Our Alien World of Childhood: THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE

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Although she often asked for the reasons, my last girlfriend rarely understood why certain films left me in tears. Yet when we saw THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE, she not only cried at the end, she gave way to wracking sobs that went on for several minutes. I could only hold her close until the storm had passed by.

For me, this film has always provoked a complex emotional response. Less a horror film than a troubled fantasy about fantasies, THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE resembles Victor Erice's THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, in that it remembers just how strange a world is childhood. Most films forget, and either fall into the overly-stylized, melodramatic approach of THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, or dilute the everyday strangeness with needlessly "magical" icing, as in PAN'S LABYRINTH. CURSE never falls into these traps.

What the film does, instead, is to maintain a tension between the typically fearful experience of a child, and the supernatural: "Is this *really* happening, or are these purely psychological fantasies?" It also maintains a tension between benevolence and malevolence: "If this *is* really happening, then is the ghost benign, or covertly sinister? Is this an act of compassion, or an attempt at vengeance by proxy?"

To its credit, the film never answers these questions, and maintains its delicate tension right to the ending, perhaps beyond. Consider, for example, the actions of the "ghost" during the climactic sequence: Does the ghost offer protection, or endangerment? Everything depends on the viewer's perspective; the film itself offers no confirmation either way.

How a viewer decides to interpret that sequence might depend on how the viewer feels about CAT PEOPLE, which must be seen before CURSE if the sequel is to make any sense at all. The first film haunts the second, colours almost every mood, and forces me to suspect that the results of this childhood "fantasy" might be darker than the ending implies.

After all, this child will grow up some day... but into what kind of person, amongst what sort of people?

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