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domino harvey wrote:This is a common problem with all Warners DVDs. It's random, and could hit any DVD you have from them. One copy of a title will be fine, and another effected. If you own a lot of Warner DVDs you haven't checked lately, I guarantee you have a couple that have succumbed in the interim

According to my database, I have about 420 Warners DVD "products", PAL & NTSC, including lots of "themed" and "actor" boxed sets and TV series. I haven't watched any of them since I bought them. I'll put a thorough check on my "to do" list, after "watch the extras" and "listen to the commentaries".

And is the problem with PAL discs as well? My Warner discs are a mixture of NTSC and PAL... (including the ostensible subject of this thread)

I have not heard of it impacting any Blus from Warners. I don't know about UK releases either, but I'd bet they were pressed not at whatever factory messed these up for Warners stateside, so hopefully uneffected

Watching Cat People and I Walked With A Zombie again this evening, I'm even more taken with both films. Surprisingly even Cat People rose in my estimations, which I had not previously rated too highly despite its famous set pieces, the great performance by Simone Simon and the introduction of "the bus" scare into the lexicon of horror cinema.

I was thinking whilst watching that there are so many themes that crop up over and over in the films that Lewton produced, particularly the idea of rationality versus irrationality, and unhealthy relationships that are often viewed from the outside by a third (more suitable) party just waiting to insert themselves into the relationship (or uncharitably, to usurp it). Both of those themes have elements of compulsion and fate to them as well - the person with the irrational thoughts knows them to be irrational but that doesn't stop them from being almost overwhelming in nature, and eventually just having the notion is enough to manifest the horror into actually existing in reality, whether it would have come to pass without that fear or not. The central unhealthy relationships are obviously not working out for everyone involved, and even those witnessing the failure of the relationship from the outside, but that cannot stop them taking the fatalistic, often deadly, final form that they come to. Which is both emphasising the lack of control that anyone has over their fate, and is also about the need for a fictional story to have a grand and operatically tragic yet emotionally powerful climax that can only come about through tragedy.

Out of all the Lewton horror pictures I like The Seventh Victim the most (which is the darkest and most existentially, fatalistically despairing of them all), closely followed by The Ghost Ship (in which the romantic relationship takes the form of sub-dom games between the insane veteran captain and his naively idealistic third officer), I Walked With A Zombie and The Curse of The Cat People (in which instead of a potential lover, the third party to a love triangle is a young daughter in danger of being possessed/expressing a preference for someone other than her biological mother, and the darkness involves the creepy lonely woman in the old dark mansion across the way), but I think it says a lot about the consistency across all of the films that they have a number of unifying features that relate to and enrich all the others surrounding them.

For instance I loved on watching Cat People this time around that the film seems to leave open the idea that rather than transforming into a cat herself when she is aroused as in the myth that she so fears, that Irena in the second half of the film is going off to the zoo to get the panther out of its cage before bringing it into certain environments to terrorise those who are threatening her relationship and who are eventually overtly planning to send her off to a mental institution in order to be able to get married without the hassle of a divorce. It is left ambiguous but I like that eventually Irena is killed not by the shifty psychiatrist (who himself is turned on by Irena and maybe has been manipulating the entire situation in order to force her to have to enter a relationship with him, but does not reckon on her quite brutally rebuffing his lascivious (and unprofessional!) advances) but by her alter ego when she either goes to the panther and tries to harness it again (but herself is 'betrayed' as it runs from her to its own untimely death) to either kill those who betrayed her, or to herself be killed by her spirit animal.

The reason I felt more interested in the film on this viewing is that rather than the transformation idea, I really liked the idea of Irena trying to get a cat to do her bidding for her as a kindred spirit (whether in actuality or just because of having been so addled by the socialised myths of her foreign upbringing that are clashing with the values of the modern world. The ambiguous 'actual or all in the mind, and does it matter in the end when the outcome is much the same anyway?' nature of which we will get into again later on when we talk about I Walk With A Zombie!) but being unable to fully control the wild animal is very similar to the opening of the later film The Leopard Man, in which the heroine of that film is doing a cabaret act with a dangerous wild cat which she is unsurprisingly unable to control and which goes mad in response to all the wild dancing during the stage act, escapes and commits the first (but not all. I often wonder if this film anticipated Dario Argento's Tenenbrae It would also fit with my theory that the astonishingly dark The Seventh Victim had an influence on Argento's Inferno too) murders of that film. That opening of The Leopard Man, but really the entire film, seems like a comment on the animal versus human, nature or nurture idea of Cat People, only with the mythological fate aspect exchanged for blunter serial murder. And to tie in with I Walked With A Zombie (and to contrast against things going the other way in Cat People), there is a sense in The Leopard Man that the modern, American characters go to a foreign country and end up being the cause for the horror that the locals face due to their blithe presence in the community causing ructions (which itself is The Ghost Ship in miniature, where the crew of the ship are well aware of their captain being a murderous megalomaniac, but the newly appointed idealistic third officer clashing against him brings things, arguably unnecessarily, to a head)

And what to say about the magnificent I Walked With A Zombie? I love that comment that Kim Newman made in the commentary that the film feels to anticipate by decades the Jane Eyre prequel novel by Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea. But it also feels just as much a kind of response to Rebecca as well, with a somewhat unworldly and naive young woman entering a house and falling in love with a man who is still somewhat in thrall to his previous wife. She thinks he is still deeply in love with her, but comes to realise that the situation is completely the opposite. There is also the suggestion of a murder having been committed, though it did not succeed in entirely ridding both the husband and his wider estate from the ghostly presence of his wife, and eventually there is a threat of an inquest into the initial situation that threatens to crassly air all of the family's dirty laundry in public. Although the situation was already a very open secret amongst the wider community anyway, so the rumours and gossip is already swirling, and surrounding characters are already getting themselves involved in the situation for their own benefit.

