L. Andrew Cooper's Horrific Scribblings

Every now and then I succumb to cuteness. Samara, however, has requested that I base a character on her, one that slaughters all the “insects,” whatever that means.

Samara, ruler of my household, begrudgingly poses for this blog

9. Cat O’ Nine Tails (1971): Dario Argento’s second feature lacks the crazy cat moments memorable in Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), which has a character who eats cats, and Inferno (1980), which has a character randomly mauled by cats who fly at her from the sides of the screen. A cat makes the title, however, because our furry Internet-ruling friend provides a metaphor for the entire film, the mystery behind which is like the titular fetish device, so twisted that following its nine suspects/possibilities is like a kind of tickle-clawing torture.

8. Cat in the Brain (1990): Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento supposedly had trouble getting along for years because Fulci piggybacked on Argento’s early success with animal-themed giallo films (Italian crime thrillers) such as Fulci’s derivative-but-good Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971). Cat in the Brain, a late Fulci effort, follows Argento in having a mainly metaphorical connection to our furry friends, who are tearing up the brain of Fulci himself, who stars as himself, a director whose past films (shown amply in flashbacks) are manifesting in present-day murders. This cat won’t likely please you if you’re not a Fulci fan, but if you like the Godfather of Gore, it’s postmodern catnip.

7. Kuroneko (1968): Stylish Italian films and stylish Japanese films have been trading ideas for decades (more on that in a moment), and this classic Japanese kaidan (wronged women with long black hair out for revenge, most familiar to Americans from the remake of The Ring, 1998 / 2002) hybrid features awesome cat-woman ghost dueling, glorious use of black and white tonality, and some samurai for good measure. Not the best Japanese horror from the 60s, but in my top five, and my favorite one focused on cats. The title means black cat.

6. Cat’s Eye (1985): The frame story focuses on a cat erring on a sort of quest to rescue young Drew Barrymore, whom he reaches in time for the third and final story in the anthology. The third story, about the girl’s (and cat’s) battle with a breath-stealing mini-monster, sort of sucks now that I’m grown up. However, the first two, about quitting smoking corporate-style and going out on a ledge for a married woman (literally), are based on classic Stephen King shorts and hold up due to dark humor, massive tension, and great performances from leads James Woods and Robert Hays. The cat gets important moments in both the grown-up stories, too.

5. Pet Sematary (1989): Everybody thinks about Gage, who played with Mommy and is now going to play with you, but really, Church, the cat, is the star villain of the piece, especially if you think about the Stephen King novel along with the film. Church snuffs it, and that’s going to make the kids sad, so why not see if that supernatural pet cemetery resurrects him like the neighbor says it will? And if it works on the cat…? What’s good for the cat ain’t good for the kiddies. A cat would be the first to tell you not to follow a cat’s example, and my cat Samara would be the first to tell you that people don’t listen to her advice often enough.

4. Cat People (1942): This Lewton/Tourneur collaboration makes some lists of greatest horror films of all time, and with good reason: it’s one of the best films to replicate the effect I forever associate with Turn of the Screw, i.e., leaving in suspension questions of whether the horror is primarily psychological or supernatural. So is this a werecat movie or isn’t it? It’s beautifully shot, with beautiful people and beautiful cats, and the reflections on the psychology and beliefs of the times are so compelling that suspension and suspense become delightfully relentless.

3. Cat People (1982): More a fantasy about the first film than a remake, this is my favorite werecat movie. The transformation sequences are good but not great (appearing not long after American Werewolf in London (1981), they seem uninspired). What is great is the music, famously David Bowie’s “Theme from Cat People (Putting Out Fire),” but really the entire synth-filled soundtrack, eighties dreamy at its best. What is greater are the sex-infused storyline and eye-popping presences of Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell. The first film’s premise gets dilated: certain people get turned on and become black leopards, and to become human again, they must kill. Oh. My. Violent estrus.

