Impaled Cats
The imagery of cats being impaled on a sword begins with a display on a discarded sketch by Irena outside the leopard cage where she first meets Oliver. When she brings Oliver back to her apartment, she has a statue of a cat impaled on a sword. Throughout the film, the imagery suggests that the only way to kill the cat people is to impale them with a sword once they have become a cat.
T-Square
Aside from the cats themselves, the single most lasting bit of imagery from the film may well be the enormous cross cast in shadow on the wall wen Oliver raises his engineering T-square high over his head with the intent to use as a weapon against the Irena in her cat form. Instead, the shadow works through the power of Christian imagery to turn the pagan devil cat away.
The Bus
The arrival of the bus is another one of the great bits of imagery that contributes to the underlying ambiguity of the entire enterprise. When Alice is terrified that a big cat may be following her on the other side of the wall separating the sidewalk on which her high heels click incessantly toward the bus stop, she (and the audience) are almost simultaneously frightened to death and then relieved by the hissing sound produced by the brakes of a city bus which sounds amazing like the growl of a big cat.
Shadows
At no point in the film is the cat persona into which Irena transforms ever show. Ever. The only indication that the film ever makes that Irena has actually transformed into a cat are very ambiguously defined shadows on the wall that appear nearly every time the fear and dread gets ramped up.
