The Black Cat

An American horror film set in Hungary. A couple are on their honeymoon. Peter is a writer, Joan his wife. They share a compartment on a train with a man. Doctor Vitus Werdegast is a psychiatrist. He spent fifteen years in a prison camp and has just been released. He is going somewhere. To see an old friend. The bus crashes. Joan is injured. They all go to the same house. The house is on a hill. Modern, geometric, glass and concrete; built on top of a battlefield. Its owner is Hjalmar Poelzig. An architect. The two men know each other. Poelzig gave the fort to the enemy in the war. Thousands of soldiers died and Werdegast was taken prisoner. Then he took the man's wife. Then his daughter. From there the film is a reckoning. The two men stay in the house and talk. They play chess. The stake is the young couple. The house has a cellar. Dead women stand below in glass cases. Poelzig leads a cult. There will be a rite that night and Joan has been chosen. What the narrative is interested in is not horror but the aftermath of war: its idea is that both men were finished by it, and that the house being built on a graveyard says so directly. The business with the cat is small. Werdegast has a phobia of cats and the narrative uses it in a few scenes. The title is taken from a Poe story and has nothing to do with it. The images come from the German expressionist tradition. Shadow, angle, geometry and light. Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi appear together for the first time. The last section is hard. There is a flaying and it is not shown directly but given in sound. The film was made just before the censorship rules tightened. The running time is very short; under seventy minutes. Edgar G. Ulmer directed. Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, David Manners and Julie Bishop are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes 1930s Universal horror and visually daring films. Who it is not for: anyone expecting explanation; the plot is scattered and some connections are never made.