2. “The Black Cat” from Two Evil Eyes (1990): Yes, I wrote a book about Argento, and yes, he gets to have two on this list, because although many have worked with Poe’s “Black Cat,” and many other films have that title (including one by Fulci), this one—half of Argento’s collaboration with George A. Romero, Two Evil Eyes—is my favorite. It ranges across Poe, featuring Harvey Keitel as Roderick Usher, a photographer who captures crime scenes (including one right out of “Pit and the Pendulum”). The ending makes kitties even more horrific than Poe does. Ah, Dario.

1. Hausu (1977): Ruled by the wild colors and non-rational narrative structure of the Italian films that were becoming popular in Japan at the time, Hausu (House) is one of my favorite films of all time, and since a white cat presides over the house that gobbles up schoolgirls, it’s one of Samara’s, too. Flying severed heads, carnivorous pianos, dancing skeletons, and more await you inside this brilliant little film, colorful, hallucinogenic, funny, scary, must-see.

Look on the Internet Movie Database, and you’ll see a tagline for Roman Polanski’s 1965 film Repulsion that almost preempts interpretation: “A classic chiller of the ‘Psycho’ school!” Marketing-wise, the claim hits its target because Repulsion clothes “higher” art-house sensibilities in lower production values and in horror-genre conventions, just as Hitchcock decided to do with the film that he brought to Universal (home of the horror monsters). Like Hitch, Polanski uses black-and-white grit to showcase a story of a woman in distress that takes an unexpected turn involving two grisly murders in a space distorted by her psycho-logical state. Polanski even uses a beautiful lead whose sweetness misleads with innocence—and although Tony Perkins’s defiance of Robert Bloch’s vision of Norman Bates as an awkward and homely killer is unforgettable in Psycho, I don’t think many would deny Catherine Deneuve as Carol in Repulsion (or as anyone at any point in her career) rivals Perkins with talent and circles him with her stunning screen presence. Her largely nonverbal performance, combined with her environment’s responses to her, conveys the psychological depth that Perkins and “mother” communicate by doing the police in different voices, creating misdirection and ambiguity until a solution may or may not appear at the end. (Beware continuing—here there be spoilers!)

Like much else in Hitchcock’s oeuvre, Psycho’s ending has received a great deal of commentary and debate, so to claim that the ending—the psychoanalytic revelation of the shared mind/body of Norma/Norman Bates resulting from a psychotic solution to an Oedipal struggle gone terribly awry—is unequivocally sincere would require proof and argument I am uninterested in providing here. However, the psychiatrist who shows up at the end provides this explanation, and taking it at face value is possible.

Repulsion, like Psycho, has a twist involving its main character’s mind, but its central psycho, Carol, doesn’t go out on a frenzy to claim any victims. She stays home, mostly having conflicts with herself; although Norma/Norman’s victims come to her/his motel and house like flies to a web, she/he still ends up coming after them, whereas Carol’s victims, both men, have to throw themselves at her, the first breaking into her apartment and the second attempting rape, before she attacks. Prior to these attacks, the film demonstrates that Carol is very reticent around men. She refuses a date; she reacts badly when her sister engages in a sexual relationship and brings a man into their shared space; she shows disgust when a man kisses her. Her initial demonstration of the film’s title, repulsion, seems to be a reaction to men, an allergy to heterosexual sex. Ergo, the pathology she exhibits in the film’s second half, as she lets her surroundings decay (she leaves out food and eventually corpses to rot, neglects her own hygiene, etc.), links to her aversion to sex, adding up in the end to what seems to be a sexual pathology, psychoanalysis’s specialty. A psychiatrist doesn’t show up with an explanatory key as he does at the end of Psycho, but, as Carol does emerge as a psychopath, the film adds up in a way that forms a lock that seems the perfect shape.

Two shots in particular support reading Carol as a psychopath. The first shows her walking past a car wreck on the London streets. Everyone stops to look but her. Her lack of interest and empathy suggests social disconnection, a disconnection echoed in the film’s final image, which shows her as a child in a family photo. Here, she looks in a direction opposite her family group, first seeming perhaps to look at a man who might be the source of her androphobia, but then, as the frame tightens around her, she appears just to gaze away, again disconnected from all around her. This reinforcement of her social disconnection suggests it has little to do with any traumas she may have experienced, little to do with the men who keep forcing themselves on her, and everything to do with a pathology that has followed her since childhood. Psychoanalysis often traces disorders back to developmental interruptions, and this film, made during a peak of pop psychoanalytic dominance, embeds psychoanalytic causality for Carol’s behavior. Ambiguity persists, so the explanation is not totalizing or necessary, but it oozes from the film’s celluloid pores.

