Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton’s Cat People is a film rich in mythological reverberations (from biblical allusions to sin, and made-up Slavic folk tales, to the imaginary of the metamorphosis in Greco-Roman antiquity). This hybrid mythical pattern is displayed in the movie through textual-narrative devices and iconography. Among the latter, it must be noticed the centrality (in terms of its implicit symbolism) attached to a giant statue of the Egyptian god Anubis in a scene near the climax of the movie. At this point, Irena decides to leave, in a fit of jealousy, the museum she has been visiting in the company of her husband and one of his coworkers, Alice Moore (Jane Randolph), whom Irena is starting to see as a threat to her marriage. As she is climbing down the stairs to the museum’s foyer, Irena stops and stands pensively for a moment; at the forefront of the frame, the upper section of the statute of Anubis is shown, with Irena standing still right behind it. The image helps to draw parallels between the fate of the cursed (cat) woman, who in the film struggles to repress her death drive, and the jackal-headed Egyptian deity, patron of the lost souls and guide to the afterlife.

Author: Samuel Fernández-Pichel