Cat Scare - Television Tropes & Idioms

Pops up in the very first episode of Mythical Detective Loki Ragnarok, when Mayura goes to investigate a haunted clocktower. Even though she was nowhere near the cat, and though it was apparently asleep when she entered, it just HAD to leap up and scream at her. Really, these cats ought to just switch to decaf, or something...
Taken literally in the first episode of Inu Yasha, when Kagome goes down to the well to search for her cat. She hears noises coming from the well, and is frightened when her cat brushes up against her leg. After realizing her error, she faces away from the well with the cat as the Snake Woman shows up to drag her back in time. Her brother, of course, sees it all, and tries to warn her. No luck.
Subverted in Darker Than Black: the first two episodes are loaded with so many supposedly coincidental "oh, it was just the cat" moments that one begins to wonder if that furry little bastard is actually plotting something. He is.
Naruto. Although it doesn't use cats. Twice in the story a bunny is seen in the bushes and then someone paranoid throws a kunai or shuriken and the rabbit leaves but a bad guy comes. First time Zabuza came and the second time was Orochimaru.

In Alien, the cat scare precedes the absolutely terrifying first appearance of the adult alien. Since the cat wasn't being tossed through the air, the film crew got it to hiss on cue by suddenly putting it nose to nose with a dog.
In Predator, Blain hears rustling foliage and readies his minigun, only to have it turn out to be a small animal. He rolls his eyes and turns away ... then promptly gets killed by the Predator's plasma gun.
Alien Vs. Predator, combining the two, naturally goes one better, featuring a penguin scare early on (before the characters even know "there's something out there").
The opening scene of Friday The13th: Part 2 has a special example, as you can actually see the hand of the technician throwing the screaming cat through the window.
An actual cat also turns up in The Ring.
Parodied in the Scary Movie films. In the first one, the victim is investigating a noise in a closed garage and finds a cat. Then a dog. Then a horse. ...then the killer. The dog and cat vacate through a doggie door. The horse gets out via a larger opening. The victim? Follows the cat out. Did we mention she's slightly overweight?
- In the second film, the protagonist goes to investigate a noise, and discovers a cat...who then beats up her up with a broken bottle.
Parodied repeatedly and beaten to death with a stick in the horror movie parody film Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th, where characters keep being scared by cats with tell tale names, like "Cheap Shot" and "Lame Gag". The final cat annoys a cast member so much that he tries to hit it, only to be told "No, don't beat Dead Horse."
Played straight in Tears Of The Sun — the team's point man at the river crossing calls for everyone to stop and get to cover because he hears something approaching through the foliage. Upon seeing that it's just a wild pig, he calls away 'all clear' and stands up... right in time to eat a sniper's bullet from across the river.
The Matrix. Neo spots a cat crossing a doorway twice, and doesn't think much of it. Turns out to be the first sign that Morpheus and crew have much bigger problems than expected.
Star Trek II The Wrath Of Khan: While searching the abandoned space station Regula 1, Bones is startled by a rat. He then walks straight into a dead body.
A Cat Scare appears early on in Romancing the Stone, in a particularly obvious instance of the cat being thrown in from off-screen.
In Dog Soldiers there's an incident with a spring-loaded dog when the soldiers are investigating a potentially hazardous closet. By all appearances the border collie who startles Cooper must have been sitting on one of the closet shelves waiting for the chance to jump straight forward.
In the James Bond movie A View To A Kill there's a very good cat scare when Bond is creeping up the broad stairway of Stacey's house.
The Amityville Horror has one of these, with an actual cat.
In House II: The Second Story, someone in a haunted house full of portals thinks he hears something ominous, but it's just a harmless dogerpillar.
The Haunting In Connecticut did this for the movie's second shock moment. Barely a minute after the first shock, Matt is investigating the plane of glass where it came from, and the camera then cuts to his mom slapping a mop on the ground. After a moment of relief, you see that the water she's using to clean has turned into blood. Thanks a lot, Cornwell.
Parodied in Fatal Instinct. While Ned Ravine is searching his house for intruders he opens the medicine cabinet in his bathroom and discovers his cat inside it. The cat jumps out yowling.
In Disney's Brother Bear, Kenai is spooked by a rodent before the bear comes along. In the DVD Gag Commentary, the moose comment on how squirrels/chipmunks/etc. always appear before something bad happens, and falsely interpret every rodent afterwards as a sign of trouble.
The remake of When a Stranger Calls uses at least one Cat Scare.
The first Scream wasn't above using one of these.
Played straight in Pet Sematary, where the newly resurrected cat hisses at his owner as he walks into a dark area. The cat is only the first creature to come back changed.
Weirdly inverted in The Secret of NIMH, where the cat itself is the monster, and its arrival is preceded by a rabbit.
Parodied in There's Nothing Out There, where Mike finds the cat and then wonders loudly how it got there.
Steven Spielberg felt that there weren't enough scary moments in the first half of Jaws, before audiences had seen the shark for the first time. He went back and edited in a plotless scare when the divers are exploring a sunken wreck. Heralded by Scary Music and accompanied by a Scare Chord, they spot a corpse looking through a hole in the wreck. While it got a shriek from audiences, Spielberg always regretted adding it in because it ultimately sapped tension that would have paid off better when the shark finally appeared.
In Darkness Falls, a woman sits in a car and a cat quickly runs across the hood, which scares both the woman and the audience.
- Darkness Falls has a lot of cat scares even at the very end.
Cat People has an interesting inversion. There is a scene where the viewer is expecting a cat to show up and attack the heroine, only for the tension to be broken by the arrival of a bus with an air brake that sounds like a cat hiss. Cat People was made in 1942, so it's not clear if they were parodying this trope on purpose or playing it straight.
- Sometimes the Cat Scare trope is also called a "bus" in commemoration of Cat People, which has one of the first uses of the trope in cinema.
- Cat People producer Val Lewton seemed to like this trope, he used it in his next film, I Walked With a Zombie, although in that case the animal responsible for the scare was an owl.
  - In Lewton's film Body Snatcher there is a scare with a horse and in his The Leopard Man a tumbleweed and a train are used at certain points in the movie.

