If you've looked into the history of this movie, you will know that Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur tried very hard to resist the studio's insistence that they show a "monster," (i.e., a black panther at large) to provide a more mainstream audience-friendly explanation for what the main character is going through.
However, they were able to minimize the overt "monster of the week" approach, and the movie reveals a woman whose problem isn't the folk tale on the surface but instead a struggle with her lack of physical attraction to a man. Thus, the true monster in this movie is the suffocating social norms of the 20th century and how it devours those whose identity clashes with them. If there is any doubt of this, one only need wait until the restaurant scene where Irina meets another "of her kind," who calls her "sister."
Lewton and Tourneur not only created one of early Hollywood's most atmospheric horror films (but not the horror audiences believed) but slipped one of the most subversive past the moral busybodies of that era.
However, they were able to minimize the overt "monster of the week" approach, and the movie reveals a woman whose problem isn't the folk tale on the surface but instead a struggle with her lack of physical attraction to a man. Thus, the true monster in this movie is the suffocating social norms of the 20th century and how it devours those whose identity clashes with them. If there is any doubt of this, one only need wait until the restaurant scene where Irina meets another "of her kind," who calls her "sister."
Lewton and Tourneur not only created one of early Hollywood's most atmospheric horror films (but not the horror audiences believed) but slipped one of the most subversive past the moral busybodies of that era.