horror – Pain In The Bud

Review: The Backrooms Conjures Dread From The Mundane

The 2026 hit psychological horror film originated as a photo posted to an internet forum in 2019, and is one of the internet’s most notorious legends.

The Backrooms began in the humblest of ways, as a photo posted to a message board in 2019 after a user requested images that “feel off.”

The photo showed a dated office space with faded yellow wallpaper, harsh fluorescent lights, a dingy carpet and a layout that suggested the space went on forever in a logic-defying maze.

As users joked about the image, they didn’t realize they were creating lore that would ripple across the web for years, a collaborative improvisational effort that vaulted the photo from mere image to a meme.

An empty, well-lit room with beige floors and patterned wallpaper, featuring a simple layout and no furnishings. — The original “backrooms” photo posted to 4chan in May of 2019.

Meme became internet legend, legend became a series of web shorts and games expanding on the concept, and this year it became a film by A24 with a budget of $10 million and box office revenue exceeding $400 million, a massive success by every standard.

Chiwetel Ejiofor (Children of Men, Life of Chuck) plays Clark, a furniture store salesman who is deeply unsatisfied with his life. Clark, who lives and sleeps in his store after hours, stumbles on a hidden portal in the basement that leads to a seemingly infinite dimension of rooms, hallways and strange chambers that feels like the work of an architect on powerful hallucinogens.

When Clark tries to explain what he’s found to his therapist, Mary, she thinks he’s conjuring up the existence of this secret place as a way to cope with his frustrations. Angered by her disbelief, Clark vows to bring her proof. Then he recruits his assistant manager, Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her videographer boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett) to help him chart the bizarre maze while documenting their efforts on film.

The movie does a remarkable job of accumulating dread. I’ve been familiar with the concept of The Backrooms for years and played one or two of the indie video game adaptations, so I was immediately on edge as Ejiofor’s Clark began creeping further into the maze from his first visit, apparently unconcerned about finding a way back.

An empty interior space featuring light green patterned walls, a beige carpet, and a drop ceiling with fluorescent lighting. — How do you find your bearings in a place like this? Credit: A24

A narrow street lined with colorful houses and white picket fences, illuminated by overhead lights, showcasing a whimsical and surreal neighborhood atmosphere. — A scene from the movie showing a nonsensical recreation of a suburban street with its structures embedded in the walls. The Backrooms inflicts claustrophobia in part by denying those trapped inside any glimpse of the outside world, so you’re never sure where you are or whether an exit really exists. Credit: A24

Like the excellent 2019 game Control, about a woman trying to find her brother in a vast building that is larger on the inside than its structure logically allows, and rearranges itself in seemingly random ways, The Backrooms follows no familiar rules or logic. Its halls and rooms feel relentlessly claustrophobic even when they’re cavernous, and there’s no guarantee that the path you took on your way in will still exist when you try to get out.

The details are all wrong as well. Floors slope in counterintuitive ways, tiny doors open into vast rooms, furniture sinks into the floor or hangs from the ceiling, and the context is always distorted.

The endless yellow maze may abruptly turn into a tiled pool area filled with water, but in a shape and design that no one would ever build. A room filled with random objects — shoes, furniture, traffic signs — might open up to what looks like a recreation of a suburban street inside a vast chamber, or a dark room filled with Christmas decorations. If you try to turn back, you may find no trace of the space you were just in.

Interior of an abandoned indoor swimming pool with colorful water slides, tables, and chairs. The water reflects a depth measurement of 3.5 meters on the wall. — No one would ever design a room like this. Screenshot from one of the many games based on The Backrooms concept.

Interior view of a modern swimming pool area featuring white tiled columns and unique architectural shapes, with clear blue water reflecting the lighting.

And then there are the noises, the tormented shrieks that seem to come from just around the corner, the shadows of unseen figures, and the objects that appear and disappear without any discernible pattern.

Of course there wouldn’t be a movie if Clark and company were able to come and go at will unscathed, and when Clark seems to vanish, his therapist Mary (Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve) goes looking for him.

Like the others, she is not prepared for what she finds.

So what makes The Backrooms so damn creepy?

