The Cat Creature (1973)

Directed by

Curtis Harrington

Genre

horror, tv movie

Country

United States

Runtime

1h 12m

Rating

5.4 of 10 from 14 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A mysterious cat amulet from Egypt causes a series of strange deaths. A woman inherits the amulet and becomes the target of a supernatural killer.

creepymoodyatmosphericlow-budgetmysteriousslow-burneerieold-fashioned

What happens

The Cat Creature is a 1973 American made-for-television horror film produced by Douglas S. Cramer and directed by Curtis Harrington from a teleplay by Robert Bloch and starring Meredith Baxter, David Hedison and Gale Sondergaard. The film serves as a tribute to the low-budget Val Lewton horror films of the 1940s and also features an appearance by Kent Smith, who starred in Lewton's original classic Cat People (1942) and its sequel The Curse of the Cat People (1944). It originally premiered as the ABC Movie of the Week on December 11, 1973. Robert Bloch recounts in his autobiography how the film was originally planned as a starring vehicle for Diahann Carroll but that by the time the script was completed and approved, Miss Carroll had fulfilled her contractual obligations with the network and he had to rewrite her role. He also writes of other difficulties with the scripting. After being informed the script ran twelve minutes too long, and Bloch's laboriously editing the screenplay to make it run to time, on a viewing of the rushes it was found the film now ran twelve minutes too short. Most of the sets had already been torn down. Bloch had to work out how to put twelve minutes back into the film so it would go out over the network on the appointed date. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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