Stephen King’s Sleepwalkers: Why The Creatures Were Afraid Of Cats

Why are the feline-looking creatures in Stephen King’s Sleepwalkers afraid of cats? Sleepwalkers, the first collaboration between Stephen King and Mick Garris, captures the most bizarre aspects of the famous author’s narrative style. The 1992 movie follows Charles Brady (Brian Krause) and his mother Mary (Alice Krige), a couple of shapeshifting vampires who thirst for human energy, which they find in virgin women such as their newest victim, Tanya Robertson (Mädchen Amick). As is common with Stephen King’s stories, these supernatural creatures hide among ordinary people to hunt their victims. Curiously enough, they barely try to avoid their only weakness: ordinary cats.

Although Sleepwalkers is far from King’s best movie, it maintains a self-aware charm that lets the audience suspend their disbelief for 90 gore-filled minutes. Absurd elements like Charles and Mary’s incestuous relationship are more effective in making the creatures feel disturbing than the visual effects themselves, and perhaps the fact that Sleepwalkers was Stephen King’s first original screenplay explains why the movie ends up being more comical than scary.

Through an introductory read of a fictional encyclopedia entry, one of the first things Stephen King explains is that the Sleepwalkers are “shape-shifting creatures with human and feline origins,” considered gods thousands of years ago. As the creatures were revealed to be naturally incompatible with cats, they were banished and later reduced to a nomadic species in desperate search for survival. In typical Stephen King fashion, the exact science of the characters’ paranormal powers and their physiological aversion to cats is never scientifically described, but the movie makes it pretty clear that Sleepwalkers have an equally supernatural reaction to cats when Mary bursts into flames at the attack of Clovis, Deputy Andy Simpson’s (Dan Martin) heroic pet.

Besides their ability to shapeshift and suck the lifeforce out of virgin women’s bodies, Sleepwalkers are also able to make themselves and any object around them invisible. This also suggests they’re at least partly responsible for the legend of vampires, who famously have their own set of questionable weaknesses. Why Charles and Mary chose to live in a town populated by cats is still a mystery, though.

The reason why Stephen King chose cats as the heroes of Sleepwalkers was the same for why he used so many celeb cameos, such as Mark Hamill and Clive Barker, for various minor roles: it was the author’s first foray into screenwriting. Maximum Overdrive, King’s first and last directorial effort, is proof that the highly-acclaimed author has a different cinematic vision than most of the directors who have adapted his works. With the creative freedom that comes with adapting his written words for the screen, King seems to enjoy an over-the-top style (to mixed results) whereas he usually seems to hate the otherwise well-received cinematic adaptations of his books, such as Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

Sleepwalkers will always be an unusual corner of Stephen King’s universe. Since it was conceived, the movie was destined to be more similar to The Mangler and Thinner rather than Carrie or the similarly cat-centered Pet Sematary. However, Sleepwalkers is also a testament to King’s unbridled joy when writing whatever pleases his brilliant mind.

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