The Curse of the Cat People is not a horror film, unless you count the horrors of loneliness and misunderstanding. This delicate and gentle tale finds Cat People's Oliver and Alice married and settled in suburban Tarrytown. Their young daughter, Amy (the wonderful Ann Carter), tries to be a good girl, but according to Oliver, she has “too many fancies and too few friends.” And when she does find a friend, she conjures a ghost from her parents' past: Amy's new playmate, invisible to others, is Oliver's dead first wife, Irena. Balancing the eerie and the ordinary—references to Sleepy Hollow, witches, and wishing rings are interspersed with everyday mysteries like the vacuum cleaner that ruffles a model ship's sails—the film beautifully evokes the reality of fantasy in childhood. Like Cat People, Curse presents a richly shaded view of both the sorrows and the comforts to be found in imagination's shadows.
—Juliet Clark