‘Cats’ on HBO Is The Only Horror Movie You Need to Watch This Year

Type “Cats horror movie” into the YouTube search bar, and you’ll find half a dozen trailers that have been re-edited to spooky music and demonic lighting.

It’s a fun YouTube game where people recut movies that are not horror movies into horror movies, but, in the case of Cats (2019)—which is debuting on HBO tonight at 8 p.m. ET—entirely unnecessary. Cats is already a horror movie just the way Tom Hooper made it. Presumably, that’s why HBO chose to premiere the film in October, the spookiest month of the year.

When Cats opened in theaters in January, I posited the theory that the musical film—based on the Broadway show by Andrew Lloyd Webber—kinda, sorta has the same plot as Ari Aster’s acclaimed horror film, Midsommar. If you’re one of the lucky few not yet cursed with the knowledge of the Cats plot, it’s basically this: A cat named Victoria is abandoned by her family, but adopted by a group of alley cats who call themselves the Jellicles. Victoria attends the annual Jellicle Ball, a ceremony where the cats compete for the opportunity to ascend to the Heaviside Layer and be reborn. Essentially, the cats fight over who gets to die.

To sum up: cults, dancing competitions, and ritual sacrifice, which sounds an awful lot like the plot of the 2019 horror film Midsommar to me.

But even without the Midsommar connection, Cats doesn’t need eerie music or jump scares to be classified as horror. I went into Cats thinking it would be a hilariously campy time. I was wrong. It was a horrible, bone-chilling, deeply unpleasant time that stretched on for an excruciating 110 minutes. The lead actors are a bizarre hodgepodge of pop stars like Taylor Swift, Jason Derulo, and Jennifer Hudson; serious British actors like Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, and Idris Elba; and comedians like James Corden and Rebel Wilson. That deranged casting alone would have anyone on edge, but Hooper had to go and add digital fur and ears and whiskers and tails that move. It’s uncanny, it’s horrifying, and it made me feel far more unsafe than Freddy Krueger ever has. Thank god for that poor VFX producer who edited out the buttholes, or I might have run from the theater screaming.

The list of disturbing visuals is endless: Rebel Wilson unzipping her skin, a cat-human double-fisting dinner knives with a murderous glint in her eye, an army of human cockroaches tap dancing, the cat-humans meowing instead of cheering for the Magical Mr. Mistoffelees, and so much more. To be perfectly honest, I blocked most of it from my memory. Because while a good horror movie is disturbing in a fun way, Cats was disturbing in an uncomfortable way. It’s the kind of car crash you absolutely can, and should, look away from.

The horror of Cats works on more than one level. There’s the horror for yourself, the one being subjected to this uncanny valley of kitty cat terror. Then there’s the horror for the cast and crew, who invested months of their life into… this. Imagine being Taylor Swift, and living with the knowledge that stoned college kids will be laughing at a cat-version of you saucily sprinkling bedazzled catnip for the rest of time. The second-hand embarrassment alone makes this movie ten times scarier than Midsommar.

So this Halloween, if you’re looking for true scares, look not to the ghosts, ghouls, and murderers of cinema. Instead, turn to CGI cat-human hybrids, with the faces of A-list celebrities and the tails of your household pets. I promise they will haunt your nightmares.

Where to watch Cats (2019)