There is even a lover threatening to tear the marriage apart, though instead of the smooth talking and obviously more suitable for the similarly crassly worldly Rebecca spiv character (played by George Sanders), in I Walked With A Zombie there is the even more perverse idea of the younger brother wanting his brother's wife, with the similar suggestion that the younger brother and Jessica were probably more suitable for each other anyway, and end up being tied together in death. The younger brother being the fatalistic character here, the true walking dead figure of an alcoholic in love with someone who can never respond to him, and even if she could would still be trapped in a loveless marriage with his older brother (who is played by Tom Conway, the brother of George Sanders).

And this tragic tussling between two brothers over a completely passive and unresponsive woman is seen through the eyes of a number of third parties, who each in their own ways decide to take matters into their own hands. The main audience identification figure of the nurse, Betsy, who is obviously the more suitable lover for Paul; but also the mother who is so upset by the strife that Jessica caused between her two sons that she stepped in and both cursed Jessica and then is heavily implied to have attempted to kill her, but the zombification curse was already in effect and it left Jessica as an unkillable member of the undead - a state far worse than being dead (even murdered) by remaining an accusing presence needing constant attention and preventing everyone from being able to move on.

The mother stepping in to 'help' her sons by removing the wife/lover, but only making the situation worse itself is a theme that gets widened out with the theme of the dark legacy of slavery on the island and the mother having played into the voodoo superstitions of the islanders to get them to accept her modern medicines by herself pretending to be a voodoo priest. Yet she finds her attempts to be a benign dictator again have terrible consequences, as the villagers whose superstitions she has been encouraging in their practices for her own ends turn out to have greater powers than she may have anticipated and once spurred into action by encountering the catatonic Jessica, they put their own unstoppable plans into motion to both bring the unhealthy influence of the zombified Jessica to a final end, and maybe as a side benefit also cause the death in a murder-suicide pact with Jessica of the younger brother, who incidentally is the colonialist overseer of the family's sugar factory that has been subjugating the islanders!

I Walked With A Zombie is such a fascinating and complex film, from the ambivalent reactions of our main characters involved in the love triangle (love square? Love pentagram if we include the mother); to the whole notion of rational approaches to illness versus the irrational idea of appealing to any force that potentially might be able to offer a solution to the situation (though it may not be the solution that you will like); through the superstition and rituals clashing against the somewhat soulless modernity aspect (which leads to people checking out, whether through catatonia or attempted catatonia through drink), neither of which seem to lead to happiness, just a sense of understanding one's despair and being able to live with it better as a slave (or as a paid nurse) than as an ostensibly free plantation owner; to the feeling that the film may simply be about the aesthetic pleasure of revelling in the gorgeously romantic atmosphere it conjures up of large airy rooms, drapes blowing in the tropical wind and women wandering through the night in their sleep attire.

MV88 wrote: Wed Mar 15, 2023 1:14 am Just because I’m always interested in hearing what others have to say about it, why don’t we go with Robert Wise & Gunther von Fritsch’s The Curse of the Cat People (1944)? One of the most unusual sequels ever made, it’s really nothing at all like Cat People (which I also love, for different reasons) tonally, thematically, or stylistically. It’s not even a horror film even though it often gets lumped into the genre simply because of its association with the original. I honestly think it was way ahead of its time with some of the themes it touches on, and it could inspire some good discussion.

To pay my dues for losing the Oscars race, I'd like to jumpstart the discussion put forth by MV88. Though, because I've already written about this film at length, I watched Cat People and The Curse of the Cat People back to back in an effort to compare their similarities rather than differences (which have already been universally stressed). I don't intend to derail the conversation from just the "sequel," but it felt cheap to just post my initial writeup and bail. I'm still going to post it to start, because I still largely agree with that impression if looking at the film insularly:

therewillbeblus wrote: Thu Aug 01, 2019 3:30 am The Curse of the Cat People: The magical atmosphere of a child’s fantastical perspective and subtle meditations on loneliness, identity, and sense of self-worth (and rejection of that worth from dismissive adults) are held together comfortably, a difficult feat for such diverse atmospheric moods to coexist as if woven from the same cloth. That is not to say that these themes are not otherwise capable of overlapping, but a lesser film would have explored each element in uneven chapters of mood shifts within the same film. Here they are effortlessly complementary, blended into a thick thematic density that is far more layered than it appears, or at least that it appeared to me the first two times I saw the film.

