Well, The Fall of the House of Usher confirms it: Mike Flanagan hates cats

Warning! This article contains spoilers for The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass, and The Fall of the House of Usher.

Across his Netflix horror shows, Mike Flanagan has ripped my heart out and then some. From the vampiric takeover in monologue-heavy Midnight Mass and Dani's demise in the achingly romantic Bly Manor to that Bent-Neck Lady twist in his terrifyingly terrific The Haunting of Hill House, the filmmaker has forced more tears out of me than I thought possible. But there's one devastating trend present in his small-screen works that I just cannot forgive: how often the cat pegs it. 

I should say 'cats' really because there's often more than one moggy murder in each of Flanagan's outings, starting with the kittens in Hill House. In episode 2, young Shirley (Lulu Wilson) finds a litter in a barn on the titular abode's grounds. Motherless, the littluns are unsurprisingly not doing very well, so Shirley vows to nurse them back to health. One of the cats passes away that same night, devastating Shirley so much that her parents agree to give it a burial in the garden. During the ceremony, though, the kitten appears to move a bit, prompting the delighted youngster to try and get it to breathe. Its mouth opens, only for a large beetle to crawl out.

Later, all of the pussycats perish – and some of them are revealed to now have ghostly blank eyes. Hugh, Shirley's father, tries to soothe her by telling her that one kitten made it and that he gave it to another family but in truth, it was just as sick as its siblings and he had been forced to put it down.

In Midnight Mass, it's a feline feeding frenzy when Hamish Linklater's mysterious Father Paul brings "an angel" to Crockett Island, only for the residents to discover the hard way that the winged beast is actually a vicious bloodsucker. (It's worth noting here, mind, that a dog and almost every human also die in the series, so you know... equality and all that).

I'd put it down to mere coincidence, really, but then I watched The Fall of the House of Usher and was shocked to see yet another kitty bite the dust. In episode 4, 'The Black Cat', Leo Usher (Rahul Kohli) fatally stabs his boyfriend's moggy Pluto in a drug-induced stupor. Shirking responsibility, he replaces it with another black cat from a nearby shelter, and gets more than he bargained for with the new addition.

Leo starts finding dead animals it's brought in in the most icky places; a mouse in his slippers, a pigeon on his gaming chair, and a rat under his pillow. Tipped over the edge by it scratching his eye one night, he launches an attack on the tom, popping out its eye and attempting to Whack-a-Mole it with a replica of Thor's hammer Mjolnir. His vengeful quest ultimately leads to his death, not the cat's, but still... RIP Pluto and Pluto 2's eye.

Now whether we can really "blame" Flanagan for that last one, I'm unsure. As evidenced by its title, the chapter was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's short story of the same name and is pretty loyal to the source material. That said, the writer-director is evidently not afraid to depict a fur ball snuffing it, or is he? Shortly after The Fall of the House of Usher landed on Netflix, he took to Twitter to respond to a cat-loving fan and explain that OG Pluto didn't actually die at all, and that Leo imagined the whole thing.

"That's why we made such a big deal about the the fact that Pluto was wearing a Gucci collar, and the new cat was not," Flanagan noted. "Look at the cat in the final shot of the episode, who is wearing the collar... and the empty bathtub, which means ALL of the animal violence was imagined."

Now, I'd better make clear here that as a huge fan of Flanagan's work, both in movies and TV, I write this all in jest – and it's a joke that Flanagan has played up to himself in recent years.

"No cats are harmed in Absentia, Oculus, Before I Wake, Hush (cat triumphantly survived), Ouija: OOE, Gerald's Game, Doctor Sleep (cat was magic), or Bly Manor. Lotta things get killed in Midnight Mass besides cats... Lotta things..." he said in response  to a feline-loving fan in October 2021.

"I don't own cats at the moment but have owned them in the past, and have had them in a few projects now they are VERY hard to direct," he explained to another.

Elsewhere, when someone on the app suggested they'd watch anything Flanagan created, even a film about a phone directory coming to life and going on an adventure, he teased: "Can the phonebook... smash someone's hand? Or fall on a cat? If so, I'll consider it."

You see, before we all got it in our heads that Flanagan has a problem with cats, we'd assumed the horror maestro had some sort of beef with... hands. In Hush, which sees a deaf woman forced to fight off a masked intruder one night, the protagonist gets her fingers stomped on. In Gerald's Game, Carla Gugino's Jessie degloves her own hand to escape handcuffs and in Doctor Sleep, Rebecca Ferguson's villainous Rose has hers shut in a filing cabinet. (Though Flanagan is insistent those latter two are author Stephen King's fault).

"I hear cats are the new hands," he tweeted not long ago.

"I like Mike's work but I wouldn't let him within 50 feet of my cat," a fan replied to one of Flanagan's wife Kate Siegel's tweets back in May 2022, to which he laughed back: "Jeez, you kill a couple hundred cats on ONE TV show and everybody gets all critical." If only it were just one, Mike, if only it were just one...

The Fall of the House of Usher is streaming on Netflix now. If horror – or cat death – isn't your bag, check out our genre-spanning list of the best Netflix shows for some viewing inspiration.