#12 The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934)

“Strange about the cat… Joan seemed so curiously affected when you killed it..”

Recently, I’ve been conteplating the notion that cats, black ones in particular, are good omens for a horror film. From Lucio Fulci’s astoundingly peculiar “Il Gatto Nero” to the Peter Lorre/Vincent Price segment of Corman’s “Tales of Terror”, to zany beatnik murder caper “The Fat Black Pussycat”, and even that nutso low budget ‘60s version of “The Black Cat” put out by Something Weird where that guy force-feeds his parrots champagne and whacks his wife in the face with an axe, the presence of a black cat seems to be a pretty reliable indicator of a great time. Whether or not my theory would stand up to a viewing of 1972’s Night of 1000 Cats remains to be seen, but for the moment I’m sticking to it. And where better to mark the genesis of this noble cinematic lineage than with Edgar Ulmer’s 1934 Black Cat – surely one of the strangest and most extraordinary horror films ever made, and the one I’m going to try my best to hold forth about here today.

Ahem.

A common interpretation of German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s sees it as a therapeutic/interpretive reaction to the mechanized horrors of World War I, and the same logic is of course applied to the whole of the wider explosion in Modernism that took place in the arts after the war. And if the Universal/Hollywood horror film of the 1930s can be seem as the bastard child of Expressionism, then “The Black Cat” is the mutant beast that squares the circle, as Austrian director Ulmer combines the familiar gothic trappings of Universal horror with a strange variation on stark, European Modernism, drawing us back explicitly to the traumas wrought upon European consciousness by the Great War.

As soon as the opening credits have rolled, our straight/normal honeymooning couple have the singularly bad luck of seeing their train carriage canoodling disturbed by an anxious Bela Lugosi, who tells them in agonising detail of the fifteen years of soul-destroying hell he has spent in a POW camp. Try that one out for ‘things you’d least like to happen on your wedding night’. When they all leave the train and continue their journey by coach, the driver regales them with tales of how the land they are traversing was the scene of some of the worst slaughter of the war, cheerily recalling the sight of bodies piled upon bodies, before the poor fellow promptly joins them when the coach takes a tumble off the rain-soaked mountain road, a circumstance that sees our characters changing their travel plans and paying a visit to Bela’s ‘old buddy’ - Boris Karloff as the almost impossibly sinister visionary architect Hjalmar Poelzig, whose terrifying modernist edifice of a house is literally built atop the mass graves of the men who died during the war under his treacherous command. Worst honeymoon ever, I think it’s fair to say.

A top-heavy wreck of conflicting aesthetic and cultural ideas, in which traditional horror movie notions of good and evil are left vague at best, “The Black Cat” is a challenging film to really write about or analyse. More-so than just about any other ‘golden age’ horror movie, it is an uncomfortable, disturbing viewing experience, reconstructing distant echoes of Poe’s original scenario into a modernist nightmare in which characters seem to exist in a constant state of nervous desperation and nothing ever quite seems to make sense.

As their characters renew their long-standing blood rivalry, Lugosi and Karloff seem to be competing to see who can appear the most utterly cracked, maxing out their respective allowances of morbid weirdness almost straight away as they start indulging in marathon staring contests, twitching like lunatics and undertaking lengthy, unprovoked digressions about such matters as ‘the dark of the moon’ and ‘the nature of evil’, as the appropriately named Peter Manners as Mr. Straight Guy looks on incredulous. Even their servants are fucking mental – Karloff’s major-domo played by craggy-face horror regular Egon Brecher, and Lugosi’s servant some kind of mute oriental strong man. In a scene that has to be seen to be believed, Bela spears Karloff’s cat with a thrown fork, before Boris quietly explains that his friend ‘suffers from a nervous affliction’ that renders him utterly terrified of cats – the only point at which cats, or Bela’s inexplicable fear thereof, are referred to in the whole damn movie!

Dull as they are, it’s hard not to sympathise with our ‘normal’ couple, plunged unexpectedly into this realm of world class boggle-eyed lunacy, trying to relax and recuperate in a complex of bare, Travelodge-esque bedrooms, under constant threat of Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff barging in unannounced through the communicating doors to subject them to strange tirades of obsequious politeness. Bela is supposed to be a ‘good guy’, relatively speaking, and indeed he does his damnedest to take on a Van Helsing style gravitas when telling young Joan of the dangers she faces from evil old Karloff, but he’s not fooling anyone – it’s clear that he’s just as much of a vengeance-crazed loon as his opposite number, and understandably she just wants the whole lot of them to fuck off and leave her alone with her husband.

Then, just when you feel things have gotten about as freaky as was possible for a 1934 movie without its makers being incarcerated in the name of general public well-being, Ulmer drops the bomb that Karloff’s character is a Satanist. I mean, an actual, honest to god Satanic cult leader who summons his robe-clad coven to celebrate the rites of Lucifer around a terrifying Cubist/Expressionist altar in the catacombs beneath his house!

I realise that doesn’t exactly sound like much of an eye-opener by modern horror standards, but how many Satanic cults do you reckon had been seen in American cinema prior to 1934..? Now I’ve not done any actual research into the matter, but I’m gonna take a wild guess and say NONE. And furthermore, I don’t really think devil worshippers and black magic cults began to become an accepted part of horror movie procedure until probably the late fifties/early sixties, with the emergence of films like Jacque Tourneur’s “Night of the Demon” and Hammer’s “The Witches”. Why on earth did Ulmer feel the need to make Polzig a Satanist? Like, as if this film wasn’t berserk enough already! The Satan angle comes completely out of nowhere in the film’s final act, serves little actual narrative purpose, and rendered “The Black Cat” so controversial that Universal allegedly cut down Ulmer’s director’s cut down to a lean sixty minutes prior to release, whilst the British censor objected so strongly to the Satanism that he excised it completely, presenting UK film-goers with a version that ran less than fifty minutes.

Thank god for obscurely-inspired maniacs like Ulmer though, because “The Black Cat”s black mass is absolutely breathtaking – the first scene of its kind seen in popular cinema anywhere in the world, and the last too for many years, it brings a dream-like, ritualistic intensity to the film that prefigures all my favourite bits of modern horror.

Everything about “The Black Cat” is completely inexplicable – it is a work of near protean high weirdness, a haunted, desperate, genuinely unstable film in which nothing is easy, nothing is certain, no one is happy, nothing is the way it should be. I know I’m often inclined on this site to talk about my conception of ‘the weirdo horror film’ - well, “The Black Cat” (perhaps in a fifty/fifty split with the next item on our list) can be considered the daddy of them all.