For a film apparently half-directed by two separate people (though I’m curious to learn more about how much Wise re-shot, as this feels very much like the work of a unified vision) the ambiance is magnificent, with a mystical mise en scène and extravagant photography. The acting also mirrors the intent of each character’s role perfectly. We get loud and charismatic performances from the fantasy characters to counteract the flat and restrained ones from the parents and ‘real’ adults. The show belongs to Ann Carter though, who gives an incredibly subdued and complicated performance as she navigates a world - or two worlds, the real and the fantasy - neither of which she is able to fully grasp at this latency stage. Lost in a middle ground of childhood emerging from the comfort of innocence, but not yet able to achieve any sense of mastery or understanding of life, she is trapped in a state of powerlessness over herself and her environment, drawn to look to the fantasy for comfort while forced to exist in the real, repeatedly pulled back into it by the claws of maturity.

I love how the weather corresponds to our young protagonist’s internal state, warm and calm at the start, while she plays and remains content in her fantasy, but becoming colder, culminating in a door-busting snowstorm as her dysregulation escalates, relationships dissolve, and worldviews shatter in waves. The storm calms, of course, as she finds peace with her ghost tormenter and embraces her as a friend before reconciling with her father as well, who ultimately validates her perspective on the world in the closing moments, thus providing her with a sense of safety in the real world for the first time in the film. The use of weather is significant in that it, along with ‘time,’ often serves as the default reminder of our lack of omnipotence and inability to control our world, emulating the film’s thematic interest in the process of engaging in this realization and the confusion over how to, or rather ‘where we can,’ gain control in a primarily powerless existence. The existential woes of psychological development.

The state of living with a desire for social connection while not yet possessing the skills to achieve this connection is drawn so authentically that it demands empathy in the relatability of its pathos. That the film retains a continuous beauty in its magical fantasy interlaced through this drama weighs lightness and darkness on a balanced scale and reminds us of the nostalgia in make-believe, a defense mechanism perhaps, but one of the most enjoyable we’ve ever had, when creativity came naturally before our innate defaults turned banal with age and we had to seek this creativity through others means, like the movies.

I'm going to suggest a reading I thoroughly expect to be balked at: That Cat People and The Curse of the Cat People are perfectly complementary films that emerge with two polar-opposite worldviews born from the same thematic ideas. Both films are about immature people struggling with their sense of identity in a social context that doesn't support this organic formation. Both films are deceptively pitched as horror films but are actually melodramas: Cat People blends into noir tropes of femme fatale, crime, mystery, singular existential missions.. all to compensate for its subject's psychological magnet of fatalism, while Curse escapes from this tone into fantasy to emulate its subject's developmental stage and nonlinear growth.

In Cat People, it's "too late" - Irena is lonely, confused, and afraid. She doesn't understand how to engage socially let alone how to engage with her 'self', overwhelmed by anxious symptoms that are exacerbated by felt pressure from the external world, and sexual impulses without knowing what to do with them or really what she even wants to do with them, if anything. There's a self-fulfilling prophecy in how her will power falters as her perceived weaknesses swallow her up, 'parts' that are strangers to her, blending with her 'self' to the point where she defines herself by them. This is yet another great IFS Therapy movie, but one so depressingly deterministic. I don't get the sense that the filmmakers share Irena's view of herself. They get enough distance to portray this as a tragic melodrama, a noir where Irena is the disillusioned existential hero as well as her own femme fatale, only where that 'cat' part is fostered and unleashed out of fear of her nebulous parts. Perhaps they're innocent and need to be cared for and explored, but they erupt violently because there's no aid. Again, a perfect IFS Therapy film.

The Curse of the Cat People gives us an entirely different outcome, in part because the subject is a child with promise, uncorrupted by the world and without as long and traumatic (and thus damaging) a personal history to create infectious doubt for hope to work in friction with. It's an incredibly optimistic film - one that shows how all these different 'parts' (or feelings and thoughts and impressions and experiences about the world) are fluid and changeable - stimuli to work 'with' rather than run from or revolt against. It's a much more holistic and validating and normalizing film than its predecessor, which was suffocating with a sensation of ubiquitous ostracizing. Cat People 'other'ed Irena at every turn. Even Ollie, the well-meaning and steady yet ignorant husband, and Alice, the predictable and confident ideal mate for him, are side-characters rather than developed, concerned intimates. They function like heavy ornaments weighing down Irena's tree when she just wants them to sparkle and make her feel clothed.

Conversely, Amy is supported, at least as much as she can be in a life where she needs to develop independently. And the ways in which she is not supported are critiqued within the film. The introduction of Ollie and Alice clarifies that conditioning matters during the parent-teacher conference, which confrontationally names the effects parents have on their kids, something that was hushed over by all just a few years earlier in Cat People. Amy's birthday wish is to conform like her father wants her to rather than be her 'self', something that ignites her various internal 'parts' to heighten and rebel when the internal dynamics shift. Another brilliant IFS Therapy film. So Irena becomes the vehicle for Amy's concocted "friend" because they are of apiece, but this affirms Irena's oppression from Cat People in addition to validating her worth outside of a narrow definition of 'acceptable psychology' rather than offering a prognosis on Amy.

