31 Days of Horror: Scream & Shout! Day 4

Cat People (1982)

What's It About?

Catman sister-fucking.

Is It Any Good?

Cat People is one of the many '80s movies which sought to reboot a classic movie monster (ala The Thing, The Blob, and The Fly) into a more provocative and adult concept for the time. It takes the basic premise of the 1942 film, about a woman who fears she'll turn into a cat person if she becomes intimate with her new husband and gives it a new sleazy coat of paint.

Cat People is a sexual thriller type horror movie and it burst onto the scene a year before The Hunger and an entire decade before Basic Instinct. It follows the story of Irena (Nastassja Kinski), a young orphan who has come to live with her long-lost brother Paul (Malcolm McDowell) in New Orleans.

The day after Irena arrives, Paul goes missing and a black leopard turns up in a seedy apartment building. The cat is captured by a trio of zoo keepers (John Heard, Annette O'toole, and Ed Begley Jr.) and taken to the zoo. Irena is drawn to the panther and soon gets a job at the gift shop while the head curator Oliver (the aforementioned John Heard) puts the moves on her. The leopard kills a zookeeper and disappears. Soon after, Paul turns up and makes some aggressively sexual moves on his sister.

You see, it turns out that Paul and Irena are part of a race of cat people born of a tribe sacrificing themselves to leopards for... some reason. There is no measurable benefit to doing this that I can discern. Well part and parcel with this pact is that catfolk can only bone other catfolk, specifically their own siblings. What happens if they have sex with someone else? Why they turn into a leopard and stay stuck in that state until they kill someone. This is a real problem for Irena as she loves Oliver and is understandably skeeved out by Paul who acts like a Malcolm McDowell character.

This movie is bananas and in the best way. It's shot very well and the actors are great (giver or take a weird line delivery here and there from John Heard), this all lends the film an air of prestige when in reality it's just weird smut. But it's interesting weird smut made with the care of a Swiss watchmaker. The nudity nearly redefines gratuitous (Annette O'Toole's nude scene is particularly egregious because there's literally no logistical reason she needs to be topless in the scene in which she appears that way) but it feels weirdly innocent since all the women who disrobe are clearly untouched by any sort of surgery. There is one amusing bit of misdirection when the camera pans over the legs and shapely behind of what we assume is Nastassja Kinski only to pull out and reveal we're staring at Malcolm McDowell's weirdly hairless body.

The grim finale of the movie involves Irena asking John Heard to make love with her one last time so she can be with her kind and then he ties her hands and feet to the bed posts and begins having sex with her with a look of grim determination of a boy taking his dog out behind the wood shed to shoot it. After this he walks out and feeds Irena, forever trapped in cat form, some meat scraps and scratches her behind the years and smiles dreamily as if to say, "I fucked a panther, mental high five." I don't know if this movie passes the Bechdel test but I assure you it doesn't matter because it's flunking in several other categories.

I'm being a little hard on this movie, it mostly plays fairly straight and the absurdity of the film doesn't really dawn on you until after you've finished watching. It's a movie that takes itself seriously and that mostly works for it until the third act when the insanity sort of bubbles over. Still if you enjoy weird over-stylized sexy horror films like The Hunger and Dust Devil then this is probably for you.