And another reason I don't own a cat, A: Being deathly allergic to them, B: the males spray!

The females spray, too. Even when neutered.

And that stuff rots metal. Not rusts--rots.

Blaubart war hier.

( If you get THAT reference you're better than most! )

I guess Felidae should be quite well known in this fandom of ours... ;)

I'm especially weird. I read the book, part of it in the original German. It plays largely the same as the movie, but there are key differences.

An example is Felicitas' murder. The movie was bad enough, but in the book, her owner finds her before Francis. Francis happens upon her crying over the body.

It damn near breaks him.

Oh, I can imagine that. Powerful scene...

Yes. The movie kinda mishandled it; when Francis was narrating in the book, it was loaded with purple prose - he was quite the drama queen. After that murder his prose changed drastically. He became a lot more focused, workmanlike. Whereas before, his prose was loaded with German "street dialect", after he spoke mostly in formal Hochdeutsch.

Claudandus wanted to get his attention and focus him on the case. He succeed far better than he ever bargained for, and guaranteed that when given the chance, Francis would bring his plans down around his ears rather then lift one claw to help him. Francis became so implacable it even unnerved his "Alte Soldat" partner Blaubart.

I guess that's the trouble with adapting books to a different medium, there are a lot of details in the way the book is written, that can't be translated into the visual medium, even if it uses internal monologues for the narration.

Yeah. This is less a fault of the medium than of the script - it isn't hammered home nearly as hard, the moment when Francis loses his innocence (and far more), how much his personality really changes. War-Footing Francis is terrifying to behold in his narration, and we don't really see that implacability in the movie until the end, in the final battle with Claudandus.

And here's a moment that'll probably make you look at the whole thing in a new way: The basic plot of Felidae makes an excellent Call of Cthulhu game. ( When I first saw the film, I kept expecting Vater Joker to bust out with "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Claudandus R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!" )

Heh, I bet he was.

When it came to the cultish aspect (well the Claudandus cult) of the movie, was it similar or different to the book?

It was handled very similarly, even including the reference to the Aristocats. And like in any good Call of Cthulhu game, the cult NEVER reacts well to the Intrepid Detective nosing around one of their secret ceremonies.

That's to be expected. Another thing the movie might have handled well were the nightmares-sequences. Were they part of the book as well?

Ooooh, yes they were, and the movie handled them perfectly. This bit of prose both embodies the nightmare completely and shows exactly what sort of narrator Francis is:

"The mouths of the reanimated dead emitted a gruesome, bloodcurdling howl that sounded like a burial march played backward, becoming a whirlpool of sound. The hairs on my back stood on end like wire bristles. I was afraid I would lose my mind if I had to witness this insane performance any longer, but there was no escape."

Oh, yeah, those words cause goosebumps. A very nice description.

That, dear boy, is a description that Lovecraft would have been proud of. It's why I thought Claudandus was a feline Eldritch Horror for a good long while, before he's revealed to be alive, not-quite-retired, and using the alias Pascal.

Oh yeah, nothing goes against cosmic horror... ^-^

It's interesting that this conversation is going on right now...I'm cleaning out my old VHS tapes and have an unopened Pascal copy of Felidae.

I can't figure out what to do with it, so I'll probably donate it to the Anthrocon charity auction, if there's one going on.

I was one of the few, I think, that actually read the book (and partially in the original German) before I saw the movie. It handled some things really well and muffed some others, as adaptations are wont to do. The main character archetypes, the Intrepid Detective and the Old Soldier, would have made excellent Call of Cthulhu characters.

The sequel was pretty good, too, sending Francis on another serial murderer case. And this time the serial killer was a wild lynx, transplanted and starving.

That's a naughty cat >.< I think I became an expert with my nose finding out where a neighbours cat had sprayed, my own kitty never did I think. At least not inside.