Cat People was a big box office hit for RKO Pictures when it was released in 1942. The horror film, stylishly directed by Jacques Tourneur and produced by Val Lewton (the mind behind the studio’s successful run of B genre films), has been hugely influential in the decades since its release, from its dive into the psychology of a woman tortured by her past to its early use of jump scares. Cat People was so successful that Lewton and writer DeWitt Bodeen reteamed two years later for a sequel, The Curse of the Cat People. But despite the three principal actors from the first film reprising their roles for this one— Kent Smith and Jane Randolph as Oliver and Alice Reed, who end up a couple at the end of the previous movie, and Simone Simon as Irena, Oliver’s first wife who believed herself to be descended from her Serbian home’s race of cat people, and that she would turn into a panther when passionately aroused— The Curse of the Cat People veers away from creature feature thrills and into psychological ghost story territory. Look no further than the fact that Lewton wasn’t aiming to cash in on his previous masterpiece’s success: he wanted to name this film Amy and Her Friend (the studio insisted on the title change to draw a comparison to Cat People), while incorporating many personal elements from his own childhood into the story.
And The Curse of the Cat People really is about childhood, despite the marketing continuing to play up the presence of Simon’s panther woman, the posters claiming that “The Beast Woman Haunts the Night Anew!” Actually, there are no cat people or cats to be found here, and while watching Cat People first decidedly enriches the story here, this sequel works just as well as its own standalone story. Irena isn’t the lead here, rather playing a minor (if pivotal) role as a figure who appears only to Amy (Ann Carter), the six-year-old daughter of the now-married Oliver and Alice. Amy is a lonely child with no friends her age who takes refuge in fantasy worlds, her attitude’s resemblance to Irena worrisome to her father. Is Irena a real ghost or imagined, a sinister spirit or a benevolent one? The answers to those queries aren’t entirely clear, but that’s a large reason why The Curse of the Cat People is so beguiling, frankly peering into the psychology of a child, the tangential threads swirling around it— from Oliver and Alice to Julia and Barbara (Julia Dean and Elizabeth Russell), an elderly former actress who befriends Amy and her adult daughter who lives with her— subtly unpacking such topics as parental failure and jealousy.
The Curse of the Cat People was met with more production woes beyond studio interference with Lewton’s vision. The film was intended to mark the feature directorial debut of short subject filmmaker Gunther von Fritsch, but his uncertainty in helming his first movie led to the picture being brought in very late and over-budget, an abnormality in the typically efficient Lewton’s filmography. Fritsch was fired and editor Robert Wise brought in to finish the film, marking his first directing credit (Wise would later become a prolific and award-winning director, making such movies as the legendary musicals West Side Story and The Sound of Music). But the result, while initially met with tepid and disappointed reactions (the film has been positively reappraised in the decades since its release), is a gently haunting and moving portrait of childhood isolation: how lonely it can feel when you don’t fit in, and how thrilling it can be to meet someone who appears to listen to and understand you.
The Curse of the Cat People also contains pivotal sequences set over Christmas. Carolers appear on the doorstep of the Reed home on Christmas Eve, but the family’s brief joyous gathering is interrupted by Amy hearing Irena’s voice countering their song with a French carol, and she runs to join her friend. On Christmas Day, Julia gifts Amy a ring that enrages Barbara, setting in motion the events that will lead to the story’s climax, and while taking down the Christmas tree, an argument between Oliver and Amy over his daughter’s insistence that she knows Irena after finding a photo of her father and his ex leads to punishment, and Amy escaping out into a snowstorm. In fact, the entire film is blanketed in snow, lending Irena’s appearances in the yard wearing a long white hood and gown and even more ghostly air. It’s atmospheric in a way that’s different from the dark shadows of Cat People, yet no less breathtaking and immaculately conceived. In a rare perceptive moment, The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther stated in his contemporary review of the film that it’s “a rare departure from the ordinary run of horror films [which] emerges as an oddly touching study of the working of a sensitive child’s mind.”
The Curse of the Cat People is available for purchase and rental on all digital platforms, and can be watched online here. Runtime: 70 minutes.
Katie at the Movies 