Green Monsters in movies

Director: Jacques Tourneur

Girls just wanna have fur
An object lesson in how horror movies have always tackled subject matter which straight drama was afraid to touch, albeit in strictly allegorical terms, ‘Cat People’ is not, as it has largely been regarded, simply a bloke’s-eye view of the suspect female ‘other’. That element is present, to be sure, but this is a much more sympathetic and heartfelt picture than such a description suggests. True, it’s the story of a woman who turns into a ferocious beast when she becomes sexually aroused. But again, this description only tells one side of the story, and ‘Cat People’ is a film dedicated to exploring every angle on its subject: the male and the female, the victim and the murderer, the monster and the human being.

Taken, for example, as a metaphor for childhood abuse and its destructive psychological legacy, the film becomes a study of a corrupted woman’s terror of her own emotional potential, and her seething sexual and violent impulses: in a way, the gender-reversed mirror of Cronenberg’s ‘The Fly’, but with a far less romantic, more oppressive and doom-laden atmosphere. Taken more simply, as the tale of a woman so constricted by social propriety that she becomes a monster, it’s no less rigorous and challenging. Either way, ‘Cat People’ is, as Jacques Tourneur no doubt intended it, the ultimate Freudian stew, offering a different meaning to every viewer, but delighting all equally. – Tom Huddleston