Amy doesn't inherit Irena's fatalism so much as the film uses Irena as a symbol of the self-doubt and insecurities all people go through on their road to self-actualization. She also represents a path to freedom - to acknowledging parts of oneself that aren't externally-'acceptable' but that must be accepted as parts of us in some form, in order to achieve internal harmony and avoid a fate of cyclical dysregulation. Irena even tells Amy that she can't tell her parents about their relationship, because they won't be helpful and will only disrupt this natural period of self-discovery. The film is essentially a corrective look at generational trauma, and how new generations can locate and capitalize on the resilience to generate their own resources or find them in new spaces through imaginative play and peripheral exploration. 'Don't always listen to your parents, discover for yourself, shatter ideology'. How progressive! And how enlightening to focus on childhood as the time to develop these skills, so that later we can treat uncomfortable sensations with skepticism and confidence, instead of default to crippling self-doubt and fear.

But that's largely in service of apologizing for the ideological masturbating exploited in Cat People. Irena was trapped in a younger developmental stage later in life, which is why she felt so alienated in her environment and her own body, and that's why the first film was so devastating - but given how narrow the boundaries of her milieu were, it's entirely possible that her condition was the product of having a more active mind and heart that were suppressed at every turn, and her hyper-awareness that she didn't fit into a neat box sparked and intensified these symptoms into becoming something they never had to be. So in this setting, she misinterprets everything, including her psychologist's analogies in the zoo. He doesn't exactly help when he diagnoses her and then pejoratively sneers at her own attempt to express what she's feeling in a moment of resistance, thereby further pushing her away from both the aid of treatment, a space that could provide her support, and also indirectly allows her to endorse her delusions. He's a well-meaning character, who keeps coming back with radical interventions and poor boundaries but ones in service of therapeutic co-regulation.. except, like everyone else, he can't fathom an approach beyond his small-minded position.

But Amy is right where she's supposed to be - and so the parents' fear of Irena and the goingons is rooted more in their own traumas and lack of control than it is real and fair, since their daughter is growing as she should be, as Irena should have had the opportunity to do. There's a key moment in Cat People that I think helps inform the 'wrong' way to look at both that film and Curse, reflected through the myopia of Ollie and Alice -the husband/lover in the first and the parents in the latter. Ollie says "I don't know what love really is" - a line that could insinuate that he himself is beginning to doubt his own sense of self or experience of feelings, but that's probably just a fleeting circumstantial musing rather than prescriptive of identity-diffusion - though Alice's response, and his response to that speak volumes. Alice replies, "I know what love is. It's understanding. It's you and me and let the rest of the world go by. It's just the two of us living our lives together, happily and proudly. No self-torture, no doubt. It's enduring and it's everlasting. Nothing can change it." Ollie then describes how he feels differently with Irena, describing a kind of codependency that conflates love with the drive to care, protect, and save someone from themselves.

Alice's pat and ridiculously-ideological and idealistically-insular definition effectively reigns him in, and that interaction does enlighten us to why they are 'psychologically successful' people in this environment: their naked interiors are malleable to whatever fluff validates the safe option to believe in. Ollie can forget what a dense and complex concept worthy of exploring like "love" is in a moment of crisis, but he allows his crisis to be deflated with a Hallmark-slogan by a new woman who presents herself as stable. And Alice is stable, but perhaps only because she grew up in sync with what society expects. She knows what to expect, has been supported by ideological apparatuses and supports their ideas right back. But as an independent vehicle presented with something atypical? Well, they both show their cards - they have little skills to cope with that. And this bleeds into their roles as parents in the subsequent film.

In both instances, they're "normal" characters who are unwilling or unable to see beyond their own perspectives, and thus boring and worthless faux-protagonists, appropriately resigned to the margins of stories that are really about people struggling with complex psychological and existential struggles that feel abnormal. These conflicts of 'individual vs. systems' represent how psychosocial conditioning can inform mental illness in Cat People, but typical childhood development in Curse, even when presented with stressors - yet still a process these two now-parents in Ollie and Alice are too far removed from to recognize or authenticate. While a bit of a stretch, it seems a fair reading to see Curse as partially pervaded with Ollie's nightmare - Is he seeing and hearing what he's hypervigilant of: evidence that Irena's abnormality is fated to follow him through his kin, those he loves most but is powerless to 'protect' from these unpredictable intrusions to his bubble of a world? Is his own sheltered ignorance a handicap, susceptible to trauma because of a time when things didn't operate as planned? Does that leave Irena and Amy as the more resilient ones, despite being 'immature' in reference to this sharpened artificial hiveminded milieu?

