Event Details

Presented by Music Box of Horrors, Shudder and Severin Films

During the remarkably fruitful four years Val Lewton spent as head of RKO’s horror division, the dozen or so films he saw through production were made with three simple constraints: a budget of $150,000, a runtime of 75 minutes or less, and a studio-dictated title around which each film’s script would be written. An uncredited screenwriter on all of his productions, Lewton thrived creatively under these circumstances, disguising a paucity of resources with shadowy, dread-stricken atmospherics and frequently ignoring the plot directions implied by his assigned titles. A prime example of this last point is The Curse of the Cat People, a film packaged to suggest a cash-in sequel to Lewton’s breakout horror hit Cat People but delivering instead a melancholic supernatural Christmas fantasy. Picking up some years after the original film, Curse focuses on Amy (Ann Carter), the moony, introverted daughter of Cat People protagonist Oliver Reed (Kent Smith). Ostracized by her classmates, Amy seeks out the companionship of some strange adults living nearby, befriending the ghost of her father’s cursed first wife Irena (Simone Simon) and becoming an unwitting participant in a seething familial conflict that constantly threatens to turn violent. Initially assigned to novice helmer Gunther von Fritsch, The Curse of the Cat People wound up (uncharacteristically for Lewton) behind schedule and over budget, which necessitated promoting RKO editor Robert Wise to the director’s chair, yielding superlative results. Every bit as unsettling as its predecessor, The Curse of the Cat People proves December is a natural fit for Lewton’s trademark disquieting ambience, dredging up all the sadness and horror you could possibly feel spending the holidays with your family. – Text courtesy of the Chicago Film Society

35mm print courtesy of the Library of Congress

Preceded by THE OCCUPANT OF THE ROOM (Dir. Kier-La Janisse, 2025, 30min, DCP)

A schoolteacher’s late-night arrival at a hotel in the Alps without a reservation leaves him with no option but to accept the room of a missing hotel guest — leading to a sleepless night full of strange and uncanny occurrences. The narrative debut of Kier-La Janisse, director of the SXSW award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, and author of the pioneering horror memoir House of Psychotic Women, is based on the classic chiller of the same name by Algernon Blackwood.