The Black Cat

Cherished by many as the finest Universal horror film of the 1930s, this fantastical fever dream set in a futuristic Bauhaus-style mansion was the first movie to pair Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. The film’s director, no slouch in the cult department himself, is Austrian expat Edgar G. Ulmer, whose Detour, a legendary low-budget noir from 1945, is often cited as the greatest B-movie ever made. The Black Cat’s plot has a honeymooning American couple trapped in the Hungarian mansion of a sinister architect and war profiteer (Karloff). The mansion is built on death-haunted ground; the architect’s nemesis is a vengeful psychiatrist (Lugosi) with a morbid fear of cats. “Like a monster from the id, director Ulmer’s morbid jewel—Universal’s top-grossing release of 1934—is a catalogue of public fascinations in the 1930s: Edgar Allan Poe (whose story ‘suggested’ the film); megastars Karloff and Lugosi (in their first of six Universal collaborations); modernist architecture; postwar trauma; psychiatry, pathology and the occult (personified in the tabloids by Aleister Crowley) ... The film’s plot is secondary to its astonishing visual design and increasingly shocking vortex of necrophilia, sadism, and torture” (UCLA Film and Television Archive). B&W, 35mm. 65 mins.