with Dmetri Kakmi

The Curse of the Cat People

USA, 1944

Director: Robert Wise and Gunther von Fritsch

Cast: Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Jane Randolph, Anne Carter

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The Curse of the Cat People is among the finest glimpses cinema offers into the workings of a child’s mind, as well as being an astute study of loneliness and trauma. It is also a shimmeringly beautiful film—the visual beauty being not merely superficial but manifesting a deeper understanding of the horror genre’s transcendent or metaphorical qualities.

Conceived as a sequel to Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur’s 1942 Cat People, the original title was ‘Amy and Her Friend’—hardly captivating but it gives us a glimpse into the kind of film Lewton wanted to make when he and Dewitt Bodeen worked on the script. The result is a sequel that goes out of its way to pick up the threads from the previous film. The only problem is Curse was made two years after the original, while six years have elapsed in the cinematic universe.

Robert Wise replaced Gunther von Frisch as director when the latter fell behind schedule. Wise had previously worked as editor on Lewton’s films and, in a long career, he went on to direct works that display the breadth of his versatility, from musicals to horror and science fiction.

Watching Curse for the first time reminded me of audience responses to a much later Wise horror movie. As the credits rolled on the reincarnation thriller Audrey Rose (1977), a woman seated next to me in the cinema said, ‘That wasn’t scary, but it was very good.’ The same applies to Curse. Not particularly frightening. But very satisfying indeed.

At heart, Curse is a sinister fairytale that closes the circle for Kent Smith’s character, Oliver Reed. After the death of his first wife Irena Dubrovna, he marries former co-worker Alice Moore and they now have a child. Six-year-old Amy is introverted and her father fears she is too much like his former wife. 

‘She could almost be Irena’s child,’ he declares rather insensitively to his new wife. 

‘Except she’s not,’ snaps down-to-earth Alice. ‘She’s my child.’ 

As becomes evident, his inability to move on from his first wife drives the story. The shadow engulfs the entire family, especially his daughter. 

‘Sometimes I feel there’s a curse on this family,’ says Alice. 

There is, but it is not what an audience might anticipate from the lurid title. Parents’ secrets can harm a child. So it is with Amy. Unable to connect with her father and caught up in his psychic maelstrom, Amy turns to an invisible friend, who, as it turns out, is her father’s dead ex-wife. 

French actress Simone Simon returns as Irena Dubrovna, the tormented cat woman from the first film. Pitching the performance somewhere between fairy godmother and phantom, she is childlike, fey and wistful — aware that her duty is to protect Amy, while being mindful of the fact there is unfinished business with her ex-husband. 

Dewitt Bodeen’s script is replete with Freudian and Jungian psychology. The undercurrent of repressed memory and a child’s perspective of the world manifest on screen thanks to cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca’s sophisticated understanding of cinematic language. It adds layers to the story, as well as providing visual pleasure for the viewer. In creating some of the most strikingly beautiful images in American cinema, Musuraca does not rely on overt special effects. Rather, he uses subtle shifts in light and dark to guide an enraptured Amy out of the real into the unreal. 

Fulfilling the film’s horror remittance, Amy’s imagination is extended beyond her own backyard when she encounters a ‘witch’ and her ‘spell-bound daughter’ in a nearby house haunted with its own mother/daughter psychodrama. It is here that the film lets fly with the old dark house tropes. Unsettling shadows, strange and unusual camera angles, entrapping staircases and weird stuffed animals as Amy wonders into the dark woods of her own imagination. Horror elements are further supplemented with references to Washington Irving’s Legend of the Headless Horseman, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem ‘The Unseen Playmate’.

The question of whether Irena’s ghost is real or a figment of imagination is left unanswered until the final frame. Even then the film insists that daydreaming or reverie can create another kind of reality, one that is as valid as daily life. 

By claiming to believe in her invisible friend (even when he doesn’t), Amy’s father is able to close one chapter in his life and open another. As Irena fades from view in the snowbound backyard, we know that Amy no longer needs her. And her father is free to move on.

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Dmetri Kakmi is the author of The Dictionary of a Gadfly (as The Sozzled Scribbler), The Door and Other Uncanny Tales, Mother Land, and When We Were Young (as editor). His gothic horror novel, The Woman in the Well, will be published in March 2025. He is currently working on a crime novel called The Perfect Room.