“It is better to be frightened… than to be crushed.” So says Bela Lugosi in The Black Cat (1934) after saving a woman from falling luggage – he plays the role of Dr. Vitus Werdegast, a Hungarian psychatrist returning to his homeland after spending more than a decade in a Siberian prison camp during WWI. Lugosi is sharing a train cabin with an American couple (David Manners and Julie Bishop), newlyweds honeymooning through Europe. When they arrive in Hungary, they share a ride with Lugosi, and wind up accompanying him to his destination, the home of Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff), a fellow WWI veteran and old friend of Lugosi’s. This is some place as well, a real minimalist interior and art deco exterior, sitting upon a hill littered by battlefield graves. Lugosi’s character is a bit of a weirdo, sure, but remains polite and suave. Karloff’s presence is even stranger still, and slightly more menacing under the polite, impassive demeanour. The Americans are witnesses to the animosity between Lugosi and Karloff, which inevitably reveals secret Satanic shenanigans and becomes a battle of wills between the two horror screen icons. Thinly based on an Edgar Allen Poe short story, directed by Edgar G Ulmer (who would later helm the poverty row noir classic, Detour), and a big hit for Universal Studios, this was one I was keen to see after hearing the Bela and Boris season of Karina Longworth’s podcast, You Must Remember This. I loved the stylistic flourishes in this movie – someone hanging their coat on the camera cutting to a shot of them pulling their sheet up in bed, Karloff making a hypnotic wave of his hand to the camera POV of his bride, the montage of close ups of the Satan worshipping cult. Lugosi and Karloff are great in their own ways – Lugosi, an urbane hero with a twisted edge, Karloff as glacially sinister. A classic horror movie like this isn’t scary, you would say, but it is still eerie and has potent, charged images (the dead women preserved and suspended in glass boxes, for example). Even the honeymooning squares stuck in the middle have their own faint erotic charge together. All of this is under 65 minutes running time as well! Streamed from the Criterion Channel’s Universal Horror collection. A gothic, loopy, stylish horror thriller that lets Lugosi and Karloff shine beyond their iconic roles as Dracula and Frankenstein’s Monster respectively. I had a lot of fun. Recommended.
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