“You must be indulgent of Dr. Verdegast’s weakness. He is the unfortunate victim of one of the commoner phobias, but in an extreme form. He has an intense and all-consuming horror of cats.”

‘The Black Cat’, directed by Edgar G. Ulmer in 1934, is an American horror movie starring Béla Lugosi and Boris Karloff. Lugosi plays Dr. Vitus Werdegast, a psychiatrist and war veteran who has just been released from a prisoner of war camp after fifteen years. Werdegast meets an American couple Peter and Alison, played by David Manners and Julie Bishop, and relates his story to them. He is on his way to meet an old friend called Hjalmar Poelzig, an architect plays by Karloff. After a crash, the three travellers take refuge at Poelzig’s house, and there they discover that he is, in reality, a Satanist and a war traitor. The rest of the film turns into a tense battle between Werdegast and Poelzig with the American couple caught in the middle. It’s an atmospheric, and surprisingly shocking film, but one that goes deeper into cultural anxieties than the other historical horrors of the time. Beyond the Edgar Allan Poe source material, there are two strands to this that interested me: firstly the use of Aleister Crowley, the infamous occultist, as a model for Poelzig, anticipating ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ by forty years, and secondly the nods to psychiatry, particularly in the Eastern European context. These make ‘The Black Cat’ feel like a very modern movie, unlike the more well-known Universal monster films. There is a real thrill in seeing Lugosi and Karloff together, both in substantial roles, but it is Karloff who is the real star, a performance that is understated but somehow relays a powerful menace.

Would I recommend it? Yes – it’s a tense and atmospheric thriller with some pre-Hays code violence. Watch with the Universal monster movies, or perhaps ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ to see a later incarnation of a similar type of story.