Edgar G. Ulmer’s Film The Black Cat: An Eighty-Year Retrospective
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18533/journal.v3i7.518Keywords:
Keywords, Edgar G. Ulmer, The Black Cat, 1930s horror films.Abstract
Director Edgar G. Ulmer’s film The Black Cat was a rare achievement in American horror cinema when released in 1934. Some eighty years afterwards in 2014 The Black Cat warrants revisiting as one of the most unique and revered horror films ever made. The Black Cat is German expressionist in character, perverse and morbid, portraying the post World War I gothic mind of Europe. The film encompasses the rage and revenge of that war with motifs of murder, narcotics, torture, necrophilia, incest, and Satanic rituals; all of which are witnessed by a young America couple who have innocently traveled into a nightmarish tragedy. Rarely has a film like The Black Cat so captured the mood of horror blended with an intellectual narrative, unique acting, modernist settings, and classical music. Paul A. Cantor said “The Black Cat was a triumph for Ulmer; many consider it one of the most sophisticated and powerful horror stories ever made” (p. 142). Years later The Black Cat would be characterized as an “art film,” and even “read as a piece of intellectual cinema” (Schwaab, p. 46).
References
Marcus, Benjamin. (January 2012). Architecture of Film. http://archoffilm.blogspot.com/
Bogdanovich, Peter. (1997) Who the devil made it? New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.
Corrigan, Timothy. (2012). A short guide to writing about film. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.
Cantor, Paul A. (2010). The fall of the house Ulmer: Europe vs. america in the gothic vision of the black cat. In Thomas Fahy (Ed). The philosophy of horror. Lexington, Kentucky: The University of Kentucky Press.
Everson, William K. (1974). Classics of the horror film: From the days of silent film to the exorcist. Secaucus, New Jersey: The Citadel Press.
Grunes, Dennis. (February 2007). The Black Cat.
http://grunes.wordpress.com/2007/02/07/the-black-cat-edgar-g-ulmer-1934/
Herzogenrath, Bernd. (Ed). (2009). The films of Edgar G. Ulmer. Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press.
Isenberg, Noah. (Winter, 2004). Perennial detour: The cinema of Edgar G. Ulmer and the experience of exile. Cinema Journal, 43, 3-25.
Lovecraft, H. P. (1963). The best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling tales of horror and the macabre. New York, NY: Del Ray Press.
Mank, Gregory. (2009). Karloff and Lugosi: The story of a haunting collaboration.
Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc.
Peirse, Alison. (2013). After dracula: The 1930s horror film. New York, NY: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd.
Risnes, Matt. (March 2013). Foraging for Subtext: The Black Cat (1934). http://www.ropeofsilicon.com/foraging-for-subtext-the-black-cat-1934/
The Black Cat. Dir. Edgar G. Ulmer. The Bela Lugosi Collection. Universal. DVD.
Schumach, Murray. The Face on the Cutting Room Floor: The Story of Movie and Television Censorship. New York, New York: Da Capro Press, 1975. Print.
Schwaab, Herbert. (2009). On the graveyards of europe: The horror of modernism in the black cat.” In Bernd Herzogenrath (Ed). The films of Edgar G. Ulmer. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, Inc.
Worland, Rick. (2007). The horror film: An introduction. Malden, Maine: Blackwell Publishing.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
