While The Black Cat does not share many explicit connections with Poe's 1843 story, both texts use archetypal symbolism to explore painfully intimate experiences...

| Oct 10, 2024

A nutty 66-minute wonder whose ridiculous script Ulmer lifts into a zone of black comedy—not in the giddy tenor of James Whale, but something more coldly ironical...

| May 10, 2024

Edgar G. Ulmer’s baroque masterpiece... is the pinnacle of expressionism in Hollywood horror cinema.

| Oct 27, 2023

The Black Cat is a wittily self-ironising affair, mixing and matching its incongruous parts to produce something thoroughly Poe-stmodern.

| Apr 5, 2021

I will say it is very impressive what they did with the architecture. I cannot believe this film is from the 30s.

| Original Score: 5/10 | Dec 28, 2020

It's a sinister, masterful tale that builds to a ludicrous conclusion in which Universal baited the enforcers of the Hays Code.

| Aug 19, 2020

The interplay between Karloff and Lugosi is mesmerizing.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 22, 2019

Wildly expressionistic, the movie has nothing to do with the Poe story from which it takes its title and everything to do with Ulmer's sense of the Nazi menace.

| Oct 20, 2016

This bizarre, utterly irrational masterpiece, lasting little more than an hour, has images that bury themselves in the mind.

| Oct 14, 2014

This timeless classic is a testimony to the craft of director Edgar G Ulmer before his career lurched into the quickie arena.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 6, 2013

Edgar G. Ulmer's grandest danse macabre, a magnificently sustained trance

| Jul 3, 2010

A dismal hocus-pocus which seems to confuse its actors as much as it fails to frighten its audience.

| Oct 19, 2008

A magnificently eerie entry from the early days of Hollywood horror.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 19, 2008

No monsters but lots of atmosphere, this is a classic of the genre.

| Oct 15, 2008

Karloff--Lugosi--Karloff--Lugosi...

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 13, 2007

Story is confused and confusing, and while with the aid of heavily-shadowed lighting and mausoleum-like architecture, a certain eeriness has been achieved, it's all a poor imitation of things seen before.

| Sep 26, 2007

Ulmer never again had the budgetary resources granted him by Universal (at the time, Karloff and Lugosi were two of the studio's biggest stars), and he makes the most of them.

| Sep 26, 2007

One of the best in Universal's storied horror cycle.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 4, 2007

More foolish than horrible. The story and dialogue pile the agony on too thick to give the audience a reasonable scare.

| Aug 8, 2006

Sumptuously subversive... one of the very best horror movies Universal ever made.

| Feb 9, 2006