The Curse of the Cat People

The Curse of the Cat People. Robert Wise and Gunther V. Fritsch, 1944.

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Edition screened: Included on Warner “Val Lewton Horror Double Feature” Cat People/The Curse of the Cat People DVD, first released 2005, also packaged in “The Val Lewton Horror Collection” 6-DVD box set, released 2008. English language. Runtime approximately 70 minutes.

Summary: Children’s “playtime” of animal violence.

Details:

1) Beginning at 2:11 is a 3-second sequence of young boys pretending to shoot at a black cat in a tree. In context, a teacher has just told her class that they can have some time to play in a park. These two boys represent healthy, normal children, and as such they immediately begin pantomimed murder of animals.

2) The star character in the film, little Amy Reed, tries to befriend a butterfly during this same playtime. From 3:25 through 3:32 her inept gentility is interrupted/corrected by a more normal child who kills and crushes the butterfly in an attempt to capture it.

Additional comments:

The Curse of the Cat People often is dismissed as a bumbling illogical failure compared to Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1943). I disagree, and in fact am impressed by the clever coherency between these two films by different directors. The theme of oafish professional culture’s inability to understand (or unwillingness to acknowledge) anything of The Invisible World, is revisited with more focus and with increased bravery by placing the blame for emotional trauma, childhood or female, where it belongs: squarely on the shoulders of complacently smug middle-American culture.

There is no ‘curse’ in The Curse of the Cat People. There is only intervening salvation from the ghost of Irena who died in the first film, and now returns to nurture and comfort young Amy. Irena brings lessons of smiling tolerance, gifts of gentle magic, and the comforts of true friendship that existed in Irena’s Old World matriarchal culture but are sneeringly prohibited in 20th-century America.

See also Cat People.

@ BL