Done straight in Shades Children.
Appears in Robert Southey's 1799 poem "God's Judgment on a Wicked Bishop," making this one Older Than Radio.
Goosebumps did this at the end of every first chapter, enough to be Lampshaded by Mad Magazine.
- Goosebumps did this almost every chapter with very stupid things some of the times like a ghost just being a pile of clothes or a monster not actually being anything at all. It was pretty ridiculous.
The book Friday The13th: Church of the Divine Psychopath has a scene where the soldiers hunting Jason in the dark woods are all startled by a raccoon, right before Jason comes out of nowhere and attacks.
How To Survive A Horror Movie cites cats jumping out of every door, cupboard, box, jar, or tube of toothpaste you open as clinching proof you're in a slasher movie.

Supernatural: After getting a lead on what might be a monster which hid under its victim's car, Sam responds to a sound from under a car, ducks down, and finds... a frightened cat. The show uses this again in season three with a cat in a locker.
- Could that be a Silent Hill Shout Out?
The X Files, "Grotesque". A clunking cliche, but it does allow Scully a nice line about thinking that one of the pictures on the wall had come to life. In "Teso dos Bichos", the cat scare is the actual plot (they might be possessed by a jaguar spirit, you see).
- Used in "Agua Mala" as a Chekhovs Gun.
Played straight in an episode of Profit.
Lost has had many a Dog Scare, thanks to Vincent. For instance, in "Homecoming," Vincent surprises Boone, who is waiting for Ethan to attack. While Vincent is licking Boone's face, Ethan comes up from the ocean to kill Scott (or was it Steve?)
Doctor Who usually ignored the fact that the Daleks had living creatures inside, but the multiple-trope-averting serial "Resurrection of the Daleks" makes one that escaped from a totalled casing a plot point. After searching for it a while (and describing the creature in such a vivid and horrible way the audience is terrified of it before they even see it), something is seen moving under a cloth...only it's a cat. Then, before the audience has time to catch their breath, the camera pans back to a character it had only been off for a few seconds, who's now being strangled to death by the Dalek creature.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer had one in the early episode "The Witch". Notable only because it was used in the credits sequence for quite a while.
Salem Saberhagen, a wizard-turned-cat from Sabrina the Teenage Witch, gains the power to startle people in this manner on Friday the 13th.
The end of episode 4 of the 1991 Dark Shadows has the professor scared in this way when we know Barnabas is after him.
When watching a scary movie in Corner Gas, the experienced horror movie watchers try to predict this, but as it turns out, a buzzsaw pops out and kills someone instead.
NCIS. While checking out a house, Tony is startled by a cat jumping from the cat flap, leading Ziva to quip, "Don't tell me you're afraid of a little pussy...cat." Subverted though when Tony silently points to the bloody paw prints the cat has left on the ground.
Used in an unusual fashion in Five Days To Midnight when Psycho Ex Roy Bremmer lures a uniform cop assigned to guard the Neumeyer house by angering the cat, then, when the cop comes to investigate, he gets a faceful of kitty.

