Where were you when you first watched the Cats trailer? Do you remember what your life was like before you saw it? Do you remember what innocence felt like?
Yes, the trailer for the Tom Hooper–directed adaptation of the famous Andrew Lloyd Webber musical dropped on Thursday and, as a journalist, I can objectively say it is the most bonkers thing I have ever seen in all my time on this Earth.
I just — I just don’t know how to carry on with my life having seen what I’ve now seen. The faces? Floating on their animated little cat bodies? Their little, lithe, furry human bodies?!
Please help.
Anyway, it seems everyone else online was just as disturbed.
Someone else who was just as messed up by it all was Los Angeles–based comedian Ian Abramson.
He told BuzzFeed News he had only vaguely heard about the movie when he saw the trailer on Thursday while checking his favorite film blog.
“Immediately in the first 10 seconds this Cats trailer is just so bonkers,” he said. “Every 10 seconds they wanted your jaw to drop even further.”
“Like, you’re just settling into the tone,” he said, “and then Rebel Wilson turns up to make some song and dance and you’re like, ‘What is this?!'”
Abramson said he noticed people comparing the film online to a horror movie, and the dancing in it soon reminded him of the ballet sequence in Jordan Peele’s Us (2019).
So, he did what any good person would do: He set the Cats trailer to the music from the Us trailer. The result? Astonishing.
“When something like this happens on the internet it feels like a gift,” he explained. “That we can get something so completely batshit crazy that wasn’t trying to be. There was no irony in this trailer!”
“The CGI so sincerely wants to be this beautiful thing and it just looks so wild,” he said.
Abramson’s work of art exploded on Twitter and has now been viewed more than 2 million times.
Other people are also making their own horror versions of Cats, remixing scarier music into the trailer. Every one is somehow perfect.
And while this isn’t horror, Parker Malloy at Media Matters made this gem by inserting Cats footage into the trailer for Infinity War. *chef’s kiss*
Abramson told BuzzFeed News he wasn’t planning on seeing Cats but now he feels obligated to check it out.
“I think I owe it to the movie Cats to see this on opening day at least once,” he said. “I will be sober and dressed as a CGI cat. I will go dressed as close to the Rebel Wilson cat as I can.”