Since it became a phenomenon, psychologists have tried to answer this question. The most common theories involve:

The extremely unsettling concept of an infinite maze where mundane items and surroundings become deeply disturbing when they’re placed out of context. Everything inside The Backrooms is familiar, but that provides no comfort in the utter isolation of a soul-deadening labyrinth where reality’s rules bend and break.
The idea of liminal spaces, locations where we expect to find people, voices, laughter, activity, and instead find nothing at all. Think of an eerie abandoned shopping mall, a place where thousands of people once walked its wide corridors, now reduced to a lifeless husk. Or an abandoned city like the real life ruins of Herculaneum and The Wheel of Time’s fictional Shadar Logoth, silent for thousands of years where once people worked, children played and merchants hawked their wares. Everything you can see is human-made, or at least an imitation of things people make, but there isn’t so much as another person’s footfall, at least until a sense of deep isolation sets in and the suggestion of another living soul triggers paranoia instead of relief.

A dimly lit room featuring a Christmas tree adorned with colorful lights on the left, while a woman in a red dress dances near a vintage lamp on the right, with a mannequin seated in the foreground. — The “Christmas room” from the movie. Credit: A24

Of course there are other elements to it as well, something we can’t quite put our collective finger on. The concept triggers something primal in the human brain, an unsettling feeling when you know something’s deeply wrong but you you cannot make sense of your surroundings.

Having played several of the game adaptations, I can say that, for me at least, experiencing The Backrooms as a narrative, through the eyes of characters who have lives and things to lose, is considerably more effective than wandering the same spaces as a nondescript character in a video game.

The same feeling of despair is there, especially the panic that sets in when you realize you cannot trace your way back, that the only way out is through, and that you’re at the mercy of The Backrooms themselves, whether they’re guided by an intelligence or something more bizarre and ethereal.

There are no true jumpscares here, or at least not in the way most of us imagine them in the horror genre. The horror comes from the ever-building sense of dread, disorientation and the characters’ descent into madness. The movie does an effective job of winding the tension ever tighter until it seems like there is no escape.

Fans of the meme and internet lore will find lots to like here, but even if you’ve never heard of The Backrooms concept before, the film will find a way to tunnel into the primal part of your brain and convince it there’s something profoundly wrong, even if you can’t articulate what it is.

An interior view of a colorful, circus-themed space featuring striped walls, patterned flooring, and distinct columns. The lighting creates an atmospheric vibe with shadows and highlights across the room. — A screenshot from one of the games based off The Backrooms concept. Yellow hallways give way to “poolrooms,” strange dioramas of suburban neighborhoods, and liminal play spaces.

Critics Laud Buddy As A ‘Master Of Horror’ After His Film Debut, ‘The Empty Bowl’

“I found myself subconsciously rationing my popcorn as I sat in the theater,” one critic wrote of the harrowing experience that is ‘The Empty Bowl.’

With a Rotten Tomatoes critic score of 94 percent and an equally enthusiastic reception by fans, Buddy the Cat’s directorial debut. “The Empty Bowl,” has already cemented his place among the modern masters of the horror genre.

The movie follows Dubby, a tabby cat from New York who awakens one day to find his human gone, and most horrifically, his food bowl essentially empty, with just a few morsels pushed to the sides of the ominously hollow container.

Time is measured in the growls of Dubby’s stomach and the lengthening shadows inside his domicile as a sinister score ratchets up the tension.

“Buddy the Cat presents a master class in exploring trauma via the absence of yums,” Associated Press critic Misty Lemire wrote. “We feel Dubby’s hunger as he carefully rations out his remaining pieces of kibble, made worse by the unknowns in front of him: when will Dubby’s human return? Will it be five minutes from now, or five hours? What if there’s nothing left in the cat food cupboard, and he has to go to the store? These are harrowing questions the audience is asked to ponder.”

The film “makes us feel Dubby’s hunger on a visceral level,” feline horror aficionado site YummyDisgusting noted in its review.

Indeed, test audiences indicated they “felt guilty” chowing down as they watched Dubby writhe with hunger.

“I found myself subconsciously rationing my popcorn as I sat in the theater,” New York Times critic Meowchio Mewkatani wrote. “How could I enjoy the buttery goodness in the bucket on my lap as Dubby’s stomach growled in excruciating Dolby surround sound? This is a film that really makes you stop and consider.”

The director told reporters he “wanted to tap into authentic fear, not the fantasy violence that often comes with genre cinema.”

“Obviously there’s something aesthetically primal about an evil, slobbering dog emerging from the shadows,” he said. “But I’m interested in pushing boundaries, not taking the well-padded path. The fear that our minds create is often much more terrifying than any trope.”