It also appears in a tagline from the film’s poster-turned-DVD-cover: “The nightmare world of a Virgin’s dreams becomes the screen’s shocking reality!” Dreams, the province of psychoanalysis—check. Virginal-frigid-sex-phobic-possibly-queer-woman, the “problem” woman of psychoanalysis—check. Carol makes psychoanalytic interpretive “sense” in 1965.

Of course, she also makes “sense” as a critique of psychoanalysis from a feminist perspective. After all, the men she kills are both attackers. The first stalks her and breaks into her apartment when she refuses his advances, and the second, her landlord, returns her rent and expects payment in sex instead, which he tries to take against her will. In 2015, if not 1965, watching this film, I suspect she might be able to plead self-defense if she didn’t present herself as batshit crazy, which, unfortunately, she likely would, as, by the end of the film, she is seeing hands reach out of her apartment wall at her, which the film gives us no reason to believe is not happening… other than the bits of context I’ve provided that suggest an otherwise realist context in which she is crazy (in 1968, however, Polanski would use Rosemary’s Baby to show the dangers of not believing the woman everyone believes is paranoid and losing her mind in a confined urban space).

Before I close, however, I want to offer a third, more obvious interpretation for what Repulsion is about, and that is, simply, repulsion. To be more precise, it might be what Jean-Paul Sartre calls nausea. I will not allow myself to travel too far into the philosophy in Carol’s mother tongue, though, and will stick, with one exception, to a riff on Polanski’s title and say that Carol doesn’t have to be disgusted and repelled by men in particular. Indeed, while she does have a bigger problem with her sister’s new boyfriend because he’s the reason for her sister leaving her alone for days, she also has a problem with her sister leaving a rabbit in the refrigerator for her to have for dinner later, a rabbit that, like men and other items, she leaves out to rot. What do the rabbit and the men have in common? They are potential objects of appetite. If Carol is rejecting appetite, her rejection and the repulsion that drives it run deeper than sex.

The only place it might be for psychoanalysis is the place that Freud describes as beyond the pleasure principle, but even his heady concept of the “death drive” doesn’t get at Carol’s repulsion. Although she re-pulses, or reverses the drives of hunger and sex, she is not self-destructive. She begs her sister, a lifeline, to stay; she defends herself against attacks, vigorously. Her homicidal acts are not externalizations of a suicidal impulse. The re-pulse is not reducible to an im-pulse at all.

Alone, depressed, and alienated, Carol, a French woman in London, doesn’t want to let the outside in. After her sister leaves, she retreats to her apartment and tries to shut everyone and everything out. She has to eat but doesn’t want to. Her acts of resistance result in the decay of both her food and her body. She doesn’t have to have sex, but men try to force the issue. Her acts of resistance result in the decay of their bodies. Resistance ultimately appears—figuratively or literally, the film stops making distinctions—as cracks in her closed-off apartment’s walls, then hands reaching for her through the walls. The harder she tries to repel the outside world she wishes to reject, the more it presses in on her. As Sartre writes in the play No Exit, “Hell is other people.” Hell, a subject informing Rosemary’s Baby as well as Polanski’s The Ninth Gate (1999), is also a description of Repulsion, or maybe repulsion as that which Carol fails to accomplish.

What she wants is emotional autonomy. The desire may be impossible to fulfill, but that rock is where her dreams crash. If she is actually a virgin (the film, as opposed to the tagline, does not say as much definitively), sex may be a realm she defends more successfully than others, but that success may result from sex’s relative expendability among humans’ hierarchy of needs (an expendability psychoanalysts would loathe to admit). The madness of social isolation and repulsion may not be the center of Repulsion—the madness of company, the madness of ending up back in the world, may be the most repellent thing of all.