This movie is perfect for the background noise for a Halloween Party. It has all the vibes of a classic Universal Horror movie. It has Karloff and Lugosi; the two biggest names horror has ever had. It has a creepy haunted house full of trap doors and secret passages. It has at least 12 scenes of women fainting and getting carried away. Throw in some clunky "action" scenes of a man strangling someone. It has a whole bunch of public domain orchestra music. This movie has all the corny stuff you want to see in one of these. It isn't either horror icons best role, but these two never put in a bad performance. Your enjoyment will depend on how much you enjoy classic horror tropes. Nothing like a good helping of candy corn.

Un thriller psicológico fascinante que tiene a los iconicos Boris Karloft y Bela Lugosi juntos, pero su mayor error es pretender ser una adaptación del cuento original de Edgar Allan Poe, ya que no tiene absolutamente nada que ver con dicho relato y solamente toma el título y algunos pocos guiños implícitos. Deriva demasiado presentando una historia diferente que sirvió como antecedente para el thriller psicológico aplicado en películas futuras. Como película de Karloft y Lugosi es aceptable, pero nunca debió ser etiquetada como una adaptación de las obras Poe, ya que en eso fracasa mucho. Mi calificación para esta película es un 7/10.

The Black Cat is a great movie. Bela Lugosi is great as Dr Vitus Werdegast and Boris Karloff is amazing as Hjaimar Poelzig. Its a anther Universal classic and I highly recommend this movie.

In the same movie, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff appeal to me, but the story and acting are like an awful theater play. The story has some interesting offerings, but the process is really, really bad.

Too slow and un-scary even for its time.

Somewhat campy and self aware - the establishing shots of Boris Karloff's character are so clearly intended to appeal to audiences already familiar with Universal's Frankenstein. The story has enough twists and turns to entertain, and the tension between Lugosi and Karloff work both within the story and as a 'monster mash' between two already iconic horror actors.

While it's always fun to see Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi together in a film, but The Black Cat proves to be a bit of a disappointment. Granted, the strange sets and the effective lighting manage to establish an eerie atmosphere at times, but the convoluted plot undermines things fairly significantly, not to mention the incredibly annoying and ever-present score that never seems to compliment what's happening on the screen. To top things off, the opening credits indicate that the film was ‘suggested by' Edgar Allan Poe's classic short story, which is clearly misleading as the film has absolutely nothing to do with Poe's masterpiece. Linking the movie to the short story would be the equivalent of saying that Stars Wars was ‘suggested by' Joyce's Ulysses.

The entrances of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff show that they mean business; indeed, they are both excellent: imposing, magnetic and with great chemistry, they shine without overpowering each other. "The Black Cat", the two legends' first collaboration, is very intriguing. The mysterious, menacing atmosphere is enthralling and the themes are not for the fainthearted. On the other hand, the second half is a little weaker and arguably not every element of the build-up gets the desired payoff.

