The Black Cat (1934)
★★½ — The Black Cat (1934)
By the early 1930s, Universal Pictures had established itself as the home of Hollywood horror, riding a wave of commercially successful fright pictures that had audiences queuing round the block. The Mummy and The Old Dark House had already proved Boris Karloff's remarkable screen presence, and Bela Lugosi had carved out his own corner of the genre following his iconic turn as Dracula in 1931. Pairing them together, then, must have seemed like an obvious commercial decision, and The Black Cat, released in 1934, became the first film to place both men in the same frame. The title borrows loosely from Edgar Allan Poe, though the finished picture bears almost no resemblance to his short story. The plot is its own creature entirely: an American couple, Peter and Joan Alison, find themselves stranded in Hungary following a road accident and fall into the company of the mysterious Dr. Vitus Werdegast, played by Lugosi, who carries a long and bitter grievance against the formidable architect Hjalmar Poelzig, played by Karloff. The house they retreat to, a sleek and forbidding modernist structure built over the ruins of a First World War fort, sets the tone for everything that follows.
The director behind the camera was Edgar G. Ulmer, a filmmaker whose career traced an unusual path through European and American cinema. He had started out in a very different mode, co-directing the quasi-documentary People on Sunday in Germany, before making his way to Hollywood. The Black Cat was by some distance his highest-profile studio assignment, and it shows in the production values: the sets, designed with a clean, severe Art Deco aesthetic, are genuinely striking for a picture of this era and budget. Ulmer would go on to build a cult reputation largely on the back of low-budget, fast-turnaround work, most famously with Detour, a film that demonstrated just what he could do when given a lean script and precious little money. Here, with Universal's resources behind him, the results are visually polished but, as we shall see, somewhat uneven in other respects. The supporting cast includes David Manners as Peter Alison and Julie Bishop (credited at the time under a different name) as his new wife Joan, both functioning largely as audience surrogates caught between the two towering leads.
Karloff, at this point, was arguably the bigger star, his stature in the genre confirmed by a string of popular Universal pictures. Lugosi, for his part, brought a theatrical intensity that made him well suited to roles requiring old-world menace and wounded dignity. Placing them opposite each other should, in theory, have produced something genuinely electric. Whether the film delivers on that promise is very much the question, and it's one that comes with a fair amount of baggage around expectation, atmosphere, and the particular limitations of 1930s genre filmmaking. At just 65 minutes, The Black Cat does not outstay its welcome, but whether it uses its brief running time wisely is another matter altogether.
The Black Cat (1934) holds a curious place in horror history, not for being particularly good, but for being the first on-screen pairing of legends Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer with striking Art Deco flair, the film oozes atmosphere: sleek modernist sets, shadow-drenched corridors, and a genuinely unsettling undercurrent of Satanism and wartime trauma. For brief stretches, the tension crackles. But atmosphere alone can't sustain a film with such a muddled plot. What begins as a psychological thriller veers into melodrama, occult ritual, and abrupt violence without ever cohering into a satisfying whole. The pacing lurches, the romantic subplot feels tacked-on, and despite the star power, neither actor is given enough to do beyond posturing. A stylish curio that horror completists should see once for its historical novelty and visual elegance. But don't expect a masterpiece. Two icons sharing the screen should've added up to more than the sum of its parts. Here, it's merely a footnote, creepy in patches, forgettable overall.
I keep coming back to that central frustration: the ingredients were all there. A bold visual style, two actors with genuine screen presence, a setting steeped in post-war dread and occult unease, all of it wrapped up in under 70 minutes. And yet the film never quite pulls itself together into something you'd press on a friend with any real conviction. It's the kind of thing I find myself defending on aesthetic grounds while struggling to argue for its overall quality, which is a strange place to be with a film that had so much going for it on paper. Sometimes the most interesting films in a genre's history are interesting precisely because they fumbled a golden opportunity. The Black Cat is fascinating as a case study. As a night's viewing, it's a bit of a missed hand.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 1934 | Watched: 2026-03-27
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Edgar G. Ulmer: People on Sunday (1930) · Detour (1945) · Bluebeard (1944)
More with Boris Karloff: The Old Dark House (1932) · The Mummy (1932)
More from the 1930s: Earth (1930) · Monkey Business (1931) · Sabotage (1936) · People on Sunday (1930)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)
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