Within the first ten seconds of You Won’t Be Alone, an intriguing-enough sounding movie with Noomi Rapace concerning a witch in Macedonia, a cat is eaten alive by some creature off-screen. I didn’t find out what the creature was because I turned off the movie after listening to its little bones get pulverized in the monster’s maw.

And ya know? I’m fucking tired of watching cats die in movies.

It feels like this piece has been a long time comin’.

On-screen cat deaths are usually a punchline, a mistake, or the product of a sadist’s gruesome machination. They are the animal equivalent of the dead prostitute who is merely a stepping-stone to catching “the killer”.

In Dogtooth, a criminally sheltered teenager stabs a cat to death with a pair of garden shears because his father told him they are evil. In The Boondock Saints, a flustered ex-mobster pounds his fists on the counter, causing his pistol to fire and splatter a cat against the wall. In The Shape of Water, the amphibious humanoid eats the head off a cat whose owner has given the creature shelter in his home. In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a cat is mutilated and left in the shape of a swastika on our detective-protagonist’s doorstep. In The Last Exorcism, a possessed girl smashes a cat to death with a camera. In Inside Llewelyn Davis, where tracking down an elusive orange cat is a continual subplot, our protagonist’s car hits a different orange cat (symbolism), which limps off the road where it presumably suffers until it dies alone in the middle of nowhere. I could go on for several more paragraphs, for this list doesn’t even include television shows.

In Pet Sematary, where the family cat, Churchill (“Church”), is fatally hit by a truck and buried in the titular “sematary,” he actually returns from the dead (yay!) and is an evil dick (boo!).

Cat deaths have become so associated with sadism that they are thrown into true stories even if they didn’t actually happen. For example, in Lords of Chaos, a biopic concerning the Norwegian Black Metal scene of the 1990s, a cat is seen hanging from a noose in one of the band member’s (“Dead”) bedrooms. Black Metal bands were known for gruesome performances, real-life violence, and, most notoriously, for burning down medieval-era churches throughout Norway. It wasn’t enough to show the bands engaging in self-mutilation and throwing pig heads at the audience during their shows, for the filmmakers really needed to show how crazy these guys were by having them kill a cat, which never happened.  

“Jack Kilmer’s performance as the band’s frontman Dead has received praise for being the most accurate portrayal in the film, with the exception of one scene where he has a cat hanging from his room. The real Dead never killed any cats but did chase them off for fun.”

Cats and dogs (and cat and dog owners) have a rivalry that stretches back to the beginning of human history, probably. “Are you a dog or cat person?” is as ubiquitous as asking, “What’s your sign?” (I’m a Cancer, by the way, which is probably why I wrote this article.) The stereotypes for dog owners are the status quo, nuclear family in the suburbs with the golden-doodle, the fit, beautiful, Weekend Warriors who grab an over-hopped IPA at their local microbrew (which, of course, allows dogs), the bleach-blonde Valley Girl with the rat-looking thing in her purse, the Chicanos with their cool cars and pit bulls on chain leashes, etc. etc. etc.

On the other hand, cat people are weirdos. They’re portrayed as “Crazy Cat Ladies,” anti-social gamers and/or conspiracy theorists, nerds, dweebs, dorks, or effete beta males—a stereotype this excellent book counters. (A few of its constituents who buck the Cat Man generalities include Winston Churchill, Marlon Brando, Ernest Hemingway, Nikola Tesla, Raymond Chandler, Haruki Murakami, and Charles Bukowski.)

If that wasn’t enough, the way violence against dogs is treated in film is gut-wrenching. Sometimes, they are the tear-jerker endings. See Old Yeller, Marley & Me, I Am Legend, and Where the Red Fern Grows—here, one of the dogs dies of a broken heart on the freakin’ grave of the other dog after it was attacked by a mountain lion (i.e. a big-ass cat), which was then hacked to death with a hatchet. I mean, come on.

In the John Wick series, the entire motivation of why our titular character comes out of retirement as the world’s most deadly assassin to kick Russian mafia ass was because the idiots killed his dog. And I get it! Had anyone done the same to one of my cats, I’d make John Wick look like a Quaker.  

In 25^th Hour, Edward Norton’s character rescues and revives a dog who was brutalized and left for dead in Brooklyn—the dog survives throughout the movie and is a symbol of the protag’s acceptance that he’s going to prison when turning him over to a friend. In The Royal Tenenbaums, a dog’s sudden death helps a family to reconcile their grievances, accept that they need help, get married already, whatever.

Moreover, for almost all of these situations, the dog perishes off-screen, sparing the viewer of witnessing a mutilated animal. For instance, in Buffalo ’66, analogous to the many cruel deaths cats face in movies, our protag’s father kills a puppy with his bare hands. However, the death is off-screen and we never see its little body. In the new Hulu miniseries, Under the Banner of Heaven, there are two difficult scenes concerning dog torture and death. While horrific, their killings are also shielded from the viewer and in the latter scene, the director does a first-person (dog) POV shot without ever even showing the animal. Furthermore, the culprits of these acts are representative of religious persecution and a sadistic family patriarch. They are not the confused man-child (Dogtooth), the sympathetic creature out-of-water (literally) (The Shape of Water), or brooding rocker (Lords of Chaos). Dog violence is not throw-away violence for shock value, confusion, or–God forbid–comedic relief.

*Okay, so the dog death in Fear sounds hideous and gruesome and more akin to what we typically see concerning cats, but I have only read its description and don’t plan to seek out the clip for verification.

This is not to say that there is a tepid adoration for felines in America. If there’s one positive effect of social media, I’d argue that it’s changed the perception of cats from being misanthropic, coddled, and sometimes nasty animals, to affectionate and entertaining goofballs (usually). In fact, the fifth most popular docuseries on Netflix in 2019, Don’t F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer, concerned a network of internet sleuths tracking down a man who killed cats in a pair of viral videos and bringing him to justice. The love for the innocent creatures catalyzed the obsessive search and yet, it feels like the art I see doesn’t reflect this ardor whatsoever. Had two puppies been suffocated to death in a vacuum sealed bag, I wouldn’t’ve been surprised if the CIA, FBI, Marines, Delta Force, Army Rangers, whoever the fuck got Bin Laden, were unleashed to find the psychopath—the fact that his human victim was largely forgotten is a topic for another piece.

Sure, a lot of this is just a feeling and not an exact science. It feels like dog people are dog people and cat people are animal lovers. Perhaps that’s an oversimplification, downright wrong, or completely backward. Maybe it’s recency bias, but I’ve only heard dog owners joke about harming cats and never vice versa.

While I’d personally like to see fewer (read: none) cats being slaughtered in movies and shows, I’m also against censorship and believe in expansive artistic expression. So long as no actual cats are being harmed in the making, a ban on portraying the violence is far from what I’m jostling for here.

No, I don’t believe allowing a consumer to make an informed decision to be “Cancel Culture”—the same goes for boycotts. “Cancel Culture” would not be allowing the art to exist or censoring it to appease an offended group. Here, for cat murder, that group would include me.

But what about a content warning before opening credits for animal cruelty? Do these already exist? My research shows that they do, kinda? However, I never seem to see them, especially not for movies. And when I do, it’s while I’m watching cable in a hotel room and it says “violence” or “nudity” or “smoking” …

I’m not sure what the solution is—or if there’s even a solution to be had—but I did locate a database where you can filter that anthology series you’re about to watch Friday night.

Unsurprisingly, it’s called doesthedogdie.com . . .

– Ben D’Alessio