The House That Freud Built
Every so often, Hollywood unearths a film so strange, so unsettling, that you wonder if the reels were stored in a padded room before being shipped to theaters. The Mafu Cage is one such cinematic asylum escapee. Directed by Karen Arthur, this 1978 psychological horror gem offers a front-row seat to two sisters’ slow-motion mutual destruction in a decaying Los Angeles mansion that feels like it should come with a tetanus shot. Lee Grant plays Ellen, a buttoned-up astronomer whose idea of “casual conversation” sounds like she’s defending a doctoral thesis. Carol Kane plays Cissy, a feral, childlike eccentric whose main hobbies include keeping monkeys in a giant cage, beating them to death during temper tantrums, and occasionally threatening suicide over household pet acquisitions. It’s like Grey Gardens got remade by Wes Craven after a head injury.
Monkey Business, and Business Is Bad
Cissy’s pets—her precious “mafus”—have the life expectancy of a mayfly in a toaster. The cage is a constant centerpiece, looming like a homemade execution chamber in the living room. When Ellen refuses to bring home a new monkey, Cissy reacts the way most people would if denied morphine during a root canal. Their godfather Zom (played with the kind of calm only a man with lifetime immunity to horror can manage) eventually brings her an orangutan instead of the requested king colobus. For a brief moment, you think maybe Cissy has found her furry soulmate. But no. As soon as Ellen’s attention wanders toward a handsome coworker, the orangutan learns the hard way that being the favorite in this household is a death sentence.
When Love Interests Go Missing
Ellen’s budding romance with David, a Griffith Observatory colleague, is one of those movie subplots that feels like watching a man casually wander into a meat grinder. His big mistake? Showing up at the sisters’ mansion while Ellen is away. Cissy greets him with a cocktail of childlike charm and predatory intent, which is a combo that only works if you’re a Bond villain. Before long, she has him in the mafu cage, “as a joke”—and by joke, she means “prelude to ritual bludgeoning.” What follows is anthropology cosplay: Cissy dons tribal paint, wields a wooden club, and proceeds to send David to the Great Observatory in the Sky.
Sister Act, But Without the Singing
Ellen returns home, suspects the worst, and—surprise!—discovers the bloody evidence in the laundry hamper. This is the kind of sibling problem you can’t solve with a “we need to talk” text. After locking herself in the bathroom to avoid becoming Cissy’s next anthropology project, Ellen eventually emerges, only to be captured and shackled inside the cage herself. In a final act of sibling rebellion, Ellen refuses food and uses her last words to tell Cissy she’ll be locked in an institution once authorities find her corpse. It’s less of a threat and more of a prophecy.
The Star Performance That Should Come with a Wellness Check
Carol Kane’s Cissy is an unhinged, childlike force of nature, the kind of performance where you half expect the studio to issue a press release assuring audiences she’s fine. She veers between wide-eyed innocence and murderous fury in seconds, like a Victorian doll possessed by a primatologist’s ghost. Lee Grant’s Ellen is the perfect counterweight—controlled, cerebral, and perpetually a few minutes away from an aneurysm. Their chemistry is so toxic it should be stored in lead barrels.
Production Values on a Budget, Madness on a Loop
Director Karen Arthur’s indie grit is palpable. Shot in just five weeks in a real Los Feliz mansion, the film makes the house itself a co-star—its peeling walls and mismatched decor a visual diary of the Carpenter sisters’ unraveling. The African artifacts scattered around the set aren’t just props; they’re relics on loan from actual galleries, lending the film an authenticity that makes the anthropological obsession all the more disturbing. And yes, Arthur reportedly spent time in a mental hospital as research. Whether that was method directing or an act of self-preservation is up for debate.
Themes That Scratch at the Skull
Underneath the murder and monkey mayhem, The Mafu Cage is about codependency rotting into mutual destruction. It’s about how grief curdles into obsession, and how isolation breeds its own ecosystem of madness. The late father’s shadow hangs over everything—his career, his artifacts, his cage—trapping his daughters in a psychological safari they can’t escape. The African tribal rituals, the constant primate imagery, the claustrophobic setting: all of it swirls together into a study of people who have lost the ability to live in the outside world.
A Cannes Oddity
Yes, this film actually premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1978, which says less about the movie’s artistic merit and more about Cannes’ ongoing commitment to occasionally traumatizing its attendees. You can imagine the after-party conversation: “Darling, wasn’t it marvelous? The monkey murder scene simply dared us to look away.” Somewhere between arthouse ambition and grindhouse exploitation, The Mafu Cage carved out its own category: psychological horror with the moral hygiene of a used sponge.
Why It Still Works (If “Works” Is the Right Word)
Seen today, The Mafu Cage is a strange relic of 1970s cinema’s willingness to gamble on the unsettling. It’s part chamber drama, part fever dream, and part monkey snuff film. It’s not “fun” in the traditional sense, unless your idea of fun involves prolonged scenes of psychological breakdown and animal homicide. But it’s hypnotic in the way a slowly spreading stain on the ceiling is—you know it’s bad news, but you can’t look away.
Final Diagnosis
If The Mafu Cage teaches us anything, it’s that family is complicated, grief is corrosive, and under no circumstances should you let anyone keep a primate in your living room. It’s a film that manages to be both intimate and grotesque, like reading someone’s diary only to discover they’ve been sketching your portrait in blood. As a psychological horror entry, it’s unforgettable; as a date night movie, it’s a cry for help.
