and Lewton did not want to create a laughable horror. His use of lighting and shadows or “mise-en-shot” effectively art horrified the audience. The movie was shot in black and white and had a very somber appearance with low lighting. I believe that this somberness helped us to anticipate the drama and horror that was entering into the protagonists’ lives manifested in the “cat people” horror that Irena has brought to America from Serbia. Irena is also associated with darkness as she claims to like the dark, and whenever the cat Irena appears it is usually a dark shadow or a flash of a black panther. The “mise-en-scene” aspect of the film showed some deep focus photography which allowed the audience to recognize the foreboding aspects of the surroundings. Whenever the monster Irena would appear we only knew it by the response of the other characters which did not make the fact that Irena was a crazed cat less believable; we were able to be horrified by the thought of Irena as a woman who transforms to a cat.