#animated horror

[januaryfruits]

Perfect Blue (1997) dir. Satoshi Kon

[mvthr]

 @pscentral​ event 43: childhood favorites

Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (2005)

TJ MIKELOGAN's HALLOWEEN HORROR 2025 EVENT + DAY 28: Animated horror

[sam-keeper]

Horror Rec: Felidae (1994)

These Le Chats sure are Noir ahahahahaha. Aherm. Uh let me start again.

It feels crass to open a review of an animated film this brilliant with a "wham, pow, animation isn't just for kids anymore!" line, but in my defense the film does invite comparisons. Explicitly: intrepid cat detective Francis, our smartass lead, makes a crack at one point that despite its feline cast, this isn't "The Aristocats". There's even a little kitten later who looks suspiciously like a character from that movie. He's right though. The Aristocats doesn't feature, early on, the discovery of a cat with its throat ripped gruesomely out, windpipe spilled on the grass.

No, as Francis tries to unwind the mystery of these grisly serial murders, the film quickly signals that it is, simply, Kitty Giallo. It's a bit of a mystery, a bit of a noire, and a bit of a lurid slasher with eerie supernatural elements. It never stops reminding you, with its sheer glut of weird freaks, cults, psychic and psychedelic dreams, dungeons and haunted moldering houses, and frank expression of cat horniness, that this is meant to be taken seriously even in its extremity.

It's also Kitty Giallo in the sense that it takes full advantage of the cat protagonists. The feline subjects and the animated medium allows them to perform tense chase sequences and complex set pieces impossible with a human cast or live action subjects. When acrobatics are the baseline assumption of your main characters, you can get much more elaborate when they're pushed to extremes for survival. I can't imagine, honestly, making this film in any other medium than cartooning, which can abandon the naturalistic and literal when it needs to. Some sequences even reminded me of scenes from Pink Floyd's The Wall, such as an extended gruesome nightmare where a towering Gregor Mendel erupts, raving, from a sea of cat corpses. Puppeting the decaying and disintegrating bodies before a terrified Francis, he sings, "Und Hop! Hop! Hop! Und Hop! Hop! Hop! Experiments on plant hybrids! Experiments on plant hybrids!" It achieves that greatest affective frission of horror's art: I want to look away; I'm captivated and can't.

Not just empty spectacle, Felidae puts all this lurid cartooning to a purpose. This is a film about human horrors: vivisection, animal testing, and the legacy of eugenics. The violence that enters the world of cats flows downstream from human violence. Though, notably the film never shies away from nature in all its own special brutality. These cats hunt rats, fuck, and kill each other over territory disputes. Serial murder, though, like the laughing free range rabbits in Watership Down, signifies a baleful human influence on the behavior of these animals. Thankfully, the film also discards a "return to purity" as its own unachievable and ultimately poisonous dream, not opposed to but intimately entwined with these human vices.

It's too bad that historically people haven't known what to do with this film. I didn't, when I watched it in my 20s. I remember being sort of bewildered by the tone, (especially the sensuous theme song by Boy George of all people). The film, like a lot of the animated films on this list that I adore, did poorly at the box office. If this was the original trailer, it doesn't set the film up for success, framing the film as a cat based mystery-thriller more than a film about serial murder, cults, and gruesome unethical animal experiments. Sometimes it's very important to aggressively signal your animated feature isn't a kids' movie! Rewatching it now, though, with a greater familiarity with its genre sources, I can appreciate just what a masterpiece it is. And thankfully, with Deaf Crocodile's new loving restoration, it might achieve more of the recognition it deserves.

I'll be doing more reviews of horror movies, a lot of which you probably won't see talked about anywhere else, all this month, so follow along in my horror tag here. If this piece helped you appreciate art more deeply, consider following me on patreon, adding me to your rss reader, and tipping me.

[horrorpolls]

what's your favourite horror genre combo?

horror comedy

horror romance

action horror

animated horror

science fiction horror

mystery/thriller horrror

other (in tags/comments)

show results

Voting ended onMar 8, 2025

[goryhorroor]

mad god (2021) directed by phil tippett

"If you disobey Me and remain hostile to Me, I will act against you in wrathful hostility. I, for My part, will discipline you sevenfold for your sins. You shall eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters. I will destroy your cult places and cut down your incense stands, and I will heap your carcasses upon your lifeless idols. I will spurn you. I will lay your cities in ruin and make your sanctuaries desolate and I will not savor your pleasing odors. I will make the land desolate so that your enemies who settle it shall be appalled by it. And you I will scatter among the nations and I will unsheath the sword against you. Your land shall become a desolation and your cities a ruin."

[madameshogunassassin]

Dead Space: Aftermath is a prequel to the video game ‘Dead Space 2’.

[hannahwatcheshorror]

A horrifying shot from the terrifying Bob's Burgers Movie.