Now, I’d like to introduce you, dear reader, to the secret third member of the No But Listen team. Meet Scoop:
Like Kevin and I, Scoop is exceptionally dumb and extremely beautiful. She occasionally gets lost walking from room to room, enjoys being swaddled in Kevin’s jumpers, and spends much of her time yelling at birds from our living room window. She’s a stunning dimwit and we love her more than we should.
Which means that we wanted to find some way to bring her in on this month of horror writing. Despite our best efforts, she still hasn’t figured out how to use a keyboard, and her only real interaction with the horror genre is a strange obsession with Bruce Campbell (who she will totter through to shout at every time he happens to be on our screens), and I feared we may not be able to bring our silent partner and third co-editor on to this particular project.
But wait! What’s this? A horror film…for cats? Temptations, the cat food brand, dropped SCAREDY CAT, the so-called first-ever horror movie for our feline friends. And so, what better way to involve our fluffy, terrible daughter in our work than to let her review this landmark piece of horror cinema? I’ll be the one writing the words, of course, since she’s still Jared, 19, but I’ll be intimating her nuanced takes on the cinematic mastery therein. Let’s do this, shall we?
0:10: She’s asleep. I had to rustle a bag of treaties to get her to wake up. I’m sure this happened to Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael all the time.
0:43: After the typecasting of cats as villains after Cats and Dogs 2: The Revenge of Kitty Galore, it’s about time that we saw the embracing of cats as a more sympathetic lead.
1:00: Okay, Scoop is actually quite interested in the ball of yarn. She seems to note the meta-references to Kubrick’s The Shining, which, though obvious, are always welcome.
1:25: Ah, yes – Scoop is a well-versed scholar in the classic gothic, by which I mean, she sat on my lap a few times while I was reading Ann Radcliffe.
1:58: Things falling down that the cat did not hurl to the floor themselves? Truly, a nightmare.
2:10: Honestly, I think Scoop assumes that we’re always just sitting staring at a static television. She seems un-spooked by this.
2:31: People…enjoying themselves? Sharing their passions? Scoop has never been more terrified. I don’t know if I can make her sit through the rest of this. She’ll be up all night. More than normal, anyway.
2:41: Actual cat yawns are scarier than that. Scoop looks like she’s going to unhinge her entire skull when she’s sleepy. Needs more Ancient Evil-esque teeth-flashing.
3:00: Scandalous inaccurate that a cat wouldn’t have just jumped on the counter to slap that milk to the ground and gorge on the mess themselves.
3:22: Using the cucumber as a cat jump-scare is actually (cat-ually, heh) sort of brilliant. Though if you go out of your way to spook your real-life cats with that stuff, I’ll fight you. And so will Scoop.
3:45 And finally, the Shyamalan-ian twist: the house is SURROUNDED by cucumbers. Scoop has fled in terror. Or maybe just because the post came and she wants to smell it. Truly, an enigma.
Overall, Scaredy-Cat is hopefully only the beginning of a true welcoming of cats into the horror genre as viewers, not just as arbiters of evil. I sincerely hope you enjoyed Scoop’s review of this no-doubt soon-to-be classic in the genre, and, who knows? Maybe we’ll bring her back soon for another look at cats in cinema. If she doesn’t sleep through it.
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By Louise and Scoop MacGregor
No But Listen 