The Black Cat (1934)

(On Cable TV, January 2020) I wish I had a bit more to say about The Black Cat, the first movie that managed to get Béla Lugosi and Boris Karloff as antagonists. It starts as a sympathetic and rather dull film, as newlyweds take a train to eastern Europe—where, as all classic horror movie watchers know, only bad things happen. Out of nowhere, a mysterious man (Lugosi) joins them and says that he’s off to see an old friend. Nobody will be surprised to see that Karloff plays the old friend in question, or that the two men are locked in a mortal struggle. When the couple is forced to stay at the old friend’s home, well, all the bets are off. To be fair, The Black Cat does a lot of mileage on subtlety. As a classic-era horror sound film from Universal, it doesn’t enjoy the notoriety that its contemporaries do—the lack of a distinctively supernatural (and iconic) monster certainly doesn’t help. But, much like the near-contemporary The Phantom of the Opera, it may hold a few more surprises in store than the deeply familiar takes on Frankenstein and Dracula. At the very least, it’s a remarkably short movie (barely 69 minutes), and it’s heavier on atmosphere than one would expect. Perhaps a bit too esoteric for the average moviegoer, The Black Cat is nonetheless an interesting surprise for classic horror movie buffs.