There are a sackful of ways to celebrate, or at least appreciate, Christmas but as I grow older and less dependent on the acquisitive bells and whistles of the Yuletide I grow more interested in the holiday as a popular meditation on the challenges presented to our collective sense of perception.  Hymns and carols through the decades have emphasized the necessity for heightened vigilance in the face of astonishing, fantastic, magical and all together unlikely events that seem invisible to worldly eyes and require the intervention of a middle man to call attention to them.  “Do you hear what I hear?” begins the eponymous composition  by Noël Regny and Gloria Shayne Baker, which goes on to ask further “Do you see what I see?” and “Do you know what I know?”  Written in 1962 to reflect gnawing fears of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the song belongs to the tradition of Charles Wesley’s 1739 hymn “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing!” in its demand for focus on the part of the listener.  “Mark ye well the song we sing,” advises the narrator of Alfred Burt’s “Caroling, Caroling,” while Adolph Adame’s “Cantique de Noël” (known more popularly as “O Holy Night”) importunes the listener to “Fall on your knees/And hear the angel voices.”  In all these songs, the inciting event is the birth of Christ and the arrival of the magi to Bethlehem at the behest of a guiding star.  Louis Armstrong put his own spin on the mythology by swapping out Christ for Jolly Old St. Nick and wondering aloud at every sound from the rooftop “‘Zat You, Santa Claus?”  Whatever its true miracle might be, Christmas expects us all to stay sharp.

The Val Lewton-produced THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE (1944) is the unlikeliest of Christmas movies.  As with HOLIDAY INN (1942), GOING MY WAY (1944) and IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, a lot of this film, co-directed for Lewton at RKO by Gunther von Fritsch and Robert Wise, doesn’t even take place during the Yuletide.  Nevertheless, the heart of the film is in its third act, set smack dab in the middle of the holly-jolliest of holidays.  A sequel to CAT PEOPLE (1942), RKO’s bid to outdo Universal Studios at the horror game, THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE is no mere cash-in and takes an odd tack in furthering the events of the first picture.  In the original, a beautiful Serbian immigrant (Simone Simon) making a new life for herself in New York City is hagged by a superstition that she is one of the title creatures, shapeshifters who transform into feline predators.  Not even the love of a good man (Kent Smith) can save her, especially when the attentions of another woman (Jane Randolph) threaten to pull him away.  Despising Universal’s crass monster franchising, producer Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur steeped CAT PEOPLE in the fragmented psychology of its characters, hitting all the terror stops (including one classic stalking sequence set in a community pool) but never quite playing the card that would explain whether these events really happened or were just the sad sequelae of its heroine’s fatal descent into madness.

In THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE, four-square architect Oliver Reed has married witty, work-a-day, non-feral Alice (Kent Smith and Jane Randolph reprise their roles) and the pair have put the weird events of the original film behind them.  Relocated up the Hudson River to historic Tarrytown, they have raised a daughter, Amy (Ann Carter), to the age of six and seem in all ways the very picture of the perfect American family.  Although the script is signed by DeWit Bodeen, the scenario is informed by memories drawn from Val Lewton’s childhood in Port Chester, New York, in the early part of the 20th Century.  Rather than focus on the adult survivors of CAT PEOPLE, Lewton and his team key in on Amy, a bright and beautiful girl who often seems lost in a world of fairytale fancies and fantasies that her farther worries have crossed a line into “something moody, something sickly.”  RKO wanted a horror film but Lewton imagined a fantasy (which he would have called AMY AND HER FRIEND) and the result leans heavily on the latter, however the studio may have sold the production as more of the same “snarling, clawing killer” of CAT PEOPLE.  An only child with enough of an imagination to mark her as strange by her classmates, Amy fabricates an imaginary friend to help her fill the lonely hours.  When she chances to find a photograph in an end table drawer, Amy has no way of knowing knowing it is of Irina, her father’s first wife, but the image gives a face to her unseen companion.

Val Lewton’s tumultuous relationship with RKO as the head of the studio’s horror unit probably shortened his brief life (he died in 1951, at the age of 46) but the product of this tension was never less than magical and thought-provoking.  Compromise was the crucible in which Lewton’s justly celebrated (now, if less so at the time of their respective releases) RKO horrors were fired.  The power, the strange and enduring charm of THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE, stems from those gauche horror movie tropes to which Lewton was so opposed.  The imagined Irina that helps fill the isolation in Amy’s heart is never less than kind and caring (and is in fact dressed in princess garb, as if she has stepped straight from a storybook), yet Lewton and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca bracket her in noirish shadows that evoke in an adult viewer an essential uncertainty.  Will “the black menace” (as the RKO ads called Irina) revert to her atavistic nature?  Will Amy forsake a world of logic and mundane rationality to follow the dead Irina to the other side?  Or will Oliver and Alice do the “right” thing by their daughter and break her fanciful will in a unnecessarily harsh and even wrong-headed bid to enforce a fallible perception of normalcy?

Complicating (or enriching) the narrative is Amy’s chance friendship with elderly recluse Mrs. Farren (Julia Dean, in her first sound film), a forgotten stage actress who has secluded herself inside a forbidding old Victorian house crammed to the rafters with creepy crap and who is looked after by a middle-aged woman (Elizabeth Russell) who claims to be her daughter but whom the old woman constantly upbraids as a liar and an impostor.  In this sad and claustrophobic milieu, Amy becomes the secret friend, ameliorating loneliness and alienation even as her visits drive the old woman’s rejected daughter to the point of homicidal mania.  THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE doesn’t give its characters an easy time, never takes the easy way out, and ends in a post-Christmas squall through which Amy – punished by her father for refusing to renounce Irina as a figment of her imagination – runs to seek out something like a friend.  The beauty of CURSE is that Lewton and company forsake the need for a villain to turn the plot, suggesting instead how life can become a nightmare through nothing more sinister than the intersection of divergent perspectives, of different coping mechanisms, of different beliefs and dreams.

Using the realm of fantasy to show how so-called reality is often little more than a collective hunch on the part of the most vocal majority, THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE reveals how deeply ingrained in everyday life is the element of make-believe and pushes through to a conclusion that is as satisfying as it is profoundly sad.  Life is lost but eyes, ears and hearts are opened.  While the ending is not happy for every character, the resolution is one of understanding, of compromise and hope… points of intersection for different perspectives that stand out in the darkness like the festive holiday lights we hang on the boughs to herald the conjoined death of the previous twelvemonth and the birth of the new year.