A cult classic from 1977, and the only film its star, Randi Allen, ever made, Cathy’s Curse is an infuriating mix of the brilliantly atmospheric and the stupid, borrowing elements from The Omen and The Exorcist and adding a touch of Dario Argento to shore up the defences.
It was critically panned, I must quickly add, and there is a good reason for that – a disastrous switch of focus towards the end, when Cathy (Allen) is replaced by her mother Vivian (Beverly Murray) at the centre of things and everything goes to the bad.
But until then… the action kicks off in the 1940s with a fatal car accident, and a dad and his daughter dead in a car crash after fleeing the big house where they lived. Forward into the future and George (Alan Scarfe), accompanied by wife Vivian and daughter Cathy, is returning after decades’ absence to the same house, which he left when he was a little boy. The fact that Cathy knows which is her room before being shown to it gets the audience spookometer twitching early on. It twitches increasingly regularly as, in scenes covering the next few weeks, Cathy’s personality changes, especially after she finds an old rag doll in the attic. Soon she is playing a game called “Accident” with the local kids, restaging the car accident that killed her aunt – George’s sister – in the film’s opening moments, right down to the last words spoken between the soon-to-be-dead father and daughter.
Cathy’s unsettling behaviour worsens. She starts to exhibit the ability to zap things with strange noises emanating from her mouth, all the while becoming inordinately attached to her little doll, which now appears to be possessed. It won’t be long before someone is heading out of an upstairs window to their death and George and Vivian – who’s had a nervous breakdown by this point – are being forced to Cathy’s “curse” seriously.
So, as said, a bit of The Omen (the window) and a bit of The Exorcist (possession), the Argento element is the gothic synths supplied by Didier Vasseur’s atmospheric score. Director Eddy Matalon, borrowing a trick from William Friedkin, emphasises the mundanity of everyday life, as a foil for the ghoulishness when it starts happening, and has a nifty, no-budget way with special effects. A strong light on Cathy’s face to suggest some inner power, time-lapse photography as food goes “instantly” mouldy, a stop-frame cut to make someone disappear. Doors slam, windows rattle. Matalon does a lot with very little, scattering snakes, spiders and rats about when necessary.
A bit more attention to continuity – which is shot to shit – would have helped things, and a bit more working through of consequences. The character of the Agatha (Mary Morter) for example. She’s a medium who is introduced as if she’s going to be featuring quite heavily. But she’s almost entirely forgotten about until much later on when she’s wheeled on for some Exorcist-style confrontation between demonic and angelic power.
Allen has a good spooky face and is a real asset. Murray, as her mother, has piercing eyes but hasn’t got the acting skill necessary to provide them with back-up. Alan Scarfe as George – fine and all that, but it’s not about him.
As for the “curse” of the title – the arrival of puberty is what the subtext of a horror movie featuring a young girl would seem to require (see also Regan in The Exorcist). But this film is more interested in female agency – this house is George’s domain but he loses control of it to the women in his life.
Which explains, I suppose, the fatal shift of focus from possessed Cathy to deranged Vivian, a silly, irrational and tiresomely familiar neurotic.
It’s a good-looking film, shot by cinematographer Jean-Jacques Tarbès, who did a few films with Matalon and was also a favourite of Jacques Deray. They shot the psyche-thriller La Piscine together, starring Alain Delon.
But Matalon is not Deray and this is quite a different film of quite a different (financial, if nothing else) order. But Tarbès’s good looks help glue it together and tidy up the loose ends. Cathy’s Curse – you could do worse.
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
