The Black Cat
(Edgar G. Ulmer, 7 May 1934)
“The phone is dead. Do you hear that, Vitus? Even the phone is dead.”
May 7, 1934 saw the wide-release of one of our very favorite films in the Universal horror cycle, Edgar G. Ulmer’s darkly perverse, pre-code, and borderline expressionistic horror show, THE BLACK CAT. In a word, an unsettlingly laconic Karloff is positively magnetic as the icy and sinisterly Satanic architect, Hjalmar Poelzig, who wages a life and death game of cat and mouse within the walls of his Bauhausian fortress of glass, steel, and modernist menace. …