Irena Dubrovna, a New York City-based fashion designer who hails from Serbia, begins a romance with marine engineer Oliver Reed. After they get married, Oliver starts to fear that Irena will turn into the cat person of her homeland's fables if they are intimate together.
More a film about unreasoning fear than the supernatural, this work demonstrates what a filmmaker can accomplish when he substitutes taste and intelligence for special effects.
[Cat People's] masterstroke lies in a constant awareness of its audience, using their expectations of its B-movie horror title to draw out the film's tension.
Cat People wasn't frightening like a slasher movie, using shocks and gore, but frightening in an eerie, mysterious way that was hard to define; the screen harbored unseen threats.
While Cat People isn't among the scariest films ever made, there are a trio of truly suspenseful scenes which, quite ingeniously, leave just enough up to the audience's imagination to dial up the tension.
First in the wondrous series of B movies in which Val Lewton elaborated his principle of horrors imagined rather than seen, with a superbly judged performance from Simon.
New York Times
March 25, 2006
Ladies who have such temptations -- in straight horror pictures, at least -- should exercise their digits a bit more freely than does Simone Simon in this film.
Times (UK)
October 03, 2016
I do like a film that opens with a mission statement, and... Cat People starts thus: "Even as fog continues to lie in the valleys, so does ancient sin cling to the low places, the depressions in the world consciousness."