In one particularly brutal sequence, Dubby’s human returns home toting several heavy grocery bags, and the snap of a tin can of tuna opening is precisely timed to the crescendo of the orchestral score.

The camera focuses on the meaty morsels tumbling into the bowl, landing with saliva-inducing, moist thuds.

Dubby races toward the feast, his tongue comes within millimeters of the juicy tuna…and he awakes tragically in a cold sweat to find himself laying in a still-empty apartment rendered dark as the last of the sun’s rays disappear over the horizon.

“If that doesn’t hit you right in the feels,” Lemire wrote, “then you’re not a real feline.”

Apocalypse Z: A Man And His Cat Fight For Survival

As the world ends, Manel doesn’t lose sight of his most important priorities: making sure his cat is safe and well-fed.

Shhhh, don’t meow!

With A Quiet Place: Day One and Apocalypse Z: The Beginning Of The End, it looks like the “protagonist and cat surviving the world’s end” thing might be a growing subgenre.

While Day One lit up theaters in spring and early summer, Apocalypse Z is a zombie flick out of Spain, currently sitting atop Amazon’s Prime Video charts as a major crossover hit.

It stars Francisco Ortiz as Manel, the owner of a small solar power business and servant of a talkative cat named Luculo. Manel’s brother-in-law works for the Spanish military, and as reports of a deadly and spreading virus hit the news, his sister relays privileged information from her husband warning Manel to hide during mandatory evacuation and find a way to join the family on the Canary Islands, where Spain’s military and civil leaders have fled.

After weathering the initial wave of the virus by huddling in his apartment in Galicia, Manel seeks out a way to make the 2,400km (about 1,500 mile) journey to safety.

One thing I loved about this movie was Manel’s absolute devotion to Luculo. When he tries to stock up at a store being ransacked by panicked locals, the first thing he does is grab cat food. When he finds a set of wheels at one point — a sporty motorcycle — he straps Luculo’s carrier securely to the back of the seat.

No matter how impractical, no matter how much danger it puts him in, Manel refuses to abandon his pal, even though the little guy can’t keep his mouth shut.

Apocalypse Z — Manel with Luculo the cat in his carrier, strapped to the back of the motorcycle.

While watching Day One, all I could think about was how conveniently silent Sam the cat was, and how dead I’d be trying to survive with Bud in the same situation.

Luculo is incapable of being quiet, although he’s not as loud or insistent as Bud is. He’s named after the Roman statesman and conqueror Lucinius Lucullus, described as “the greatest glutton of antiquity, who stunned Rome with his lavish feasts” and his dedication to bringing recipes for the tastiest dishes from the provinces back to the capital.

“He came, he ate, he conquered” might be an appropriate motto for Lucullus, and his feline namesake is similarly food-obsessed, often seen scarfing down yums as if the apocalypse is just a minor obstacle between meals.

Apocalypse Z isn’t a walk in the park, given the genre, but it’s significantly less gory than The Walking Dead, The Last of Us or even Zombieland. The film’s infected are Danny Boyle-style zombies, the terrifyingly fast baddies from 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later, rather than the slow shufflers of Romero-influenced productions. Accordingly, they’re much more dangerous and enable more intense action sequences.

Finally, because this is a cat blog and I’ll most certainly get emails and comments if I don’t address the tabby in the room: nothing terrible happens to Luculo. His greatest ordeal is having too many admirers, who are shocked to see a guy who’s survived so long with his pet cat.

Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End is the first part of a bigger story, as the title suggests. It rocketed to the top as the most-streamed movie in more than 90 countries, so we should be hearing news about a sequel soon.

If you’re a fan of genre movies and escapism, Apocalypse Z is a fun way to spend a few hours.

Apocalypse Z is available now to stream on Amazon Prime Video. The stream will default to an overdubbed version, but we highly recommend enabling English subtitles and switching the audio track to its original Spanish.

Review: A Quiet Place: Day One’s Frodo The Cat Steals The Show

A rare prequel that matches or exceeds the original, Day One explores relationships feline and human in a harrowing, life-or-death situation. With its Manhattan setting and post-apocalyptic vibe, the film also invites comparisons to the chaos and insanity of 9/11, when shocked survivors were just beginning to grapple with what they’d experienced.

