‘Eye of the Cat’ Is a Midnight Movie on Its Ninth Life

On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark takes a feature-length beat to honor fringe cinema in the streaming age. 

First, the spoiler-free pitch for one editor’s midnight movie pick — something weird and wonderful from any age of film that deserves our memorializing. 

Then, the spoiler-filled aftermath as experienced by the unwitting editor attacked by this week’s recommendation.

The Pitch: Drink (Responsibly) Every Time They Say “Cat”

Like midnight movie canonization, the Cat Distribution System works in mysterious ways. The term, as made popular on TikTok, refers to an informal branch of feline government by which every cat-human connection is ostensibly forged. Whether you met Mittens at your local animal shelter — or found Paul Gia-Meowti in an empty boarding school over Christmas break — the central tenets of the C.D.S. suggest that any time a cat and owner find one another that connection was somehow fated. (To wit, this writer and her ill-mannered orange tabby belong to an undergraduate adoption program out of Atlanta known colloquially to its star-crossed alumni as “Being 20 and Bored.”)

Watching a grindhouse screening of David Lowell Rich’s “Eye of the Cat” at the New Beverly in mid-January (my now 8-year-old Kirby still snug at home), I imagined how the delightfully unserious creature feature must have slinked its way from 1969 to my contemporary corner of Los Angeles. Sure, there’s Tarantino to thank; the…