Directed by Jacques Tourneur from a script by DeWitt Bodeen in 1942 for producer Val Lewton, Cat People opens with a scene in which a man named Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) meets a strange but beautiful woman at the exotic cat exhibit at the city zoo. This woman, a Serbian immigrant named Irena Dubrovna Reed (Simone Simon), has recently moved to New York City to work as a fashion artist. She invites Oliver back to her apartment where he takes interest in a statue. She tells him its history and in doing so, relays to him an old Serbian folk story about how her ancestors were, years back, involved in witchcraft.

Regardless of Irena's quirky, sometimes unusual, behavior she and Oliver are soon married. This doesn't stop her from often visiting the large cats at the park zoo or finding comfort in their roars as she hears from them the apartment late at night. Intimacy is a problem for them, however, and soon enough Oliver's beautiful new bride tells him that she's worried some of her ancestors' ancient evil could very well live inside of her. Oliver pays no attention to her old world superstitions and figures she's just nervous. He has a doctor named Louis Judd (Tom Conway) talk to her, but it doesn't seem to do too much good. As time continues to pass, Oliver starts to fall out of love with Irena, things just aren't going the way that he had hoped they would with her. When his beautiful co-worker, Alice Moore (Jane Randolph), confesses her love to him, he's interested… but what to do about Irena? Soon enough, Oliver and Alice are both experiencing some strange encounters in the dark, and hearing cat noises at unusual times…

Despite running a fairly short seventy-two minutes in length, Cat People might not necessarily appeal to those looking for cheap thrills. Rather, this is a superb exercise in the slow burn style of filmmaking, creating suspense not with jump scares or loud musical stings but with deliberate reveals and rich atmosphere. The more we get to know Irena the more unusual her behavior becomes and while it's hardly a shock to find out that she may in fact be more than she would seem on the surface, we still feel for her. She cares for Oliver, even if she knows she can't love him the way that he wants her to. This is demonstrated in the scene where, when she is confiding to Judd, about their intimacy issues. He encourages her to kiss him, not just for her benefit but obviously for his own (he's clearly attracted to her). She tells him she doesn't want to, but we know from the look she gives him that even if she did, she couldn't. This curse upon her prevents her from doing so. It's in scenes like this, quieter and more subtle moments, that the gorgeous Simone Simon is at her best. She's able to convey a believable sadness with her facial expressions and eye movements far more effectively than any dialogue that could have been written for her.

The rest of the cast are fine. Kent Smith is dashing and charming and Jane Randolph quite good as the woman who just can't get over him. Tom Conway steals a few scenes as the psychiatrist looking into Irena's case. Really though, it's Simone Simon who leaves the lasting impression by the time that this picture is over.

Aside from an unusually trippy sequence involving some animated effects, most of the film's horror elements come from what we don't see more so than what is actually shown to us. The best example is the scene where Alice goes for a late night swim at the pool in her gym. Here she starts off by enjoying herself but soon begins to scream for her life as the lights go black and we hear the eerie howls of a cat. All we see is blackness, which is exactly what Alice would see, and it's perfect. The cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca frames all of this with some fantastic use of light and shadow. Roy Webb's score accentuates the drama, the romance and the horror perfectly.

Cat People arrives on Blu-ray in an AVC encoded transfer framed at 1.33.1 fullframe on a 50GB disc from a new 2k master taken from "a 35mm safety fine-grain master" and it looks excellent. The black and white image shows frequently very impressive detail throughout the duration of the film. Grain is present but there isn't really any obvious print damage, the picture is incredibly clean and very film like. There's good depth to the image, even in some of the darker interior scenes and night time scenes, and the image demonstrates good shadow detail throughout (you'll notice this during the night sequences that take place at the zoo, for example). Contrast is perfect, so we get nice, bright whites alongside rich, deep blacks and a pretty full grey scale covering everything in between. Compression artifacts are never a problem and the picture is free of any obvious noise reduction or edge enhancement. Fans of this film should be very pleased indeed with how good it looks on this release.