‘The Black Cat’ or — Horror, International Style?
On the surface Edgar G. Ulmer’s ‘The Black Cat’ (1934) is your (somewhat) typical horror tale — a young, newly married couple find themselves stuck in a spooky house containing a mad genius who has a penchant for Satanism. This home is built on the foundation of horrific deeds meaning the entire edifice is cloaked in Death; this is a place where even the phone has died.
Fortunately these newly weds have a potential ally in the form of a Dr. Vitus Werdegast (the names in this film are fantastic), a psychiatrist who has a score to settle with the master and designer of the place — the brilliant if crazed architect Hjalmar Poelzig. Yet will Werdegast’s revenge sabotage the young couple’s escape plans? After all, Poelzig does have the body of Werdegast’s dead wife in his cellar and appears to be sleeping with Werdegast’s daughter who is now Poelzig’s step-daughter as Poelzig married Werdegast’s wife before her death and, to top things off, it’s not entirely clear what Poelzig is doing with her dead body. Yeah, it’s pretty safe to say Werdegast has plenty of reasons to be pissed at Poelzig.
So all the elements of a horror tale with Poe overtones (the house with poisoned foundations) are all present and played out with energy and gusto along with a sadistic verve and culminating in a truly shocking climax that’ll leave your skin crawling for the nearest exit.
Yet it is that surface, that visual design, which arrests the eye and sucks you into ‘The Black Cat’s world. It is a surface that is strikingly modern (the phone might be dead but you can bet your ass it would’ve looked like it was made by Le Corbusier). The tale might be hoary but the geometric design is from the future (this film is about as Gothic as Mies Van Der Rohe). And it’s used to brilliant effect. For example, notice the moment when Lugosi stands before what looks like a giant mathematical graph but which is actually a glass panel, the grid system of precise squares splintering into violent shards as Lugosi falls against it revealing the surprise.
With this modern aesthetic permeating Poelzig’s lair I ended up thinking less about Gothic castles or crumbling ancestral piles but, instead, the work and set design of Ken Adam. It’s not just that Karloff’s Poelzig seems to straddle Lang’s Mabuse and Bond’s Blofeld what with his gadgets, trap and devices but the angles, spaces and planes of Poelzig’s house wouldn’t look out of place with Connery or Moore sneaking about in them.
There’s also a touch of ‘Silence of The Lambs’ (1991) rattling about here too. Poelzig’s modern home rests on ancient foundations and the journey down from the bright futurism of the surface to the stone dungeons beneath recalls Starling’s visit to Lecter and her descent from the modern hospital down to the Gothic cell of the psychopath below.
‘The Black Cat’ is absolutely fantastic. It’s got a great story, is directed with invention and panache, has a truly terrifying ending and has Lugosi and Karloff on screen together and sparring as equals with marvellous effect. But it’s also an exuberant exercise in visual style and one reaching into the future than glimpsing back into the past. There’s even hint of the dream-like worlds of Cocteau as bodies hang seemingly weightless in mid-air. Smash all this together into an hour’s entertainment and the effect is ecstatically thrilling.