If there’s one thing director Michael Sarnoski knows about cat people, it’s that putting a feline in danger is a reliably manipulative way to ratchet up tension.

Frodo the cat, therapy pet to Lupita Nyong’o’s Sam in A Quiet Place: Day One, is every bit the handsome co-star.

In a story about a woman and her cat trying to survive an apocalyptic event in New York City, the cat gets plenty of screen time. There are entire sequences following the little guy as he dashes away from danger (and sometimes toward it) and as he follows his feline instincts, which might not be the right instincts in a world that suddenly has its rules rewritten.

A Quiet Place: Day One is the third installment of the Quiet Place films. The first one thrilled audiences with a tight script, tense acting and a quiet/loud dynamic that made the absence of sound more sinister than sound itself.

A Quiet Place (2018) and its sequel (2020) take place about 16 months after the arrival of monstrous creatures of indeterminate origin. The aliens are blind, but that doesn’t impede their ability to rampage through human cities. They have an unearthly sensitivity to sound and can echolocate. Even a whisper can be enough to draw their attention if they’re in relatively close proximity.

We meet the Abbott family (John Krasinski, Emily Blunt and their children) some 16 months after the initial invasion, when they’re living silently on their isolated farm in upstate New York.

The audience is told nothing about where the creatures came from or what they are, and except for a short sequence in the very beginning of the sequel, we don’t see their arrival. The first two films deal exclusively with the aftermath, with scattered survivors trying to eke out an existence.

Frodo the Cat — A curious Frodo watches Quinn’s character, Eric, emerge gasping from a flooded subway station. Credit: Paramount

Day One is a different beast entirely, both from a plot perspective and through the lens of Sarnoski, who leaves his fingerprints all over the franchise and imbues the prequel with a surprisingly poignant relationship between Nyong’o’s Sam and Joseph Quinn’s Eric, a young British student who moved to New York for law school. (If you’re a fan of Stranger Things, you’ll know Quinn as Eddie Munson, the D&D-playing metalhead and stand-out character from the show’s fourth season. He also had a brief appearance in the seventh season of Game of Thrones, and will appear in the upcoming sequel to Ridley Scott’s Gladiator.)

Sam and Eric are strangers thrown together by circumstance and quickly grow close. Eric, overwhelmed by the world being turned upside down in a country he’s not yet accustomed to, needs someone to latch onto. Sam, who has isolated herself as she wastes away from cancer, finds the companionship she didn’t know she needed.

While tens of thousands of New Yorkers heed the US military’s call to head to South Street Seaport for evacuation via boats, as the Death Angels apparently cannot swim, Sam is determined to reach Patsy’s pizzeria in Harlem, where she believes the world’s last slice of their beloved thin-crust pizza awaits. Unlike the other survivors, she doesn’t have the possibility of a future if she makes it to safety.

Walking from Chinatown in lower Manhattan to Patsy’s in Harlem is a hike, about nine miles as the crow flies. It would take most people the better part of three hours to walk under normal circumstances. In an invasion, when the slightest sound can mean death, it’s an extraordinarily dangerous and long journey.

Still, being determined to get the very last slice of pizza in an apocalypse is precisely the sort of ridiculous thing I’d do, so I sympathize with Sam.

Day One — In an amusing scene early in the film, a man in a bodega tells Nyong’o’s Sam she can’t have a cat in the store — while his own shop cat lounges on the counter next to him. Bonus point for the Knicks hat. Credit: Paramount

As for Frodo, he’s one cute little dude! I appreciate the fact that Michael Sarnoski elected to have an adult cat rather than a kitten, not because I have anything against kittens, but because Frodo is a reminder that felines of all ages are beautiful, and there are plenty of Frodos in shelters.

Nico and Schnitzel, the cats who play Frodo, are great animal actors. In one scene Frodo sees Quinn emerge from a flooded subway and stops, curiosity playing across his little face. He looks at the stranger and his mouth opens ever so slightly, as if in shock. How many takes did Sarnoski need to get that?

Frodo is also a survivor. His hunting instincts kick in when he sees a rat, drawing him closer to danger, and at one point curiosity beckons him toward the ruined shell of a building where the Death Angels are apparently nesting.

Incredibly, he never meows. There are times when he freaks out and runs, as cats are known to do, but he reliably finds his way back to Sam, and he has a knack for remaining absolutely still and silent when he needs to be.

