Cat Person terrified men and thrilled female readers – has anything changed?

Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter for all the latest entertainment news and reviews Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. A Twitter account sprang up entitled “Men React to Cat Person”, as male readers declared that Robert “ultimately is the victim in this story” while Margot is “a borderline sociopath”. Prior to “Cat Person”, she’d had just one short story published in a print magazine; now her first short story collection was the subject of a multimillion-dollar bidding war. When the film’s director Susanna Fogel first read “Cat Person”, she was surprised at the inflammatory response and shocked by the level of male anger being expressed. “As a director, I thought the biggest risk in adapting ‘Cat Person’ is that it’s going to be a small movie with an internal voiceover borrowing from Kristen’s prose, and it’s just going to be a tiny indie film that four women see, and it doesn’t connect with the people that connected with the story, or even provoke them, because they don’t go see it,” Fogel admits.