When Horror Eats Its Own Brain
By 1990, Italian horror maestro Lucio Fulci was tired, cranky, and apparently bored of directing zombies gnawing intestines for the tenth time. So what did he do? He made Cat in the Brain, a movie about himself losing his mind because he makes too many violent horror movies. In other words, it’s Lucio Fulci filming Lucio Fulci being haunted by Lucio Fulci’s recycled gore footage. If this sounds like the world’s first arthouse horror therapy session, that’s because it is. Unfortunately, therapy isn’t cheap, and instead of paying for an analyst, Fulci subjected us to 90 minutes of self-flagellation with stock footage.
The Plot (If You Can Call It That)
Fulci plays… Fulci. A tired horror director plagued by visions of murder, dismemberment, and general splatter. Instead of retiring, meditating, or just taking a vacation in Tuscany with a bottle of Chianti, he decides to see a psychiatrist. Unfortunately, the shrink is also a serial killer who hypnotizes Fulci into believing he’s the one doing all the murders.
So Fulci staggers around Rome convinced he’s dismembering prostitutes, strangling wives with piano wire, and running over tramps, while in reality he’s just having nervous breakdowns in piazzas. The real killer—the psychiatrist—is murdering everyone while Fulci hallucinates, sweats, and eats pasta badly. Eventually, the cops catch on, shoot the doctor, and clear Fulci. To celebrate, Fulci gets back on a boat, directs another gory scene, and sails away smiling.
If that sounds halfway coherent, it’s only because I just saved you the migraine of piecing it together from endless insert shots of blood-soaked heads, chainsaws, and Nazi orgies recycled from Fulci’s past films.
The Title: Blame the Cat
Why is it called Cat in the Brain? Does a cat actually crawl inside anyone’s skull? Nope. Does the feline symbolize Fulci’s artistic conscience clawing at his mind? Maybe. Or maybe it’s just an excuse for an edgy title. Either way, don’t expect Garfield popping out of a cerebellum. The only cat here is the audience, pawing at the remote in hopes of escaping.
Fulci as Fulci: The Director Eats Himself Alive
The bravest (and dumbest) decision Fulci makes is casting himself. He looks perpetually exhausted, wandering through the film like a man trying to remember where he parked. His main acting strategy is “eyebrows of despair,” which works about as well as giving a zombie a tax return. Every time Fulci stares in horror at another hallucination, you can’t help but think he’s not acting—he’s genuinely horrified that his career has boiled down to filming himself having a nervous breakdown.
The Psychiatrist: Worst Medical Advice Ever
Enter Professor Schwarz, Fulci’s therapist. Instead of offering actual psychiatric care, he straps Fulci with hypnosis, buzzers, and murder instructions. Imagine Freud, if Freud also moonlighted as Jack the Ripper. The good professor then gleefully kills random women while Fulci thinks he’s the guilty party. Which begs the question: who would go to a therapist in an Italian horror movie? You’re better off confessing to your butcher.
Gore Recycling Program
Here’s where Fulci really shows his genius—or laziness, depending on your tolerance. Instead of shooting new effects, he raids his back catalog. The Nazi sex party from Ghosts of Sodom, the cannibal banquet from Touch of Death, the oven scenes from Massacre—all chopped up and re-edited as Fulci’s hallucinations. It’s like a “greatest hits” album, except instead of Queen or Bowie, you’re stuck with entrails being slopped around like leftover spaghetti.
The effect isn’t shocking so much as numbing. After the tenth montage of decapitations, you stop being disturbed and start thinking about what you’re having for dinner.
The Metaphor Hammer
Cat in the Brain wants to be Fulci’s 8½—a self-reflective meditation on art, madness, and identity. Instead, it plays like Weekend at Bernie’s directed by a man with gout. Subtlety is non-existent. Every scene screams: “Movies rot your brain! Look, I’m Lucio Fulci, and I’m going insane from making these movies!” It’s like being trapped in a lecture where the professor stabs mannequins for emphasis.
Performances: The Walking Dead (And Not the Good Kind)
Aside from Fulci’s walking corpse routine, everyone else exists as meat for the grinder. Prostitutes, wives, random extras—they all get sliced, diced, and fed to the recycling bin. The psychiatrist is gleefully cartoonish, like a Bond villain who traded world domination for stabbing housewives. And the police inspector exists solely to look skeptical until it’s time to shoot someone.
The Ending: Who’s on First?
After all the gore hallucinations, Fulci is cleared of suspicion. The shrink is shot. Fulci happily sails away, filming more carnage on his boat, his psyche miraculously cured by the magic of celluloid. Depending on which cut you watch, the Italian distributor tacked on an alternate ending where a scream suggests Fulci really is a killer. Neither ending makes sense. But by this point, logic has packed its bags and emigrated to France.
The Real Horror: It’s Boring
Here’s the problem with Cat in the Brain: for a movie crammed with murder, mutilation, and Nazis having sex, it’s shockingly dull. The pacing drags, the narrative makes a Möbius strip look straightforward, and the self-indulgence is suffocating. Fulci thought he was baring his tortured soul; what he really bared was his filing cabinet.
High Points (If You Can Call Them That)
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Fulci smashes paint cans with an axe in a rage. Symbolic? Maybe. Therapeutic? Definitely.
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A cat literally digs up a corpse. Finally, the title earns five seconds of relevance.
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Seeing Fulci lose his cool at a restaurant menu because meat reminds him of cannibal scenes. Relatable, if you’ve ever eaten at an Olive Garden.
Low Points (Too Many to Count)
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Endless stock footage stitched together with duct tape.
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A psychiatrist so obviously evil you wonder if Fulci hypnotized himself into believing this was subtle.
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A “meta” concept that collapses into navel-gazing faster than you can say Argento did it better.
Final Thoughts: Nine Lives Too Many
Cat in the Brain is less a film than a cinematic suicide note scrawled in ketchup. Fulci wanted to show us the psychological toll of gore filmmaking, but all he showed us was how lazy and indulgent a director can get when he raids his own editing room.
If you’re looking for terror, look elsewhere. If you’re looking for comedy, the unintentional kind is abundant. If you’re looking for an actual cat in someone’s actual brain, you’ll be bitterly disappointed.
The only thing scary about Cat in the Brain is the thought of watching it twice.
