Don't F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer is a 2019 true crime docuseries about an online manhunt. It is written and directed by Mark LewisNetflix’s Don’t F**k With Cats Documentary Does So Much Wrong – ScreenRant and was released on Netflix on December 18, 2019. The series chronicles events following a crowd-sourced amateur investigation into a series of animal cruelty acts committed by Canadian Luka Magnotta, culminating in his murder of Jun Lin, a student from China who was studying at Concordia University. It was one of Netflix's Top 5 most-watched documentaries of 2019.
Premise The three-part docuseries follows a group of amateur internet sleuths who launched a manhunt for Luka Magnotta after he gained international notoriety in 2010 for sharing a video online of himself killing two kittens in a plastic bag by suffocating them with a vacuum cleaner. Magnotta was later convicted of murdering Jun Lin in 2012.
Early investigation The series started with Deanna Thompson, a data analyst for a casino in Las Vegas, and John Green, from Los Angeles. In 2010, a viral video called 1 boy 2 kittens was linked on Facebook and posted on YouTube. The video shows a man playing with two kittens before he puts them in a vacuum seal bag and vacuums out the air, suffocating the kittens. Thompson and Green subsequently joined a Facebook group to build evidence and find the perpetrator. The group worked together to examine the details of the video, including the objects in the room, to help solve the mystery.
Cast +CastRole EpisodesJohn GreenHimself3 episodesDeanna ThompsonHerself—aka "Baudi Moovan"3 episodesDet. Sgt. Claudette HamlinHerself—Montreal Police, Homicide2 episodesAntonio ParadisoHimself—Montreal Police, Homicide2 episodesAnna YourkinHerself—Luka Magnotta's mother2 episodesBenjamin XuHimself—Jun Lin's best friend2 episodesMarc LilgeHimself—Berlin Police2 episodesMike NadeauHimself—Janitor1 episodeJoe PanzHimself—Rescue Ink1 episodeJoe WarmingtonHimself—Journalist, Toronto Sun1 episodeHenriHimself—Undercover Detective Fugitive Task Force1 episodeRomeo SaltaHimself—Attorney1 episodeKadir AnlayisliHimself—Internet cafe employee1 episodeJoel WattsHimself—Defense psychiatrist1 episode
Episodes
Reception Two weeks after its debut, the docuseries became one of Netflix's Top 5 most-watched documentaries of 2019. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the series has a 67% approval rating, based on 12 reviews, with an average rating of 8.3/10. The website's consensus reads, "Don't F**k With Cats offers an intriguing tale, but questionable intent and muddled storytelling make it a hard sell for anyone but true crime completists."
Accolades
!scope="row" style="text-align:center;" rowspan="4"| 2020 | British Academy Television Awards | Best Factual Series or Strand | Mark Lewis, Felicity Morris, Michael Harte and Dimitri Doganis | | rowspan="3" style="text-align:center;"| |- | rowspan="2"| British Academy Television Craft Awards | Best Director: Factual | Mark Lewis
| Best Editing: Factual | Michael Harte
| Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards | Outstanding Writing for a Nonfiction Program | Mark Lewis
Impact In the trial for the 2021 murder of Jorge Martin Carreno, prosecutors provided video and audio evidence of the defendant, Scarlet Blake, livestreaming the killing and dissecting of a cat, with the New Order song "True Faith" playing in the background; they said the defendant's use of the song was in homage to the docuseries Don't F*** With Cats. Blake was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder. At her sentencing hearing, Mr Justice Chamberlain told Blake "[the] documentary played a part in your own mind in the link between killing a cat and killing a person."
Deanna Thompson, one of the lead presenters of the docuseries, later appeared as a contestant on the seventh season of The Mole in 2024.
See also Internet culture Internet vigilantism
References
External links