Ordinarily, if someone says they are dressing up as Mike Myers for Halloween, you might assume it’s a mixup – that they meant to say Michael Myers, the masked killer from the Halloween horror franchise. But what if the former was actually scarier?
This month, the costume worn by the actor Mike Myers in the 2003 children’s film The Cat in the Hat is being put up for auction – but fans have been horrified by the ghoulish look of the empty cat costume.
The outfit – which features huge, empty holes where the eyes should be, giving the costume an eerie, otherworldly vibe – is going on sale as part of a wider entertainment memorabilia auction by Propstore.
Myers’ costume is being sold alongside props such as Frank the Rabbit’s costume from Donnie Darko, the severed toe from the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski, and the fax reading “You’re Fired!!” from Back to the Future Part II.
open image in galleryIt’s The Cat in the Hat’s furry centerpiece that has got people talking, however, with one social media user describing it as a “cursed item”.
“This is the scariest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” one person remarked, while another another simply wrote: “BURN IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Adapted from the popular children’s book by Dr Seuss, The Cat in the Hat arrived when Myers was at the height of his powers, hot on the heels of Shrek (2001) and the Austin Powers franchise (1997 to 2002). Dakota Fanning and Spencer Breslin portrayed the two child leads, while Kelly Preston played their mother and Alec Baldwin an ill-tempered neighbour.
At the time of its release, the film was a critical disaster: reviewers had their claws out for the film, which to this day boasts an unusually low score of 10 per cent on the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes.
Reaction to the film was so vicious that Audrey Stone Geisel, the widow of Dr Seuss (whose real name was Theodor Geisel), put a moratorium on all further live-action adaptations of the author’s books. Audrey Geisel died in 2018, 27 years after her husband.
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open image in galleryThe Cat and the Hat’s dubious screen adaptation also preceded a renewed scrutiny of Seuss’s work, with several of his books (not including The Cat in the Hat), now condemned for their racist content.
In recent years, however – fuelled in part by the ageing up of audiences who had been children when The Cat in the Hat first debuted – the Myers film has undergone a soft re-evaluation, with some now regarding it as a cult classic.
A recent TikTok trend has seen users re-edit clips from The Cat in the Hat to adopt a chilling horror aesthetic, juxtaposing images from the film with sinister captions.
Myers spoke about the suit around the time of the film’s release, claiming that the cat costume and makeup was a “piece of cake” after the intense experience of playing the obese Scottish character “Fat Bastard” in the Austin Powers films.
“[That] took about 5 to 6 hours” to get into costume, he said, whereas it took only three to get ready to play the Seuss character.
“And it was very easy to pee in, which is nice,” he added. “That’s how I look at my characters now.”
Which is to say – anyone looking to bid on the outfit in the auction later this month might want to look into a dry cleaner.