Horror Hates Cats

Deadman’s Tome is home to Book of Horrors, a horror anthology loaded with terrifying horror short stories that’ll chill you to the bone!

Cats are either adored or hated with disgust with very little in between. Ancient Egyptians treated cats as if they’re divine, while medieval Europeans would burn them for being witch familiars. And while cat commercials may shower the feline with love, horror genre as a whole seems to loathe them. cats seem to only have one role in horror, to serve as a bad omen, curse, or even KILL!

The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe: A classic example of a cat suffering mutilation and death by the hands of a raging alcoholic that is later overcome with guilt. The black cat is hated, but then

Stephen King’s Pet Sematary: As an homage to “the Monkey’s Paw” the cat dies, is buried, and then later returns but not as its former self. The cat is a bit smelly and a little dead.

Rats in the Walls by H. P. Lovecraft: Nigger Man helps the narrator discover the insidious rats in the walls, leading the man to discover a world of evil living under his house. It takes an evil feline to detect an evil entity.

Sergio Martino’s Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, is a retread of The Black Cat, one of the main characters is afraid of a cat named Satan. The plot mostly deals with murder and betrayal rather than guilt, with an annoying cat giving away the location of the body. I wanted to talk about this film only to showcase the beauty that is Edwige Fenech. That’s a face that armies would die for.

Cats with a taste for human flesh cropped up in Rene Cardona’s Mexican schlocker Night of a Thousand Cats , where a misogynistic woman killer feeds his victims to his half-starved pets. The purr-fect (horrible, I know) plot line for a Deadman’s Tome story, but through a cat biting off a dick to outweigh the misogyny.

Speaking of cats in horror, check out Oreo – Blair Frison. It may not read like Edgar Allan Poe, but it definitely borrows from it. Can’t have enough cat stories.