It's interesting how Curse intercuts Amy's productive journey with moments of an impotent Ollie crying out in static fear, traumatized by the symbolic disease of Irena, which sensitizes his attention to every little possible warning sign that could be infecting his child. I love how Alice continues to function as the 'male-typical' role of a moored, poised incarnation of assurance, coming in with calm attempts to diffuse his paranoia, this time perhaps for the right reasons(!) but still in service of adhering to the norm of pretending that problems don't exist, because how could they in our perfect white-picket-fence life? They simply aren't allowed. Ollie emerges at the very end with a curiously-sudden maturation of his own - presenting a willingness to take a leap of faith to be an encouraging father. I don't think we ever get a very clear picture of why this is - perhaps because he knows Irena devolved psychologically due to an absence of affectionate resources and that he can play a part in correcting that for his daughter, or because he's willing to recognize Irena's presence as one that's now safely imaginary for him just as she is to Amy, and so not the threat he allowed her to be when refusing to accept what 'is' abnormally side by side the normalcy he is comfortable acknowledging. Again - that ability to hold incongruous truths together as parts is classic therapeutic work of internal-family-systems. This not-yet-evidenced psychology would provide material to melodramas across the next two decades, chronicling the torment of this generation of adults engaging in unskilled retreat from facing this unthinkable yet inescapable dissonance. But here it's approached... kind of. Maybe Ollie is just following suit with Alice once again, and it's the opposite of growth on his part - where "everything's fine" because I say it to myself over and over again and begin to believe it to be true by ignoring the inconceivable. Well, as long as it helps Amy. And she'll be okay at least. Probably. Then again, so will he, because nothing's going to challenge him to be 'not-okay', at least until Amy grows up and he morphs into Jim Backus in Rebel Without a Cause, emasculated and desperately confused in his own living room.

If we see Amy and Irena as the 'strong' ones - but possessing a strength ill-fitting in this environment (as least Irena), is it possible that Ollie is a weak person? Where relative to this milieu's norms, he might seem strong, but his awareness of a void unfulfilled and his lack of skillsets or self-knowledge in filling that void (i.e. 'who am I, what is love, why am I even sensitive to entertaining these feelings I cannot name') and subsequent uncontrollable incitement of disequilibrium leaves him paralyzed? Maybe that's where Alice's utility comes in, and why he leaves Irena for her. Maybe he actually does love Irena, but had conflated love with security, and when Alice feeds this answer back to him, he gulfs it down like a pill for relief of symptoms. Maybe an adjacent tragedy is that Ollie gave up love for stability and never even knew it, brainwashed by what was easiest and more than willing to follow that path and numb the passion he felt before, because it also necessitated some painful lows to complement to highs. And this tracks with how Ollie passes on the rigid demands of conformity to Amy with timid expressions from crippling fear, and how he needs his regular doses of Alice to stay afloat. She's his medicine, he's lost without her, or so he thinks. Maybe he would've been freed -into an unstable period full of taxing work to do on himself, but efforts that could've been rewarded if surrounded by Irenas. Or maybe not - maybe any unconditional love they could cultivate would be no match for the ubiquitous mass of culture swarming them with narratives of disorder and aggressive acts of estrangement. Yeah, that's where I'd hedge my bets, but either way, it's a no-win situation for anyone with the remotest sensitivity to an alternative part of reality, which is.. every single character except Alice?

Returning to the quite, it's initially funny but then fades into a tone of brutal desolation in how Alice's definition of love is not only the exact opposite of Irena's experience, but unfairly simplifies love with an 'of course'-accessibility that Ollie -a mentally-stable man with the privilege of not being plagued with emotional dysregulation- can latch onto, but that Irena cannot. The film has empathized with Irena's struggles to "understand," to locate peace in her partner and "let the world go by," to evade "self-torture" and "doubt," and to resist the "change" she's experiencing through understandably-fluctuating moods. No, nothing can exist in flux here, that's just not entertained as an option because it's not accepted as a potential 'reality'. Their daughter experiences all of these diverse moods in Curse too, as do most people, but it's psychotic when it's Irena, and she has to be stopped from disrupting the streamlined behavioral and thought patterns of all adults in this world, because god forbid that safety net is "complicated."

So I think that Curse of the Cat People is a statement of clarification that Cat People should not be taken at face value, that the filmmakers are most interested in exploring how the Irenas of the world are persecuted by a zeitgeist demanding we revolve round a homogenous idea of 'normalcy', and they accomplish this by using the most innocent and least-threatening vehicle imaginable: a child. Neither the viewers nor the adult-characters in Curse of the Cat People are going to persecute a child for having experiences that we can all remember relating to, even Greatest Generation audiences. The film creates an 'a-ha' moment of course-correction, that's optimistic in a vacuum but, as a consequence of this revelation, leaves a shadow of stained blood on the interventions and attitudes taken in Cat People. This retroactive strategy permits us to recognize the predecessor as a far richer film than ingested on its own, and also one excruciatingly demoralizing in this one's wake. Especially that nonchalant "[At least] she never lied to us" confirmation of Irena's fatalism and overall subhuman worth to close out Cat People. Ugh.

I always felt Curse of the Cat People was remarkably consistent as a sequel to Cat People when it comes to themes and characters. When every I read that it has almost nothing in common with the first movie, I wonder whether those critics have watched the same film. They seemed to be thrown by the fact that the movie switches horror-subgenre, while the first film is a variation on the werewolf movie, the second one is an (ambiguous) ghost story. But Oliver is still the same insensitive clod from the first movie, this time driving his daughter instead of his wife to despair. The psychological aspect shifts from dealing with female sexuality and repression to child psychology. The Universal horror franchises would constantly recast lead characters for their sequels but this ports over its trio of lead actors from the first film intact and tells a follow up story which deepens those characters. While superficially Irena may have been the "monster" of the first movie, Cat People views her sympathetically and Oliver is the real monster for abandoning her as soon as it becomes clear she is troubled, with psychotherapy not providing an instant solution to the problem. Curse validates that view, here Irena becomes a guardian angel to Amy.

