Cat People (1942)

Why do these screams matter?

Described by famed movie critic Roger Ebert as possessing “an undertone of sexual danger that was more ominous because it was never acted upon,” Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942) leans into a more covert coding of its heroine’s queerness than found in previous horror films like Dracula’s Daughter (1936) and Rebecca (1940). In the film, Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) struggles against a part of her identity she fears will render her an outcast. A Serbian immigrant, Irena believes she is descended from a cursed tribe in which any woman who has her passions aroused will shape-shift into a killing panther. Unable to be intimate with Oliver (Kent Smith), a New York architect she impulsively marries, for fear it will activate the curse, Irena is sent to a psychiatrist in search of a cure. Up until the very end of the film, the audience is left guessing whether Irena’s paranoia is the result of sexual repression or whether her fears may be well-founded.

A coded queer narrative about a woman who resists but ultimately gives in to her primal desires, the gender presentation of Irena throughout the film is expressly feminine in keeping with the Production Code Administration’s (PCA) edict that “grossly masculine” women suggestive of “sex perversion”- including queerness in PCA speak- were to be eschewed at all costs (Martin 180). And yet, bubbling beneath this facade of demure dresses and practical sweater sets is an acknowledgement of the dangers of repressing one’s true identity. Irena’s identity is initially framed by her gender identity and is “aligned with all those traditional associations of the woman as Other (monster, nature, animal, emotional, irrational, evil) characteristic of the patriarchal sex/gender system (Berks 34). Reflecting Robin Wood’s argument that surplus repression in horror films is “the driving force of values of what he sees as modern society’s social norms, such as heterosexuality and monogamous marriage,” the film codes Irena’s queerness in ways that intersect with other markers of Otherness, most notably her status as an immigrant (165). This duality of repression — indeed, Irena yearns to be sexually and culturally “normal”– informs the film’s first scream.

Interestingly, this scream comes not from Irena but from Alice (Jane Randolph), Irena’s rival for Oliver’s affections. Realizing that Alice is in love with Oliver and worried that Oliver might return those feelings, Irena sets off to follow Alice to the basement pool. Meanwhile, alone and vulnerable in the water, Alice fears she is being watched.

 

Most obviously, Alice’s scream is a direct acknowledgement of her vulnerability. Alone and treading water, she is for all intents and purposes immobilized. With only her voice to confront the threat she feels encroaching, Alice is a woman in peril, horror’s most well-known gendered trope. And yet, while Alice’s screams here are most certainly coming from a very real place of fear, they are also moving the threat posed by Irena from potential to actual. Up until this point, Irena’s concerns that she is cursed have been largely dismissed by both Oliver and Alice. But this scene demonstrates that Alice, at least, is coming to believe that Irena is, in fact, a shapeshifting monster and that her curse renders her a very real threat to those around her. That this threat is directed toward Alice is intentional.  As the “normal” woman in this love triangle, Alice’s relationship with Oliver is one of expressed heteronormativity. And her scream here signals the threat to not only her safety but to traditional domestic relationships.

Alice is a stark contrast to Irena, whose inability to engage in heterosexual sex marks her as an Other in the eyes of the audience. For Irena to be perceived as a monster, she must be positioned outside of acceptable societal boundaries; the film accomplishes this by coding her as a lesbian and doing so in a way designed to fuel audience terror and unease. Just the inference of queerness-and the moral depravity and corruptness it conveyed in the heteronormative culture-was enough to elicit revulsion (Noriega 23). In the early 1940s, the United States was still a country in which sexual and gender identities challenging the status quo were framed as a danger to the nation’s moral fabric. The United States was still six years away from the Kinsey Report estimating 10% of the American population to be gay (“Diversity of Sexual Orientation”), eight years away from the founding of the Mattachine Society (McHugh), one of the U.S.’s first gay rights groups, and thirteen years away from the founding of The Daughters of Bilitis, the United States’ first lesbian political organization (“The Daughters of Bilitis”).  Culturally speaking, in 1942, there were simply no mainstream voices that could counter religious-based framing of homosexuality as a perversion.

In one telling scene, Irena explains the mythology behind the curse to Oliver, which sets up the film’s queer  undertones. Irena’s story of her village being overrun by “wicked people” who did “dreadful things” echoes the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Given the specific references to religion throughout the film, this association is not accidental and helps to contextualize for the audience the perverse nature of the sexuality with which Irena struggles. In another scene, Irena and her new husband are celebrating their wedding when a woman who has been staring at her throughout the dinner approaches Irena. Not only does the mystery woman refer to Irena as “my sister” indicating an awareness that they are of the same tribe but there is a palpable fear on Irena’s face which suggests concern that her new husband will perceive a connection between her and the mystery woman.

