Summary
Just when you thought things couldn’t get any more ridiculous, enter the CGI “Demon Cat”, death metal sacrifice, and a shaman.
This recap of Haunted season 3, episode 5, “Demon Cat”, contains spoilers.
Death metal, masks, tattoos, leather, knives, and… cats? Yeah, I guess. I can’t say I’ve ever seen a cat sacrifice before, which is what “Demon Cat” opens with, but as an owner of three felines I can imagine there’s probably an inkling of truth to Alicia’s claim that she was haunted by one.
As with all these stories, Haunted season 3, episode 5 finds a family moving into a new house, where a man with a sleeveless denim vest and face tattoos is seen leaving (never judge a book by its cover, unless you’re in a horror series.) The house is nice, to be fair — it has a pool and everything! The usual weirdnesses begin occurring immediately, ornaments flying off mantelpieces and such, but in this case, they’re accompanied by an eerie cat cry. In the pool, Alicia finds a bin bag full of the masks that the creepy cat cultists wore in the cold open. “For some reason, I felt like something wasn’t right here,” says Alicia, somewhat hilariously.
As we learn in “Demon Cat”, the titular moggy isn’t just evil but also telekinetic and sprung to life from awful CGI, which Alicia discovers when she finds it cornering her mother in the basement after flinging her down the stairs. Alicia rushes upstairs to very slowly acquire a weapon, leaving her mother to the mercy of the cat and then is surprised to return and find her with shattered ankles. The cat becomes public enemy number one, so Alicia, armed with a kitchen knife, sets about finding it. No luck. Odd happenings and meows persist. Alicia eventually spots the thing under a fish tank, which makes sense in the same way that, say, an episode of Tom and Jerry does. The sighting causes her to have a seizure and insist, “There’s a demon in my room.” She even has the temperature to prove it.
Alicia is taken to the hospital for her raging fever and dunked in an ice bath, where her hair starts falling out in clumps. Alicia’s condition is a mystery until someone diagnoses her with typhoid fever, of which there have been no cases in the U.S. since the 1920s. It’s time, then, to hire a “shamanic practitioner” who, and I quote, “is very sensitive to energy.” This guy and his shirt start burning incense in the basement and getting a sense of the cold open ritual until he’s confronted by the demon cat itself. He blows smoke in its face and it disappears, simultaneously bringing Alicia back to health.
“It was too good to be true,” says Alicia. I have a different opinion.