Silent Hill: In the monster-filled Midwich elementary school, Harry sees that there's something in one of the lockers; of course, when he opens it, it turns out to be a cat. However, once it's off screen, something decidedly not a cat can be heard devouring it.
- BRUTALLY subverted in the alternate form of the school. Harry can hear the same locker door banging against its latch, but when he opens it there's nothing inside except bloodstained rust. When he turns to leave, another locker bangs open and a mutilated body falls out.
In the haunted house level of Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines, the role of the cat is played by a lone rollerskate. Alternatively, one could argue that the whole level is a giant catscare, because even though there's plenty of ominous creaking, liberal use of the Scare Chord, sudden ghostly whispers, Ax Crazy apparitions etc... nothing jumps out at you, and you're in no danger whatsoever (except for the one falling elevator).
- Later seen again several times in a level. Entering, if you look to the side—Gahh! A raptor! No, wait, it's just a statue. Then you have to walk past creepily rendered dioramas of dinosaurs, and on walking under a giant Tyrannosaurus head model, it roars... but no dinosaurs ever come alive, and they're just there to be scary.
  - The raptor statue is lampshaded later, as the player can come across a note to a museum worker both praising the guy who placed the statue there for the scare factor, and telling him to put it back before someone important notices.
- Also subverted with the flesh-crafted head monsters. They will suddenly jump out at you in suspensful moments, but are actually threatening.
Clock Tower for the SNES does this one literally. Upon entering either the second bathroom or the storage room, the crate in the opposite corner may start to shake. The protagonist's portrait changes to one of shock, and out jumps... the cat. Also subverted due to the fact that there's also about a one in four chance that it's the game's resident psychopathic killer instead of the cat.
Used a couple of times in Siren 2... with a cat that the player never gets to see.
In Fatal Frame 3, as part of a reference to The Grudge. After having a dream about a ghost encounter in the attic, the protagonist can go downstairs and open a closet, at which point her housemate's cat will leap out.
In one of the Alien Vs Predator games, shortly before the Aliens come into play, there's a piece of ventilation in THE EXACT SHAPE of a Xenomorph head that drops quickly in from above and hangs there.
- Cat scares are built into the game in the form of the marine's motion sensor. Rather than a standard enemy radar, it shows the relative location of any object that moves nearby, accompanied by a warning beep. It won't detect any Xenomorphs hiding motionless in the shadows, but it will freak you out every time you scare a cat, almost step on a cockroach, or walk by a crane hook swinging in the breeze.
There's one particular corridor in Metroid Prime which the player can walk into, then a few bat-like creatures will drop down and fly towards the camera. They can be killed easily with some quick lock-ons and firing action, but they respawn the second the door closes, and if you haven't played the game in a while...
Adventure game Scratches subverts this in the Director's Cut version: in the additional chapter, Last Visit, the player spots in a hole a pair of glowing eyes which the player character mistakes for a cat, most people having played the original game until the end will know that the thing in the hole is no cat. Except it is. The real scare is elsewhere.

Evil Overlord List #139: If I'm sitting in my camp, hear a twig snap, start to investigate, then encounter a small woodland creature, I will send out some scouts anyway just to be on the safe side. (If they disappear into the foliage, I will not send out another patrol; I will break out the napalm.)
As the page's picture references, this concept was brilliantly parodied by the Nostalgia Critic throughout his review of the film End of Days, which features many a cat scare.

Lampshaded in Arthur:
Brain: Let me guess. She walks over, opens the door, a coat falls on her, she laughs, then turns around and sees the ghost.
(said events happen in movie)
Francine: You've seen this movie before?
Brain: No, but it's a horror movie, and they're very predictable.
A particularly notable example in Disney's adaptation of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Ichabod Crane is wandering through some genuinely terrifying woods just after midnight, trying to get home on a painfully slow horse after a town get-together. He hears a variety of spooky sounds, such as owls and frogs croaking his name. The cat scare appears as Ichabod and his horse are suddenly brought to the ground... but Ichabod can still hear hoofbeats! Trembling, he turns to the side and realises it's just the wind blowing a set of cat tails against a hollow log. He and his horse start giggling in relief... and are soon joined by someone else's cackling.
Transformers Animated, "Return of the Headmaster": After a Decepticon sighting is called in, Sentinel Prime and Optimus Prime split to look for the Decepticon. Sentinel gets spooked by a noise, whirls, and slashes some pavement into bits with his lance — and a cat appears, then runs off. He grumbles about organics a moment — and then the Headmaster zaps him.

Main Tropes Index

Troperville

Editing Help

Tools

Toys

Examples