A Cat in the Brain (1990)
Italian horror legend Lucio Fulci (The Beyond, Zombi 2) plays… Italian horror legend Lucio Fulci, who starts having trouble distinguishing between reality and his own mega-violent movies. A spontaneous visit to a psychiatrist helps Fulci ascertain that he’s somehow “breaking down the boundary” between reality and fiction, and the director’s soon plunged into a murder mystery that’s straight out of his own filmography. Is Fulci (who is really, really into consuming red meat in this movie, despite how triggering it is for him!) going mad, is someone sinister pulling the strings, or is the whole nightmare all part of his latest production (titled Nightmare Concert, the alternate title for A Cat in the Brain)? Fulci died just six years after this movie’s release, and A Cat in the Brain offers a self-reflexive look at his career in a way that’s both intriguing and—since it’s super-duper gory—very true to form.
