A Cat in the Brain

A Cat in the Brain centres on Lucio Fulci, the Italian horror director, playing a version of himself. His own films have begun to haunt him: violent images from his past work intrude on his waking life until he can no longer separate memory, hallucination and reality. Believing his mind is giving way, he turns to a psychiatrist, Professor Egon Schwarz. Schwarz has other intentions, using hypnosis to bend his patient to his own purposes and to direct suspicion for a series of killings onto the director, whose reputation he wants destroyed.

Fulci directed the film, the nineteenth of the nineteen features credited to him in chronological order, following Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 in 1988. He wrote the screenplay with Giovanni Simonelli and Antonio Tentori, and Antonio Lucidi and Luigi Nannerini produced it for Executive Cine TV. The cast includes David L. Thompson as Schwarz, Jeoffrey Kennedy as Officer Gabrielli, Malisa Longo as Katya Schwarz, Paola Cozzo as Nurse Lilly and Shillett Angel as Filippo the Producer. Mixing comedy with horror, it runs ninety-three minutes.

Audience responses are divided. On IMDb it holds a rating of 5.5 from around 4,200 votes, and on TMDB it sits at 5.7 from roughly 159 votes. The two figures are close, indicating a small but settled audience that treats the film as a curiosity within Fulci's body of work rather than one of its highlights.