In Manuel Puig's novel Kiss of the Spider Woman, its queer protagonist identifies with Irena in Cat People as a fellow victim who is cast out due to her sexuality and who threatens the status quo.

Something which gets rarely mentioned is that these two films form a trilogy with The Seventh Victim, which features the fourth lead character from Cat People, Doctor Judd (again played by Tom Conway). As he died in Cat People, The Seventh Victim could be seen as a prequel or as taking place at the same time and it shares the Cat People movies preoccupation with psychologically troubled female protagonists. The Leopard Man often gets thrown in with the two Cat People movies, but while repeating and honing a couple of set pieces from that film, thematically it has little in common with them, turning out to be a murder mystery with the promise of a shape shifting "leopard man" turning out to be a red herring.

I really love both Cat People films, and agree that Curse is a perfect sequel. In so many ways, the second film extends, elaborates, and redeems themes and characters from the first. Irena is clearly the heroine of Cat People and the character favored most by the filmmakers, so I love that in Curse, she is fully redeemed (not that she really needed it) from the punishment dictated upon her by society from within the film, and by censorship from without the film.
One of the things that is so rich about Cat People is that it serves as a metaphor for so many things, two of which therewillbeblus and thecurioussofa have discussed. I’ll add a third: the experience of the immigrant. All throughout Cat People, Irena is being told to forget her European past, leave behind the silly traditions of her people and assimilate; her inability to do so puts her at odds with society and the status quo. In Curse, Irina becomes a part of Amy’s life, and though she isn’t related to her by blood, she’s a still a part of her family. By entering into Amy’s life, she is the passing on to the next generation the traditions of her homeland and people. She shares wisdom with her, provides comfort, sings her a traditional lullaby; her favorite painting, one depicting a cat, which is so important to her people’s history, hangs in the house. She isn’t the assimilated American that people in the first film want her to become, and her experience and heritage becomes a boon to her family. It may not be as major of a theme as some other parts of these two movies, but to me it has always stuck out as tying a beautiful little bow on the multi-faceted tragedy first movie.

On another note, this is a really beautiful movie aesthetically, despite not being a big budget (I believe they reused old Amberson sets) and a reminder of just what the great craftsman of Hollywood were capable of. Post-war will bring the strive for realism and on-location pseudo-documentary style filmmaking, which of course has its merits, but there’s nothing quite like the magic of tightly controlled, expressionistic studio filmmaking like this. It’s something that seems almost entirely lose now, which gives these movies and even greater appeal to me.

bottlesofsmoke wrote: Fri Mar 24, 2023 3:43 pm ... On another note, this is a really beautiful movie aesthetically, despite not being a big budget (I believe they reused old Amberson sets) and a reminder of just what the great craftsman of Hollywood were capable of...

Most definitely in Cat People where that vestibule and staircase are a complete architectural mismatch for Irena's New York apartment building, so much so that Oliver is given the metatextual line "I'm always amazed at what you'll find inside these brownstones" in an attempt to excuse the dissonance! Continuing with The Curse of the Cat People, I'm fairly confident that the exterior, as well as some interior elements, of the aging actress' home were originally used for the famously-deleted boarding house scene from Ambersons.

And the Ambersons staircase also turns up in a different form at the beginning of The Seventh Victim as the entrance hall of the boarding school that Mary is in at the beginning of the fim, walking against the crowd of girls in the first shot, and then at the end of that scene leaving the school for the last time to go into the scary outside world with her ears ringing to an ode to courage being recited by the other girls.
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I think my favourite Val Lewtons would go The Seventh Victim, The Curse of the Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie, The Ghost Ship, in that order. I think Cat People is more important for its place in the canon, whilst the other films which picked up and built upon the groundwork it set down are even better. That is why I was a little upset when Criterion just released Cat People and nothing further after that. If it is OK, I'll copy my post on The Curse of the Cat People from the "UK TV" thread into this one as well, which were my thoughts a couple of months ago upon revisiting that magnificent film in a double bill with The Exorcist (which is a film that I am not sure that think it particularly successful, but makes for an amazing companion to the Lewton):

The most exciting news of the week involves repeats however. The biggest news of the week is that the wonderful The Curse of the Cat People (more children's story and fairy tale than horror film sequel) is getting a rare showing on BBC2 at 1:55 a.m. on Saturday 29th, taking place during the 'lost hour' when the clocks go back (and in an amusing thematic double bill following a screening of The Exorcist!)

This double bill of The Exorcist and The Curse of the Cat People turned out to be an absolutely inspired one! Thematically in the form of children in some ways turning or 'being tempted' away from their somewhat brittle and on edge parents for more indulgent supernatural figures that may just be conjured up by their own minds, but also the pairing worked extremely well structurally too. What I mean by that, is that The Exorcist starts off with all that material about Father Karras and his mother before it gets sublimated and overwhelmed by the main plot of a young girl playing up and externalising her inner demons to maybe get her mother to focus on her problems; whilst in The Curse of the Cat People it is mostly about a young girl feeling demonised by her parents for having a vibrant inner life, until in the final stages it really turns into a story about that old woman and her adult daughter's tragic relationship to provide the emotional impact.

