Wow, what a moving story!
This is so because the main character KNOWS that she has this curse, and yet no one will believe her when she tries to tell her story.
Simone Simon is excellant as the doomed heroine. You really feel for her, and her emotions (from shyness, to happiness at trying to live a normal life, to despair and sadness when she knows it is impossible) are powerful and poignant.
I always remember the line where she talks about living alone and staying away from people--you know how lonely she was, and Oliver was a bright spot, then to not be able to be a "real" wife to him & see that she is losing him--the only one she'd allowed to be close to her. It is hard to see her as a villain...
shareI want to re-post Tom Huddleston's comments from www.notcoming.com
"I think Cat People makes a lot more sense when viewed as an abuse metaphor- the horrors in Irena’s past make it impossible for her to experience love, at least physically, and she fears the monster she might become if she lets her desires take over, as those ‘in her village’ did. I don’t see it as a film about the fear of female sexuality, as most reviwers seem to, but in fact a highly sympathetic treatment of an horrific subject. It is the men who are unsympathetic here, especially the creepy, potentially abusive psychiatrist who in the guise of helping Irena in fact deepens her mental instability. But for all its sympathy, the film is deeply pragmatic, even cynical- we never feel that Irena has a chance to put the past behind her and become a ‘normal’ person, she has to die to find peace."
Twenty years ago, practically all horror film scenarios were seen as "metaphors" about Vietnam or some other war....is it now fashionable to read them as metaphors about sexual abuse?
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Yes the ending kind of made me feel about sad, too bad that she was cursed.
"You gotta be Fking kidding"-The Thing.
“Doomed”. Yes, that is the ideal word to describe her. Even as Irena is both the protagonist and antagonist to the film, we sympathize with her and for her. I saw her character as a reticent, lonely individual, who was struggling with a past she desired to escape. It is telling that the story takes place in America, where there is the conflict of the Old Country versus the New World. Fairy tales and village myths have no place in the city, which makes Irena in the figurative sense, a dying breed.
shareVery well put, VoirreysVoice! This is really a story about alienation, a stranger in a strange land, a woman who cannot come to terms with her heritage or consummate her marriage. So much is missing from horror films today, which rely on tired plots about escaped mental patients chasing promiscious teens with axes or somesuch nonsense.
shareIt seems to me that a lot of the 30's and 40's horror movies were basically tragedies. The original WOLFMAN certainly was. And the Frankenstein monster was actually a tragic figure. Even THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON was tragic.
Life, every now and then, behaves as though it had seen too many bad movies
Very true. Before those, "Phantom of the Opera" certainly featured a tragic (and sympathetic) character.
shareI entirely agree. I love horror films, but I don't like this one because it's scary in the typical horror movie sense - I love it because it moves me. Simone Simon gives an outstanding performance as Irena, and really makes you feel for her. It's a complex, emotionally charged story, and in all fairness it's probably more concerned with that than with actually delivering the scares, which I have no problem with. Like the OP said, it's powerful and poignant. The sequel is equally so (though the horror elements in that one are even less).
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