First Look at The Cat and the Hatchet Introduces a Very Different Kind of Cat
Forget balancing cakes, books and fishbowls. This cat has apparently brought a hatchet.
Stalk & Slash has been given a first look at upcoming horror short The Cat and the Hatchet, a twisted horror parody inspired by the basic set-up of Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat. The production has released three official images ahead of its first teaser trailer, which is due to arrive this Friday. They introduce Scratches the Cat, played by Mark Ricci, alongside young siblings Ellie and Connor, while another image reveals Scratches considerably less presentable than your average children’s book visitor, covered in blood.
The premise deliberately begins somewhere very familiar. Ellie and Connor are two siblings stuck at home during a boring day when an unexpected feline visitor arrives at their house. Unfortunately, this isn’t the sort of cat likely to improve the afternoon with elaborate games and increasingly precarious household objects. Their visitor is Scratches, whose arrival quickly turns the children’s uneventful day into a nightmare as his twisted sense of humour reveals something much more sinister underneath.
Precisely what Scratches has planned for Ellie and Connor is being kept under wraps for now, and the material supplied to Stalk & Slash doesn’t reveal how far the film intends to take its central parody. The first images do, however, establish the contrast the filmmakers are playing with. There is the instantly recognisable idea of two young siblings receiving a strange visitor at home, but this particular visitor has a considerably nastier disposition and, as the title rather helpfully warns us, a hatchet.
The Cat and the Hatchet is directed by Cameron Dodd and produced by Kaleb Carmichael and Mark Ricci, with Six Side Studios and Prime Capitol Entertainment behind the production. Ricci is therefore doing double duty as both producer and the man beneath the make-up as Scratches.
The project also has a connection to another recent independent horror short. Prime Capitol Entertainment released Simon Says earlier this year, a psychological horror film centred on a group of friends whose birthday gathering is interrupted by a mysterious clown named Simon. What begins as the familiar children’s game becomes deadly, with the group required to obey Simon’s commands when he uses the magic words. The 21-minute short was co-directed by Kyle Godfrey and Jake Dufner and is currently available through Tubi and YouTube.
Prime Capitol describes itself as a creator-led media company headed by Godfrey, better known online as Stromedy. In July, the company announced that Simon Says had been developed as a proof of concept for a potential feature film and the beginning of a broader slate of film projects. That announcement also revealed a seven-figure investment by Everbloom in Stromedy and Prime Capitol to support further expansion into film and larger entertainment projects.
There appears to be a similar larger ambition behind The Cat and the Hatchet. A recent crew call for the production described it as a horror proof of concept and said it was being developed with the possibility of becoming a feature. For now, however, what has actually been announced and completed for public consumption is the short film, so any potential feature version remains just that: a possibility rather than a confirmed movie heading into production.
From Storybook Mischief to Horror
The idea behind The Cat and the Hatchet belongs to a long tradition of horror taking imagery associated with childhood and making it threatening. What makes this particular concept immediately understandable is the contrast built into its title. The Cat in the Hat is culturally synonymous with anarchic childhood mischief, while replacing one word with “hatchet” tells you fairly efficiently that nobody should expect Scratches to spend his visit tidying up before Mum gets home.
Importantly, though, the filmmakers are describing The Cat and the Hatchet as a horror parody, rather than presenting it as an adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s book. The information supplied to Stalk & Slash identifies Scratches, Ellie and Connor as the characters in this story, and no further plot information beyond the basic home-invasion-style premise has yet been released. That means we’ll resist the temptation to speculate about exactly what the blood-covered Scratches has been doing, because the photograph is already making a strong enough argument that his visit hasn’t gone particularly well.
The three first-look images offer the clearest indication yet of what the filmmakers are aiming for. One provides an introduction to Ricci’s Scratches, another brings Ellie and Connor into view, while the bloodied image pushes the character firmly away from playful storybook troublemaker and towards horror villain. Whether Scratches is intended primarily as a slasher figure, a supernatural character or something stranger hasn’t been revealed.
There is also no confirmed public release date for the completed short in the information Stalk & Slash has received. What is confirmed is that audiences won’t have to wait long to see it moving. The first official teaser trailer for The Cat and the Hatchet is scheduled to arrive this Friday, when we should finally get a better idea of just how badly Scratches behaves once somebody lets him through the door.
Until then, the first images are here, the cat is out of the bag, and he appears to be carrying something considerably sharper than a red-and-white striped hat.
