The Black Cat (1934)

A Mystery writer (David Manners) and his bride (Julie Bishop) on their interrupted honeymoon get stuck inside an ultra-modernistic manor (with digital clocks which tell nonsensical time,) built on top of the site of a massacre with a deranged, former P.O.W. psychiatrist (Béla Lugosi,) and a Satan worshiping former prison manager architect (Boris Karloff in eyeliner and clack lipstick.)

Both madmen act very strangely; and when the bride, after being injured on the cab ride, is given a sedative she joins in on the loony behavior for a while, though by the next morning she’s already feeling better and behaving normally.

The couple’s lunch had already been interrupted when the psychiatrist intruded at their train cabin; and as breakfast doesn’t seem that appetizing the morning after, food (in this movie) is clearly a substitute for sex.

Additionally, they are given separate rooms at the mansion; and while Lugosi helpfully switches rooms so that the groom will sleep next to his bride, his sleep is interrupted when Karloff barges in hoping to speak with Lugosi.

By the next day, the couple wants to leave, but a chess game has already decided they won’t be able to: The Satanist has other plans for the dark moon.

There are moments of light (romance, obviously) and humor (provided by the lawmen who come investigating the accident); but there is an all-pervading malaise which dominates the film as soon as Lugosi invades the newlywed’s privacy (despite intermittent attempts at generating audience sympathy,) and which never dissipates till the film’s conclusion. Even then, an odd final bit about how the writer’s book was reviewed leaves an odd, lingering flavor as one leaves the theater.

Bauhaus design had already been used in other films. Though it had generally been in brightly lit comedies, musicals, and futuristic fantasies it had never been used in a shadowy Horror such as this one. Despite the modern setting, odd angles and shadows help create traditional effects like those in Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari and other German Expressionistic films.

It probably would not be until The Shining that a Horror film would use an even more unusual setting (a spacious, brightly lit hotel!)

Adding to the general disorienting feeling, the architecture itself makes no sense: Bedrooms are serially interconnected (to what purpose?) and the home is built and connected to a reinforced concrete military fort which includes a revolving prison room, barred torture dungeons, a crypt with preserved, glass encased cadavers, a ceremonial chamber; and all built over explosives which can be activated by pulling down a red lever.

The dialogue is bizarre and nonsensical ("Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney, perhaps not") and Lugosi’s delivery makes it even more so.

Through nearly irrational, there is no true supernatural content. It’s insinuated that cats are the embodiment of evil and that a cat is killed only to reappear later because of its remaining lives; but a more rational explanation is simply that there is more than one cat, or that the cat didn’t really die.

Pre-Code elements include pervading tastelessness; necrophilia; near-incest, (marriage to a woman and her daughter both); a black mass; murder, human sacrifice, and torture.

Not only a bona fide Cult Film, but director Edgar G. Ulmer gave us one of the oddest, most preposterous genre offerings ever.