There were so many moments when I imagined myself in Sam’s shoes and Buddy in Frodo’s paws, and we’d have been dead in all of them. As I noted in my post about the “Quiet Place Challenge” trend on social media, the Budster and I would have a life expectancy of approximately 60 seconds in the film’s world. Death by Buddy would be my fate, as inescapable as his mealtime screeching.

There is also a visceral 9-11 feel to the opening sequences of the invasion, and any New Yorker old enough to remember that day will be reminded of it. It’s impossible not to with the scenes of ash-covered survivors huddled inside buildings, crowds of dead-eyed people walking away from disaster and the eerie sight of a sooty Manhattan bereft of its usual bustle and life.

There are of course plot holes in Day One, or at least unanswered questions to things that don’t seem to make sense. When the military’s helicopters sweep over Manhattan, announcing via loudspeakers that survivors should head to the ports because “the enemy cannot swim,” I wondered: did these aliens just land in Manhattan? If so, why? Surely they don’t recognize the arbitrary municipal boundaries of humanity, and the whole area is one seemingly endless metropolis.

The Death Angels are obviously sentient, but whether they’re sapient is another matter. They don’t seem to have much in the way of a sense of self-preservation, and there is no method to their madness. During the aforementioned helicopter scene, the characters watch as hundreds of Death Angels race toward lower Manhattan, drawn by the sound of the choppers and the loudspeaker. It’s impossible not to think it would be trivial to draw the lot of them with the loudest possible sound, then drop a few daisy cutters on them and call it a day.

Of course if any of that happened there would be no movie and no drama, so as with most stories like this, it’s best to let the film pull you along without stopping to over-analyze what you’re seeing.

If you’ve watched the first two films, you also know the reasons for the invasion are nebulous. The Death Angels don’t eat their kills, as Krasinski’s Lee Abbott learned, and if they’re the vanguard of a more intelligent species, doing all the dirty work before the masters arrive, well, we’ve yet to see who’s pulling the strings.

Overall, like horror master Mike Flanagan taking on a sequel to the tepid Ouiji earlier in his career, Sarnoski doesn’t view the fact that Day One is a prequel as an excuse to phone in a performance. He approaches the film with enthusiasm and energy as if it’s one of his own creations, and that’s evident in every frame. It’s a Sarnoski movie that happens to be a genre film, not the other way round.

There’s a surprising poignancy to Day One that makes it more than the sum of its parts. We’re not here to spoil anything, but if you’re a cat lover, we will say that Day One doesn’t pull an I Am Legend. You can watch the film with reassurance that Sarnoski has better tricks up his sleeve for stirring your emotions than gratuitous animal-involved violence.

It’s rare when a sequel or a prequel reaches the same heights as the original. How many of us wish franchises like Alien and The Matrix stopped at one film? Thankfully that’s not the case here. There’s life in A Quiet Place yet, and like the best science fiction, it’s a film that uses extraordinary circumstances to tell a very human story.

Perhaps the best part is the experience has made a cat lover of Nyong’o. In a short promo (below), she explains that she’s always been afraid of cats, viewing them as miniature lions.

“Now,” she says with a laugh, “somehow, I love them!”

She’s not just saying that either. After filming Day One, she adopted her own cat, Yoyo, and it takes just a glance at her Instagram page, which is festooned with photos of the orange tabby, to know that she really does love the little guy.

Would Your Cat Survive The ‘Quiet Place Challenge’?

Buddy is many things, but he’s NOT quiet. His incessant chattiness can kill my sleep and my peace and quiet, but in the world of A Quiet Place, it would kill me! Would your cat get you killed in the movie franchise’s monster-stalked reality?

As a cat lover, big time science fiction fan and appreciator of the first two A Quiet Place installments, the very first thing I thought when I saw the trailer for A Quiet Place: Day One was “I hope the cat doesn’t meow!”

My second thought? Bud and I would be so, so dead.

Dead immediately. Dead a thousand times over.

Apparently I’m not the only one, because fans have taken to social media to participate in the “Quiet Place Challenge,” which involves reenacting some of the scenes from the movie with their own cats to see if their furry overlords can stay silent.