So whatever issues that the child may have, and are being buffeted around by as the fundamental innocent almost unable to comprehend why they feel the way they do, these films are perhaps even more powerful because they are using a child through which to filter very adult concerns about parentage, what loving a parent (or a child) really means, and issues around grief and loss that are still there no matter how old the child is when they lose their parent. The child loses their connection to an imaginary friend, but regain a second chance with their actual parents; the adults are having their actual parents die after being rejected by them, either through a dementia-style illness or just the parent not loving them, and are left drifting in a terrible limbo without the catharsis of knowing that they were able to fix their relationship.
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I still have major issues with The Exorcist though, in the sense that whilst I think that the first half of the film when it mostly focuses on the more 'grounded' stuff is excellent (although I do find some of the attempts to portray Karras as a kind of working-Joe, blue collar, Rocky avant la lettre figure rather inadvertently comic! Though that provides the class contrast with the MacNeill family, I guess) that any ambiguity is thrown out of the window (literally!) once it becomes about pea soup vomiting, head spinning and bed bouncing. When the two priests are just reduced to shouting a single line over and over again for a minute straight, I think we have reached the terminal point of some kind of spectacle cinema there, where nobody knows where to go from there to move things forward, except to keep on repeating the same rote behaviours over and over again.

It is rather disappointing because there was a real opportunity, which is absolutely there as a subtext but completely smothered to death by the head-slappingly blunt literalism in the second half of the film, about Reagan being a character pushed to the margins of her single parent family by her harried and brittle mother who always seems distracted by functions and rehearsals than by listening to her daughter. And the implication seems to be that Burke Dennings, after behaving boorishly at the party, goes even further and it is implied at least attempts to sexually abuse Regan alone upstairs in her room with her, before he is thrown from the window with his neck twisted around by the Devil that has already laid claim to her body for its own evil whims. In some ways being possessed by the Devil, rather than her mother actually caring for her, was the thing that prevented her abuse from occurring! Or maybe it did occur and this triggered off her change in behaviour (to "that thing not being my daughter") into acting out in increasingly extreme ways, as if desperately trying to get her mother's attention without coming right out and saying why she was so troubled? (Although the notorious crucifix scene kind of acts as the blunt act of self-harm climax of all that! Which also conveniently destroys any evidence of an assault, if one had occurred)

A much more ambigious and careful film would perhaps have been able to balance those 'all in the mind or the actual Devil?' aspects much better than this film did. I think perhaps most telling of all is that when Max von Sydow's Father Merrin character comes into the picture, he immediately dismisses all of the surrounding context or meaning that we have built up (even Father Karras' mother issues that he is interjecting into the otherwise unrelated situation) to bluntly brings things down to a simple battle between the forces of Good against Evil. Maybe that is a comment about how once organisations, like the Catholic Church, get involved in specific cases that the people suffering inside those situations don't particularly matter as individuals any more, but more as exploitable symbols - that whatever brought them to the point of being possessed by "Evil", understanding and empathy is treated as irrelevant (even a liability) now that they are just in the hands of the organisation to perform their standard operating procedure. Maybe that is why there is so much conversation around the ethics of the confessional box rubbing up against real world ethics and practicalities earlier on in the film? And maybe that is why eventually Father Merrin fails and Father Karras (albeit sacrificially) succeeds, because whilst the standard tactics pushing 'in your face' reality of situations into abstract ritual and ignoring the suffering of the individual at the heart of the situation can get you so far in 'curing' them; only empathy for what that person is going through (even if it runs the risk of 'infecting' you as a consequence of getting too close) has the potential of resolving the trauma going on in the real world.

But... whilst I like thinking about the issues of the film (and have absolutely no problem with the wonderful performances by the cast. And of course Tubular Bells!) I still have issues with the over the top special effects which just throws me out of it every time they occur. It's painful to watch The Exorcist because of that potential for ambiguity that just gets lost. But, hey, that's what made the film so notorious and a big box office hit, so what do I know?

(And at least we later on had by far the best of the series, The Exorcist III, that walks that ambigious line far better)
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Compared to The Exorcist however, The Curse of the Cat People is a masterclass in walking that tightrope between reality and fantasy. The parents of Amy are constantly portrayed as undermining and belittling their daughter's inner world, and in some ways this film is about celebrating Amy's resilience to still having an inner world in the face of ever more vocal prejudice against it, and demands that she renounce her faith in it. Her parents in some ways are still somewhat damaged and traumatised by the events of Cat People looming large in their own minds, and rather than this being an 'actual' supernatural film about the ghost of the first wife Irena coming back to torment the spawn of her husband's new marriage as a kind of revenge (which after some of Oliver and Alice's behaviour behind Irena's back in Cat People, I would argue that she might have been within her rights to do!), it is actually about how parents stuck with their thoughts in the past end up badly damaging their children. Amy's vibrant inner fantasy world (in which a carelessly left out picture of the beautiful Irena gets folded into her image of what her imaginary friend looks like), is shown throughout as perfectly healthy here (anyone who can be happy within themselves, is never truly lonely); it is particularly Oliver's issues with his first wife that are ironically tormenting him, influencing his behaviour and potentially causing issues with his new wife and especially in his far too blunt treatment of his daughter's pure (if occasionally dangerously naive, whether practically so in the bookending accidental ruining of the birthday party invitations at the opening, or more worryingly with the wonderfully humane moment of hugging the potential murderer ending!) approach to the world.

