Double Feature: “Cat People” (1942) and “Repulsion” (1965)

I have long believed that women are at the heart of the horror genre. Whether that is because women are perceived as frail and innocent, and therefore more dreadful to murder, or because horror is so ingrained into their day-to-day lives due to oppression, it seems to be the case that horror so often tells women’s stories.

The two movies I have picked for today’s double-feature both focus on a similar subject, approached very differently. Both are horror movies based on the inability of their main characters to have sex with men.

In Cat People, fashion illustrator Irena Dubrovna falls in love with an engineer, Oliver, while sketching a panther at a zoo. The two hastily marry, only for Irena to reveal that she can never be intimate with Oliver to any degree; Her family line from Serbia has been cursed by evil so that any time a woman should become aroused she should turn into a blood-thirsty panther. At first Oliver is quite patient with her, though staunchly believes the curse to be a hoax. However, after a while he gets bored of waiting and falls for his secretary at the firm. Irena becomes angry, passionate... but does she really turn into a big cat or is it all in her head? I’ll leave it up to you to find out. I’ll have to give this much away though; she does end up violently attacking Oliver and his mistress, and in the tragic ending, she dies.

In Repulsion, an unusual girl named Carol (played by the indomitable Catherine Deneuve) struggles daily with her dislike and distrust of men. She loathes her sister’s fiancée particularly. When her sister and her fiancée decide to take a trip and leave Carol alone in the apartment, Carol’s catatonic state grows to a fever pitch of psychosis as she battles nightmares about intruding rapists. In the end, Carol kills two men and is finally found under her bed, utterly unresponsive, by her sister’s fiancée. The last shot shows a family photo in which Carol is the only family member not looking at the camera; Her gaze is directed at an older man, presumably her father.

The movies are similar, but very different. In Cat People, a woman with a healthy sexual appetite cannot become aroused lest she murder her mate. The horror arises from the idea that a woman’s overt and animalistic sexual desires are innately evil and should be feared, and her passions tamed. In Repulsion, the horror is the uncontrollable and animalistic passions of men. The horror of rape takes over a woman’s mind until she only operates so as to avoid it, and as such renders herself more vulnerable to their attacks. Although Carol builds herself a barricade, cloisters herself like the happy nuns outside her window, the attacks of men still find their way in through the cracks in her wall.

Both women end up attacking and killing the men that wrong them. Neither murderess emerges unscathed either, one dying and the other completely detaching from reality. The attacks they commit aren’t victories, they’re tragedies. Both movies, one more intentionally than the other, shed light on the ways in which women are intrinsically linked to horror, whether it be the horrors they feel or the horrors they are perceived to contain.