As PITB readers know, Buddy never shuts up. He’s got something to say about everything, he often narrates his activities in real time, and he’s got an entire meowing ritual that starts at least a half hour before Food O’Clock, gaining in volume and annoyingness until a fresh bowl of turkey is placed before him. His personal patois, the Buddinese dialect, makes heavy use of trills, chirps, grunts, chuffs and sniffs to elaborate on his meows.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Quiet Place movies, they imagine a world that’s been invaded by so-called Death Angels, dread creatures of extrasolar provenance who are completely blind, but have extraordinarily sensitive hearing. The first movie, about a family surviving on their farm in upstate New York months after the initial invasion, was universally lauded for its taut script, effective tension and novel use of a quiet/loud dynamic that is a marked departure from the usual horror-thriller formula.

In A Quiet Place (2018), its 2020 sequel and the recently-released prequel, Day One, entire minutes pass soundlessly. As a viewer you can’t help but wince and tense up when a character errs and makes noise, knowing the consequences can be immediately tragic.

There’s simply no way Bud and I would survive more than five minutes, and if I had to put money on it, I’d wager we’d probably be dead within 60 seconds of the terrifying monsters showing up.

Indeed, the movie doesn’t dither: the Death Angels make planetfall at around the 12 minute mark. Mild spoilers from the beginning of the film follow:

12:31 – On Chinatown’s ruined Pell Street, within a haze of dust so thick you can’t see more than a few feet in any direction, a man shouts loudly into his smartphone, telling the person on the other end that something meteor-like had landed just a few hundred feet away. He’s pulled suddenly and violently into the smog, his scream ending as abruptly as it began. Verdict: Death by Buddy. He’d probably meow in protest at the dust and get us both killed immediately.

12:53 – A female National Guard soldier sees Nyong’o’s Sam and shouts at her to take cover. The guardswoman’s radio crackles with the panicked screams of her comrades saying the enemy is everywhere, and then she’s dispatched as quickly as the guy on the phone. Verdict: Death by Buddy. He’d almost certainly huff derisively at the soldier’s order to take cover, and we’d both be crushed underneath the foot of one of the lumbering beasts.

13:34 – Sam huddles behind a vehicle with another woman when a panicked man screams, drawing the aliens like moths to a flame. Verdict: Death by Buddy. Little dude’s default reaction when he’s scared is to run screaming and hide behind my legs. He’d draw the monsters right to us and we’d die.

13:50 – Sam wakes up inside a theater several minutes after an explosion knocked her out. She’s about to speak when Djimon Hounsou’s Henri clamps a hand over her mouth and raises a finger to his lips. Unfortunately that doesn’t work with a cat. Verdict: Death by Buddy. Attempts to get him to shut up would be fruitless, and while I’d know my only chance for survival would be to throw him like a football so the aliens track his indignant screech, I wouldn’t have the heart to do it. We’d die together.

Frodo, the feline co-star of Day One and “service cat” to Lupita Nyong’o’s Sam, is precisely the opposite. He’s a Good Boy extraordinaire, consistently calm in his mother’s arms and reliably silent when he needs to be.

Without meows to rely on, director Michael Sarnoski gets quite a performance out of Nico and Schnitzel, the two cats who play Frodo. They’re expressive felines who could teach Nicolas Cage a thing or two about how to emote with subtlety, as in one scene when Frodo sees a man emerge gasping from a flooded subway station. Frodo regards the stranger with curiosity, his little face registering surprise at the man’s sudden appearance with just the slightest twitch of his mouth and whiskers.

It’s effective and very cute, but we never forget about the incredible danger that faces Frodo and Sam as they ~~return the One Ring to Mount Doom~~ navigate the ruins of New York City amid blind predators with extraordinarily sensitive hearing.

buddyroarbanner — “LOL I got you killed, dude! Hey! Wake up! I’m hungry! Turkey time! I’ll take my evening meal on the balcony and dine al fresco this evening, okay? Big Bud? Dude?”

If Day One’s world was reality — and I’m extremely thankful it’s not — I suppose it’s possible I’d get lucky if we were in a deep subterranean level of a building for some odd reason, and if Bud decided it’s not worth disturbing his nap to investigate the ruckus above.

But the moment his belly rumbles and he starts screeching for yums, or the second he gets it into his little head that he just has to tell me his latest theory regarding entangled subatomic particles, it would all be over, for me at least. I could totally see Bud making noise, then dashing to his customary hiding place behind my legs while a “Death Angel” impales me with one of its giant claws.

What about the rest of you? Is your cat a Frodo, a Bud or another sort entirely? Would you be dead as quickly as we would be, or do you think you could survive with your furry pal?