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Cat People (dir. Jacques Tourneur), the 1942 classic of the horror genre, is a film about the Balkan monstrous as manifested through the dangerous and uncontrollable sexuality of the cat woman Irena. Simone Simon portrays Irena, a Serbian immigrant to the United States who has inherited a curse of a distinctly Balkan variety (or at least Hollywood's version thereof) that causes her to turn into a predatory and blood-thirsty cat when she becomes sexually aroused. In the tradition of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Irena embodies a monstrous threat attributed to Balkan peoples in the west, a threat of ominous irrational passions and dangerous sexuality waiting to be unleashed on the civilized world.
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