The Curse of the Cat People is a 1944 American psychological supernatural thriller film directed by Gunther von Fritsch and Robert Wise, produced by Val Lewton, and starring Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Jane Randolph, and Ann Carter. It tells a story about a young girl who befriends the ghost of her father's deceased first wife, a Serbian fashion designer who descended from a race of people who could transform into cats. The film, which marks Wise's first directing credit, is a sequel to Cat People (1942) and has many of the same central characters, but the plot is only tangentially related to its predecessor.