I wasn't prepared for how sad this film would be.

The world still ignores women's pain until they fear it. We still aren't believed, even when we want to talk about it, to our loved ones, to our doctors. It's hysteria. We're too sensitive. It makes us angry, and righteously so, but we learn to denounce that rage and cage it up, keep it confined to the shadows.

Irena just wants to belong. She wants to have a normal, happy life, but she struggles with something inside of her that she can't control. Cat People lives in a space of psychosexual terror, where the fantastical is explicitly stated and everyday despair is only a suggestion, but it's the tiptoeing whispers…

Spoilers ahead.

Cat People is a quietly devastating look at one woman's life, and the impact social pressures and expectations have on her ability to live freely, told through the vehicle of horror. Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) is deeply alone, telling Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) on the very day they meet that he's her "first real friend." (Her word choice is terribly touching, suggesting a hopeful optimism that "only friend" would not have conveyed.) It's hard to tell if Irena truly feels lonely (later, she says that she "loves silence and loneliness"), or if she simply plays the role of a lonely woman because it's what society has taught her is expected from a girl who is single and lives…

TW: mentions of sexual assault and suicide

Cat People, on this rewatch, really felt like a completely different movie to me. I noticed a lot about it I didn't on that first go. I was reminded of Frankenstein because while the monster at first appears to be the non-human creature (the Cat Person) in reality the monster is societal pressure around sex and Oliver. Dr. Louis Judd is the second monster of the piece representing how male doctors gaslight their female patients. Both the sexual pressure and gaslighting elements of the story harken back to two of the oldest anti-feminist pieces of rhetoric: women should be sexually available but if they are either too available or not available enough then…