My Top 10 Favorite Scary Movies: The Black Cat (1934)

Edgar G. Ulmer's "The Black Cat" is nothing like the Poe classic, there is barely a feline in sight for most of the movie! But what is there is a majestic chess game, literally and figuratively, between two horror greats Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Lugosi's Dr. Vitus Werdergast is on a train to Hungary from a prison camp to meet his "old friend" Hjalmar Poelzig. But a chance meeting with honeymooners Peter (David Manners) and Joan (Jacqueline Wells) leads them to share a car which crashes just a few miles from Poelzig's home. Joan is injured and taken into the sharply modern mansion where Poelzig and Werdergast finally face off, resulting in a Satanic ritual, Werdergast's own Ailurophobia, and a few deaths.

Lugosi is in rare form as an antihero and ex-World War 1 soldier captured and betrayed by his superior, Polezig, to only lose his wife and daughter to the man who Ulmer modeled after Satanist Alstair Crowley. Yet he is not without his own faults in drugging the injured woman with hallucinogens and killing one of Poelzig's cats in a fit of paranoia. This is probably my favorite Lugosi film for this strange antihero protagonist as he is every bit of a gentleman up until he is finally pushed into insanity and ultimate revenge. 

"The Black Cat" could only be called a visceral film from never seeing how Werdergast enacts his revenge or any overt Satanist allusion. Having gained "complete freedom" from Universal Studios, Ulmer and writer Peter Ruric went crazy after taking more creative liberties from Ruric's original faithful mix of the short story blended with "The Fall of the House of Usher." "Ulmer's "complete freedom" came to a screeching halt when Universal Execs saw the filmed footage and script. Lugosi's hero rapes the heroine, the heroine occasionally turns into a black cat, and Karloff's Poelzig is skinned alive and last seen crawling on the floor with his skin hanging from his body as Lugosi's mad hero laughs hysterically. All of these scenes were cut from the film and par, the course at that time, were destroyed. There are conflicting accounts as to whether the scenes were shot and then burned, or merely scripted and axed." (Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat (1934)) Towards the end, it is clear that many scenes were purposefully cut, including a strange transition between Poelzig beginning his Satanic ritual and a woman spontaneously fainting. There are many questions about the plot, but what remains is a beautiful psychological game about revenge and secrets at the behest of the time the film was made. Imagine what it would have been like if the film remained fully intact!

What is lacking in story is made up in Ulmer's gift for set design. Having been trained with the great F.W. Murnau ("Nosferatu," "The Last Laugh") as an apprentice, Poelzig's mansion is a magical wonderland based on clean yet sharp Weimar angles that translate well into night shadows and futuristic minimalism in the daylight which heightens the dark debauchery. Only when the story gets darker and breaks off from the frivolity, they enter the "chapel" and the caves underneath the home. Perhaps this too is a nod and a wink towards "Metropolis" which Ulmer possibly worked on as well. Where "The Haunting" is a love letter to Val Lewton, "The Black Cat" is definitely a love letter to Weimar cinema, which I spent a lot of time watching in college, but I'm probably biased.