The Curse of the Cat People

The Curse of the Cat People (1944) is producer Val Lewton's gentle fantasy drama, ready to watch online on iFILM. The title promises monsters, but this is no creature horror — it's a hushed story about a lonely little girl. Six-year-old Amy lives with her parents, has no playmates, and keeps slipping further into a world of her own making.

There she meets a kind stranger: the ghost of Irena, her father's first wife (Simone Simon). The grown-ups panic, reading the friendship as a sickness and trying to drag the child back to reality. Amy (Ann Carter), meanwhile, is simply glad that someone finally listens to her. The film asks, very softly, where a child's imagination ends and the thing adults fear to name begins.

Gunther von Fritsch started shooting it; a young Robert Wise finished — the directing debut of the man who would later make West Side Story. Billed as a sequel to Cat People, it is really a tender, melancholy fairy tale about childhood loneliness wrapped in genre packaging. Watch The Curse of the Cat People (1944) online on iFILM.