Column SFF Bestiary A Feline Haunting: The Quiet Horror of The Cat By Judith Tarr | Published on March 16, 2026 Credit: Next Entertainment World Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Next Entertainment World The Cat (2011) is a Korean horror film. Horror-comedy, supposedly, but it’s not the laugh-track kind of comedy. More the classical type. When I first checked it out while looking for genre films about cats (and discovering that Zombie Cats From Mars cannot be bothered with subtitles or closed captions, so forget that), one review noted that it’s “not for everyone.” That gave me pause. I am not friends with grossout horror or explicit gore. I need not have worried. Maybe the “everyone” it’s not for is the person who likes the splashy stuff? It’s not exactly gore-free, but it is quite restrained. This is quiet. Literally. No screaming women. The cats express their opinions, but more often with hisses and glares than with yowls and screeches. It’s a gentle film, though parts of it are as ruthless as a cat can be. The settings are not fancy. A neighborhood pet shop. A high-rise, and the park nearby. A handful of unpretentious apartments. A psychiatric hospital. An animal shelter. A local police station. It’s winter, with snow; there’s a Christmas tree in one hard-earned scene. Pet-shop employee So-yeon assists her boss with the shop and serves as an animal groomer. As we meet her, she’s bathing a beautiful white cat named Bidan (Silky) and commiserating with her about the things her owner wants done, especially the hot pink spots on her cheeks. Hair dye, as she says to the owner, is not good for cats. The owner doesn’t care; she’s all about how she just knew pink was Bidan’s color. The boss backs her up. He’s on that side of the pet divide: we first see him sizing up little dresses for an unhappy cat. There are signs of something else going on. Things half-glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. A handprint on a glass divider. A little girl seen petting the cat while the owner fusses over her transport, who vanishes after a car passes between. Something even more subtle may be happening as well. Does So-yeon imagine the cat’s voice telling her “I like the way I am. This is not me. I hate it!”? Or are we hearing the cat’s own thoughts? Are cats telepathic? Can So-yeon understand them? So-yeon is profoundly claustrophobic. She can’t ride in elevators or on subways. She can’t be in any enclosed space. All the doors in her apartment have either been removed or left open. She tolerates the shop because its frontage is glass; she keeps the inner doors ajar. She is in therapy, and has been for years. Her therapist treats her with medication and encourages her to face her fears. This matters, as we quickly see how an elevator can be a deadly trap. Bidan’s owner, who lives in a nearby high-rise, is found dead in one as she returns from the shop. Police assume she had a heart attack. No one but the cat was on the elevator with her. So-yeon happens past the police cordon on her way home from work and encounters an officer she knows. He asks her to look after Bidan while they sort out the situation. The owner’s husband doesn’t want her; somebody has to look after her. Once So-yeon takes the cat to her apartment, she discovers that she’s brought in more than she bargained for. There’s something attached to the cat: the ghost of a little girl. The ghost is angry. Very, very angry. Nor is she the only one. So-yeon’s lighthearted friend Bo-hee (who just happens to be the ex-girlfriend of the policeman who entrusted So-yeon with the cat) has found out that you can get a cat for free at the animal shelter. She ignores So-yeon’s reminder that she had cat before and abandoned it. She did not, declares Bo-hee. It ran away. Now she wants a cat again, and she wants So-yeon to go with her to the shelter. This is a bleak place, out in the middle of snowy nowhere. A rough-looking man named Lee is on duty, euthanizing cats and incinerating them before he’s called to attend to the visitors. The cats in the poorly maintained cages are not in the best condition, but Bo-hee finds a pretty chinchilla cat and insists on adopting her. While Bo-hee and Lee depart for the office to complete the paperwork, So-yeon stays behind with the cats, including one that tips over the brink into death. She’s propped the door of the building open, but it falls shut and the power starts to flicker, triggering a massive attack of claustrophobia. But is that all it is? It’s not just So-yeon who reacts. The animals all go crazy, dogs barking, cats yowling. As Bo-hee and Lee come back and find So-yeon crouching on the floor in a state of gut-wrenching panic, the scene shifts to the police investigating the security footage on the elevator and wondering if there’s more to the woman’s death than a heart attack. Panic attack? Can a person die of a panic attack? one of the policemen wonders. Was it a panic attack? Things ramp up from here. The hauntings escalate. The ghost girl starts to get physical. So-yeon is dreaming or hallucinating: seeing visions of dead cats; waking in her apartment to find her father in a corner, drinking Bidan’s blood with a ladle; petting Bidan under a quilt, then lifting the quilt to find the ghost girl glaring at her. And always there are cats, sitting on the edge of shadows in the street or in the park. Watching. So-yeon’s father, we learn, is a patient in a psychiatric hospital. His room is on a high floor. She goes to see him, but when she gets there, she can’t do it. The tension keeps on rising. Bo-hee gets rough with her new cat and pays a terrible price—while So-yeon is in the next room. So-yeon cuts her finger while cutting up raw chicken for Bidan, and is appalled when Bidan licks the blood. So appalled that she tries to take the cat back to the owner, but he refuses. “Throw it away or kill it, I don’t care.” So-yeon can’t kill a cat. She can’t keep Bidan, either; she’s far too creeped out. She takes the carrier to the park, opens the door, apologizes but leaves—and runs into an old woman wandering barefoot in the street. So-yeon takes the old woman to the police station. Granny is known there; she has dementia and she often wanders. Her son always comes and retrieves her. This combination of kindness and cruelty, protection and abandonment, is the heart of the story. By now we know that if you mistreat a cat, however mild or heedless it may seem from the human perspective, you pay. We also know that the ghost girl has a strong connection with the cats. She has a cat’s eyes, and at times a cat’s claws. As the story winds toward its end, we learn who the ghost girl is, and who Granny is, and why the cats are so angry. So-yeon is central to the resolution, along with the young policeman whom she’s had a crush on since she met him. Not only does she have to face her fears; she has to redress a number of great wrongs. She shows us how humans’ cruelty to one another can harm and even kill, and how carelessly humans can treat animals. The cats strike back on both fronts. They, with the ghost girl’s help, are the instruments of justice. It’s no accident that the last voice in the film is that of a small, grubby, abandoned kitten. “Mew,” it says, sternly. And roll the credits. Among the last of these is the most reassuring. NO CATS WERE HARMED IN THE MAKING OF THIS FILM. I needed to know that.[end-mark] The post A Feline Haunting: The Quiet Horror of <i>The Cat</i> appeared first on Reactor.