Also treat this as a recommendation not just for the main films mentioned here but for all of Val Lewton’s work. I enjoyed the two-week online session I did around Lewton’s cinema in 2020, and hope to do a follow-up at some point. Can also share some of the films with anyone who’s interested.)
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In my early teens I became obsessed with old Hollywood films, hunted down and watched hundreds of them – at a time when this wasn’t easily done as a Delhi kid – and at some point I probably deluded myself that I had seen almost everything worth seeing. Especially in my favourite genres, which included noir, horror, and musicals. And so, in my forties I feel a thrill when I come across a treasure that I had altogether missed (or disregarded) back then.
Among the most invigorating of these recent discoveries is the 1944 film The Curse of the Cat People, co-directed by Robert Wise – who is much better known to casual movie buffs for helming The Sound of Music 20 years later (and to more knowledgeable viewers for being one of the editors of Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons). Though as it happens, The Curse of the Cat People is one of those films where the producer – Val Lewton – is regarded as the principal creative force. It is one in a series of marvellous low-budget Lewton films that were characterised by psychological horror – by the hinted-at rather than the explicitly seen – and a hard-to-define sense of unease.The Curse of the Cat People is also the sequel to the 1942 Cat People, which I had seen much earlier. I remembered being gripped by the quietly sinister way in which that film told the story of a young woman who is convinced she has a dark, uncontrollable cat-self. Though this woman, Irena (played by Simone Simon), is an essentially sympathetic character tormented by demons she barely knows, the basic premise paves the way for Cat People’s presentation of shadowy feline as movie monster. The film’s most famous scene – a classic example of Lewton’s moody, abstract approach to horror – has Irena’s romantic rival Alice being terrified by an unseen presence during a late-night swim (and we think we see something leopard-like amidst the shadows on the wall around the pool area). Another celebrated scene – one which created a horror template and led to the coining of the term “Lewton Bus” – has Alice being stalked during a walk; just as we expect a fierce cat to pounce, the sudden, startling noise on the soundtrack turns out to be a night bus that has stopped in front of her.
That bus does make a very distinctive hiss.So here was the idea of cat-ness as something mysterious and scary, something that can tear apart both the person afflicted by it and the people who come in touch with this cat-person. (If the initial viewers of Cat People were anything like Indians who abandon their pets at the slightest excuse – or impulsively buy the “cute” breed of dog they’ve seen in a new ad – there would have been many disoriented house-cats roaming the streets of America in the weeks following its release.)
It was with this memory, and with very little prior knowledge, that I watched The Curse of the Cat People a couple of years ago – expecting a straight sequel, in the style of later horror-movie franchises. I was taken aback. This is a sequel only in the sense that it features the characters who survive the first film, and finds a way to bring Irena (or her ghost) back into the frame. Otherwise it is a switch in genre, quite different from Lewton’s other works.
The Curse of the Cat People is mainly a sensitive look at the inner world of a little girl named Amy, a child who seems to live more in private fantasy and less in the actual world around her – which is starting to vex her father Oliver (Irena’s husband in the first film, now married to Alice), who worries about what “too much imagination” can do to a child’s mind. Feeling lost and friendless, Amy wanders into an old house and makes the acquaintance of an eccentric old woman (as well as *her* dejected daughter; this mother-child relationship in some ways suggests what Amy’s relationship with her father might become). With the help of what may or may not be a wishing ring, Amy also conjures an imaginary(?) friend for herself – and later, after seeing a photograph of the deceased Irena in her house, she starts to picture Irena as this friend.
And that is almost the extent of this film’s connection with its predecessor. Lewton himself had wanted this one to be titled Amy and Her Friend, which would have been much more fitting – though it wasn’t bone-chilling enough for the studio. (The posters of the time, including the one attached here – “The Beast Woman Strikes!” “Sensational Return of the Killer Cat-Woman!” – are sensationalist misrepresentations of this film.)This is a story about parents and children, and the gulfs – including those created by personality clashes – between them. (I was unsurprised to learn that this was a very early instance of a film being used in child-psychology classes in the US. It’s pleasing to think that a Val Lewton B-movie – with all those exploitative posters! – would be used in that way, given that this was a period when there were some very simplistic ideas about what “respectable” or “educative” films should look like.) It is also about the nature of parenting itself, and how the best intentions can have dire results. During one nuanced exchange, a kindly teacher suggests to Oliver that maybe he is *too anxious* and watchful about Amy, and that she is sensitive enough to pick up on that anxiousness – which makes her more nervous in turn. This may well be the case, but it’s also worth noting that Oliver doesn’t always pay full attention when Amy is trying to tell him something important: in one scene, when she mentions the spooky house she went to, he is quick to brush it off as another fanciful tale; a short while later, Amy’s mother Alice, speaking more patiently with her, easily learns which house she is talking about and who lives there.
Back to cats, though, and an important difference between Cat People and its sequel: in the first film, Irena, though melancholy and sympathetic (and easy to see as a victim by the end), is also for much of the duration of the story an enigmatic protagonist who might be a big threat to the other characters. But in Curse of the Cat People, she is a warm, comforting presence – an invisible friend who sees a lonely child through hard times.
The French actress Simone Simon, who played Irena, was a striking, unusual presence for the Hollywood films of the time, much more of an “exotic” European import than, say, Ingrid Bergman from the same period. Simon’s most recent Hollywood role before Cat People had been as the Devil’s impish assistant in the period film The Devil and Daniel Webster (“You French?” someone asks her character in that film. “I’m not anything,” she replies with a knowing smile) and it’s easy to see why an American audience of the time would find her otherworldly, hard to pin down, and sexually threatening too. (One subtext of Cat People – which also makes the film useful in feminist studies – is that the beast inside Irena is unleashed when she is sexually aroused.) But Simon’s distinctive screen presence is used to very different effect when she plays “my friend” in the sequel: to Amy, who is our object of identification in this film, the suburban world inhabited by her “normal” parents and “normal” schoolmates is distancing and often upsetting; for her, the spectral, cat-like Irena is a protector, and there is a reassuring glow to their scenes together – the camerawork becomes soft-focused and dreamy, it’s obvious that we are in a magic space. Put simply, the first film is built around fear of a feline attacker; while the second is a children’s film where the guardian angel is a cat-person – a companion to a reserved and bullied child. (Would it be gratuitous to recall the Prahlada-Narasimha story? Maybe, but as we are constantly being told now, Hindu mythology did everything first.)
As I wrote in the Cat People essay, I was an Amy-like child myself in some ways, and it’s possible that this is why I was a “cat person” at a certain age. Such theories are of course built around broad stereotypes/generalisations about reserved cats vs extroverted dogs, but I find it hard to separate my childhood closeness with cats from the fact that I spent a great deal of my time in a very interior world: the world of books, films (including, from age 13, films that none of my friends or
classmates were interested in), later watching long hours of Test cricket alone, filling notebooks with scores and star ratings and little observations about things I had watched or read. Kittu and Sandy, the cats whom I wrote about in the essay, were in different ways my Irenas during that period. Though as I would come to realise in later years, dogs can play a similar role in their slobbering, undignified ways. (For related thoughts on cats + dogs + cat people who are also dog people, read my piece in the Cat People anthology. The book is available online, here for instance, and of course in physical bookstores.)
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