Cat People is one of the creepiest horror films ever made. It was the first one made by producer Val Lewton, whose studio cranked out low-budget movies that varied in quality, but during the 1940s he embarked on a successful run of effective shockers like this one and I Walked with a Zombie. Director Jacques Tourneur would later take his skill to another B-movie genre, the nascent film noir cycle, producing one of the best, Out of the Past. Watching this film, it is evident that he was honing his skills, creating claustrophobic scenes from a minimum of sets and a practically nonexistant budget. The chiaroscuro lighting pattern that would characterize the entire film noir canon was perhaps never better used than here, and it's no shock to learn that Tourneur took cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca with him when he made the switch to film noir. This film is an efficient, economical study in how to frighten viewers by not showing them what they're afraid to see.

Sexy French ingeneue Simone Simon plays Irena, a Serbian dress designer who is fascinated by the black panthers at the local zoo. Drawn to them by childhood stories of "cat people," women who turn into panthers and kill men, she has long been frightened that she might be one of the witches in question. We don't learn this right away, of course. We first see her through the eyes of Oliver Reed (Kent Smith), an all-American guy who works as a shipbuilder who quickly falls in love with her. True to 1940s Hollywood fashion, he's in love with her by the second date, and they are married on the third.

She's an odd one, though. He learns about her connection to black panthers, and at first it doesn't seem to bother him that she won't consummate their marriage, instead hiding her affection from him and begging that he understand her fear. Soon, though, it gets to be too much for him, and he ships her off to sleazy psychiatrist Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway), who thinks it's all in her head; he seems to want to cure her partly to ease her suffering but partly because he's a lecherous jerk. Unfortunately, it seems that his hypnosis of her, coupled with Oliver's increasing tendency to seek consolation from his best friend Alice (Jane Randolph), has brought out Irena's latent cat-dom. After Alice confesses her love to Oliver and Oliver begins to second-guess his devotion to his wife, a series of creepy incidents occurs in which it appears that the cat form of Irena is attempting to murder Alice.

The film is a textbook example of how to make a low-budget horror film. Not a single word in the screenplay is wasted, and not a second of screen time: the film clocks in at a slim 73 minutes. It is 73 minutes of tension, starting out seemingly harmless and building toward the inexorable finale. Tourneur was a master of suspense (witness his film noir masterpiece Out of the Past), and he uses the minimalist sets and high-contrast lighting to perfection. Wonderful, too, is the fact that, probably for budgetary reasons, they couldn't explicitly show Irena turning into a cat (the results would probably have been terrible, and would have ruined the ambience of the film). Instead, the filmmakers use shots that implicitly connect Irena to the cats: a cut from a closeup of her to a closeup of a black cat; sudden light reveals a cat-shaped shadow to be Irena standing in a corner; and the best one, where huge pawprints in the mud, leading away from a slaughtered sheep, gradually turn into a woman's shoe print, as the camera catches up to Irena walking under a streetlight. The best scenes by far are an inspired stalking scene in which Alice runs between inviting pools of streetlight in an effort to escape some unseen follower, and a scene in the swimming pool in Alice's basement in which the glowing light from the pool cannot quite penetrate the opressive shadows surrounding it, each of them seeming to conceal a human or animal shape. This scene was quoted for the finale of David Cronenberg's psychosexual horror film Shivers, and he managed to preserve both the physical fear and sexual tension of the original.

There's a lot going on in the film, but it seems to be about America's schizophrenic attitude toward women's sexuality. A lot is made of Irena and Alice's connection to cats, and Irena's basic fear, that she will turn into a panther and murder her mate if sexually aroused, is the typical male fear of women's destructive sexuality, especially coming as this movie did during World War II, when women were leaving the home in droves to work. The schizophrenia comes in the film's presentation of Irena's unwillingness to fulfill her wifely duties and sleep with her husband. He pretends understanding at first, but his patience soon runs out and he falls into the welcoming arms of his close female friend Alice. Not that they do anything, but listen to the dialog between Oliver and Irena after he returns from "coffee" with Alice. He comes into the apartment and tries to put his arms around her, and she says, "Don't touch me." He becomes defensive and says "What happened tonight happens in every family. I was all on edge. You've got to understand and you've got to forgive me." He's talking about barging out after an argument, but he might as well be defending himself for cheating on her.