Sleepwalkers (1992)

There is a moment in Sleepwalkers, roughly ninety seconds in, when we understand that the film has no interest in improving us. Stephen King wrote the screenplay, his first composed directly for the screen, and what he composed was a story about a mother and son, the last of a shapeshifting feline species, who feed on the life force of virgin women and who are also, in the film's most discussed flourish, lovers. Mick Garris directs with the solemn commitment of a man who believes he is making a serious picture. The MPAA disagreed, requiring five submissions before granting an R rating. This is a film that fought the ratings board and won the right to show us Ron Perlman's fingers being bitten off. No lesson is offered. None is intended.

The film's moral architecture is entirely thanatological. Tanya Robertson, played by Mädchen Amick, survives through a corkscrew to the eye and, later, her fingers in another eye, which is the standard final-girl arithmetic of the era rather than any statement about female agency. Her savior is a cat named Clovis. The cats of Travis, Indiana, are the only force capable of perceiving the Sleepwalkers' illusions, which makes them the film's true moral agents. That a domestic cat constitutes the ethical center of a major studio release is, on reflection, the most subversive thing here, and it is not subversive at all. It is simply a cat.

We search the frame for contemporary meaning and find none. No character remarks on the economic precarity of itinerant shapeshifters. The climate goes unaddressed. The town of Travis contains no discourse. The film simply proceeds, at speed, toward a burning driveway and a hug between a teenage girl and a cat. A treatment for a sequel was written by Tabitha King and involved a women's basketball team. It was never produced. That unrealized basketball sequel represents the closest this property ever came to a statement of any kind, and it remains, like the Sleepwalkers themselves, extinct.