There is little doubt that the first cinematic pairing of horror film giants Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, Universal’s 1934 classic The Black Cat, is their best film. It is a movie that is horrific, suspenseful, intelligent and incredibly decadent. That this film was made at all is amazing and that it was able to include so many strange and disturbing elements makes it doubly so.
The Black Cat was a movie that simply could not fail. With so much going for it, Universal saw little but growing bank accounts and didn’t pay much attention to what was actually going to be put in the film. The director Edgar G. Ulmer had convinced Universal producer Carl Laemmle, Jr. that teaming the two Universal giants of Lugosi and Karloff in a movie based loosely on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story would be nothing short of a certain hit. Even during the Depression, a studio could not pass up a movie that promised to make them so much money. Laemmle, haunted by visions of box office bonanza, gave Ulmer practically free rein to do anything he wanted and so he did. The result was a movie that simply amazes the viewer by its decadence...
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