In that sense the old woman, Mrs Farris, in the Old Dark House treating her still present and living daughter as an ignorable ghost is the moral lesson end result of being far too in thrall to the ghosts of the past (with a tinge of Great Expectations to it). That may be a lesson that Oliver and Amy do not particularly take on board, but in some ways they don't need to (much as Regan doesn't need to understand her facilitator role for larger issues in The Exorcist), since they have been reunited and have another chance to mend the bonds of parent and child. Whilst the Curse of the Cat People is of course Amy's story primarily, and is driven by her actions througout, I love that really the emotional climax of the film is in that tragic relationship between Mrs Farris (who seems to maybe be a drinker? Or just withdrawing into dementia?) and her adult daughter. It may just have been because since the last time I watched this film I found myself placed in a very similar situation so can really empathise much more with the character of the adult daughter now, desperately trying to show affection but getting not just no response but active antagonism from the parent that they just want to acknowledge them, and finding themselves somewhat unwillingly pushed into the 'monster' role. To the extent that they maybe could have hurt the child who comes blundering in there concerned only with their own issues rather than those of others (though she is only six years old, so that is too much responsibility to place on her!) and oblivious both to their effect, the damage they have done and the danger they were in. That almost Coriolanus-like moment in Elizabeth Russell's performance where the potential to blind violence is in some ways tamed by being given a moment of affection long denied to her from her own, now dead, mother, was so wonderfully done that it brought me to tears. Tears for the tragedy of the loss, and that the adult daughter never got to say goodbye to her mother ("You took even this last moment away from me". Although the mother would likely have denied this to her even without the presence of an interceding third party anyway), but also for the end of a dreadfully prolonged era of that woman's life.

What will that woman move onto now that she is not under the thumb of her matriarch any more? Will she leave the Old Dark House, or transform it? There is a potential for a brighter future for that woman as an adult without her parent, as compared to the juvenile Amy being reconciled with her father. However I cannot help but see this ending through the lens of the other magnificent Elizabeth Russell supporting role in the Val Lewton production from just the year previous, the supremely dark The Seventh Victim, in which Russell's dying character is again on the margins of the story for the majority of the time but in her few brief appearances as the next door apartment owner of to the room that the hounded by Satanist cult older sister has rented for mysterious (insurance?) purposes, she provides an added spin on the fatalistic and death-obsessed storyline. In The Seventh Victim's incredibly dark ending:

Spoiler for The Seventh Victim

her dying character despite being scared of her imminent death through illness gets dressed up to go out 'one last time' to dance, passing by the older sister who herself has inevitably been drawn/forced back to that rented room next door that contains the chair and noose set up in it, long prepared for the inescapable suicide. Russell's otherwise uncredited and anonymous character gets the honour there of the final brief but incredibly powerful scene, and quotation of that film.

bottlesofsmoke wrote: Fri Mar 24, 2023 3:43 pmAll throughout Cat People, Irena is being told to forget her European past, leave behind the silly traditions of her people and assimilate; her inability to do so puts her at odds with society and the status quo. In Curse, Irina becomes a part of Amy’s life, and though she isn’t related to her by blood, she’s a still a part of her family. By entering into Amy’s life, she is the passing on to the next generation the traditions of her homeland and people. She shares wisdom with her, provides comfort, sings her a traditional lullaby; her favorite painting, one depicting a cat, which is so important to her people’s history, hangs in the house. She isn’t the assimilated American that people in the first film want her to become, and her experience and heritage becomes a boon to her family. It may not be as major of a theme as some other parts of these two movies, but to me it has always stuck out as tying a beautiful little bow on the multi-faceted tragedy first movie.

Great point. I love how Amy’s “childlike” elasticity of schematic rule formation provides the inclusivity that “mature” parties cannot permit let alone access as an option. I wonder how WWII informed the drastic change in thematic attitude and tone between films across just two years. I'm particularly curious if makeshift families were more commonplace and becoming publicly valued during the U.S.’s time in the war (which likely began while Cat People was being filmed/in post?) when so many family dynamics shifted as the men left home. Not only could an acclimation -and affirmation of gratitude- to this sudden forced change affect the comfort in human camaraderie flexing and bleeding roles, evidencing a positive impact on personal functioning through support (the very thing the first film's milieu lacked), but I could see this playing into the international inclusion as well. I obviously wasn't alive to know if any of this holds ground, but I'd hypothesize that the U.S. of 1941 was in an insular period of static constructs, without yet receiving the gift of desperation opening peripheries to new ways of operating and needing support, while by 1944 the U.S. had emerged from not just a hive of rigid parameters on socialization, but were actively collaborating with other nations for a common goal on a global level. That disruption of myopic nationalism into internationalist appreciation could have maybe subliminally informed the change we see between the two films, as related to Irena's immigrant status being welcomed more fluidly.