Adding to the dynamics of this scene are the words used by party observers to describe the two women. The woman who approaches Irena is deemed outside the norm for her physicality by the two men at the table when one says, “Look at that woman. Isn’t she something?” to which his friend replies, “She looks like a cat.” This exchange is preceded by an exchange in which Irena is labeled as possibly being “odd.” On the surface, these exchanges appear innocuous but to a queer audience in the 1940s, a female being labeled “odd” would function in much the same way as a gay man being called a “sissy.” That Irena returns home after the exchange to scrub herself clean of the label is a clear indicator that Irena recognizes (and loathes) the Otherness that she sees in herself. This fear of association and discovery would certainly resonate with a gay and lesbian audience in this time period.

Alice’s scream also legitimizes Irena as the film’s monster. As she stalks the pool, Irena cuts a symbolic figure of silent menace that “cannot be accommodated in a society governed by the sunny American optimism of Oliver and Alice” (Campbell 121). While the audience might feel pity for her, Alice’s scream reiterates the threat Irena poses and moves her from a character to be pitied to one to be feared. When Alice discovers that her robe is shredded, it crystallizes the audience’s understanding that Irena’s monstrosity is explicitly violent.

This thread is continued in the next scream that comes from Dr. Judd (Tom Conway), the psychiatrist who has taken on Irena’s case at the behest of Oliver. As a medical professional, Dr. Judd serves the very specific function of ensuring that the audience reads Irena’s Otherness as a psychological defect. It is a dynamic underscored when, during a therapy session, Irena offers up a sound that I believe can be read as the animalistic equivalent of a scream. In the scene, Dr. Judd attempts to seduce Irena partly because of his sexual interest in her and partly to prove to her that her concerns are all imagined, a mistake Dr. Judd comes to regret.

 

The traditional scream heard here comes from Dr. Judd and stems from his awareness that he has severely misjudged the situation and is about to be brutally killed. But there is also a subliminal message being imparted to the audience that Irena’s Otherness, that authentic part of herself society defines as unclean, is not controllable (Grant 351). The only way to eradicate the threat is to destroy the person; something that does come to pass with Irena’s death at the film’s conclusion. But at this moment, Irena has stopped resisting her self-described impure impulses and has embraced her authentic self. The growls we hear her direct toward Dr. Judd are the animal equivalent of a scream and are meant to counter Dr. Judd’s response and to underscore to the audience that ultimately medical intervention cannot tame instinct.

These animalistic screams counter the silence typically baked into early horror depictions of queerness. Irena is only able to access this particular brand of screaming once she accepts her identity and its guttural quality suggests a metaphorical eradication of the closet’s silence. It also signals a gender performance inversion that challenges the implied femininity of the horror film scream. Often coded as feminine, horror film screams of fear are overwhelmingly performed by women. But here, that scream is executed by a professional man whose sexual interest in Irena is expressly masculine. Conversely, the growling, low-pitch scream of Irena reads as distinctly masculine for the traditional power and authority it conveys. By setting these screams against one another, the film is imbuing Irena with an agency afforded to few queer characters-let alone female queer characters- of the era and is reminding viewers that there is strength in reconciling one’s own identity in the face of oppressive norms.

Note: Excerpts of this entry first appeared in The Gay and Lesbian Review, November-December 2015.

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Works Cited:

Berks, John. “What Alice Does: Looking Otherwise at “The Cat People”.” Cinema Journal, vol. 32, no. 1, 1992, pp.26-42.

Campbell,  Donna M. “Val Lewton’s Naturalism and Historical Trauma: No Bed of Her Own, Cat People, the Seventh Victim, and I Walked with a Zombie.” Studies in American Naturalism, vol. 17, no. 2, 2022, pp. 103-125.

Cat People. Directed by Jacques Tourneur, performances by Simone Simon, Jane Randolph, and Kent Smith, RKO Pictures, 1942.

“Diversity of sexual orientation.” Kinsey Report, 2019.

Ebert, Roger. “On the Prowl.” RogerEbert.com, 12 March 2006.

Grant, Barry Keith, editor. The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. University of Texas Press, 1996.

McHugh, Jess. “‘The Beginning of a Conversation’: What It Was Like to Be an LGBTQ Activist Before Stonewall.” Time Magazine, 25 June 2019.

Martin, Olga. Hollywood’s Movie Commandments. Wilson, 1937

Noriega, Chon. “” Something’s Missing Here!”: Homosexuality and Film Reviews during the Production Code Era, 1934-1962.” Cinema Journal, vol. 30. no.1, 1990, pp. 20-41.

“The Daughters of Bilitis.” Library of Congress, n.d.

Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond. Columbia University Press, 2003.