The first of eight films to pair Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, this has so much less to do with the Edgar Allan Poe story and so much more to do with Aleister Crowley, in particular a series of rituals and did with Betty May Loveday. Loveday was a model, a dancer, an artist and the lover of White Panther, a member of L'Apache Gang, and a fight over him led to her nickname: The Tiger Woman. She once said, "I have not cared what the world thought of me and as a result what it thought has often not been very kind. I have often lived only for pleasure and excitement." After marrying Miles Linzee Atkinson — who had access to cocaine as he was a doctor — they both became addicts, a habit she kept into her second marriage. In 1922, her third husband Frederick Charles Loveday became an acolyte of Aleister Crowley, who considered Loveday his magical heir but condemned his marriage. In her book Tiger Woman, Loveday claimed she found a chest containing men's ties which were covered with dried blood. Crowley told her they belonged to Jack the Ripper, who he knew, who was still alive and who had been a surgeon and magician who taught him how to become invisible. Frederick — who also used the name Raoul — was never a healthy person. In her book, Betty May said that Crowley recommended that he drink a cat's blood. Regardless of the truth of that story, he did drink water from a stream that Crowley had warned him about and he died in 1923. The entire time May was in Italy with her husband and Crowley, she had been May had been sending reports to the Sunday Express informing the public of what Crowley was up to. Those rituals that she describes appear in The Black Cat. When she returned to England, she sold the rest of her story to the Sunday Express and John Bull, which is where Crowley's title The Wickedest Man in the World" comes from. She also mentions that after the death of her husband, she tried to kill Crowley by firing a gun directly at Crowley;s head at point-blank range and missing. He laughed and she shot again. The gun jammed. Betty May was the principal witness in the suit brought by Aleister Crowley against Nina Hamnett for libel in her book Laughing Torso which led to someone stealing her letters of proof, more libel suits and Crowley being "bound" by the court for two years. Anyhow… Peter (David Manners) and Joan Alison (Julie Bishop) are on a train en route to on their honeymoon in Hungary, during which they share a car with psychiatrist Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Lugosi), a Hungarian psychiatrist who spent the last 15 years as a prisoner a Siberian prison camp. Now, he is traveling to visit Hjalmar Poelzig (Karloff), an Austrian architect. Somehow, all three end up on a bus which crashes near Poelzig's home. The foreboding estate sits upon the ruins of Fort Marmorus, which Poelzig commanded during the war. It also turns out that the doctor and architect are not great friends, as Werdegast accuses Poelzig of betraying their side to the Russians, leading to thousands of deaths, as well as stealing his wife Karen and killing his black cat. He mighe be correct, as Werdegast literally has a collection of dead women on display and Karen is one of them. Poelzig is quite literally the devil on earth, as he has taken Werdegast's daughter as his new wife and planning on killing Peter and sacrificing June. Seriously, I don't want to give away the end of this movie away and I'm amazed that pre-code horror is so grisly and outright filled with darkness. This wasn't a small independent movie. This was Universal's biggest movie of 1934. Poelzig's chant doesn't coming from Crowley and is invented Latin nonsense. Thanks to IMDB trivia, it translates as "With a grain of salt. A brave man may fall, but he cannot yield. To err is human. The wolf may change his skin, but not his nature. Truth is mighty, and will prevail. External actions show internal secrets. Remember when life's path is steep to keep your mind even. The loss that is not known is no loss at all. Heavy thunder. With a grain of salt. A brave man may fall, but he cannot yield. By fruit, not by leaves, judge a tree. Every madman thinks everybody mad. Who repents from sinning is almost innocent." Despite this being such a big movie, Edgar G. Ulmer's career didn't take off. That's because he began an affair with Shirley Castle, who would eventually become his wife. At the time, she was married to Max Alexander, a producer at Universal Pictures and nephew of Universal chief Carl Laemmle, who did not look kindly on "outsiders" upsetting his family. The scandal resulted in Ulmer being blackballed from all of the major Hollywood studios for the rest of his career, so he worked on smaller movies about which Peter Bogdonavich wrote "the astonishing thing is that so many of Ulmer's movies have a clearly identifiable signature despite being accomplished with so little encouragement and so few means." He found a home at PRC, the lowest of the low that was Hollywood's "Poverty Row" studios, but Shirley stayed by his side, acting as the script supervisor on nearly all of his films as well as writing several of the screenplays. Their daughter Arianne appeared as an extra in his movies. If you'd like to check them out, some of his post-Black Cat films include The Amazing Transparent Man, Strange Illusion and The Man from Planet X.

Edward G. Ulmer's 'The Black Cat' is an odd little number. Sure, the film was always going to go down in horror history as the first teaming up of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, but the film itself seems to have many things going against it. And yet, such is the tense discomfort of the atmosphere it succeeds in establishing so quickly, the pace as it races through its 66 minute running time, and the strangeness of the various plot twists (which, upon consideration, make no sense at all) that the viewer is just kind of swept up into the flow of events much like the Honeymooning couple who have the misfortune to stumble into the dark and bitter rivalry of the two horror icons. The film kicks off on a train to Hungary where a mix up forces honeymooning couple Peter and Joan Allison (David Manners and Jacqueline Wells) to share their carriage with a certain doctor Vitus Werdegast (Lugosi) who informs them that he is an established psychiatrist returning home to visit an "old friend". Whilst certainly exuding an exotic, charismatic charm, Werdegast strikes the couple as rather odd in his tales of war, death, and loss. After all disembarking at the same station the trio are involved in a coach accident and Werdegast takes the couple to the nearby house of his "old friend", an esteemed architect by the name of Hjalmar Poelzig (Karloff) whose house, of his own design, is a futuristic mansion/labyrinthine/ mausoleum in which Peter and Joan become unwitting prisoners as the two horror icons go head to head in their obsessive and consuming game of death. From here plot twists abound as all manner of secrets and past transgressions of the twisted mindsets of Werdegast and Hjalmar are revealed leaving the viewer asking "what the…?" for the remainder of the film. If looked at with a cold eye, the plot twists which go nowhere (Werdesgast's daughter, the whole Satanic thing, the title of the film itself), the plot holes (Werdesgast as psychiatrist, the fact that Werdegast takes so long to enact his revenge) and the ending which is really, really(!) hokey should mean that this is a rubbish film. But there's something about the pace, the short running-time, the performances of Karloff and Lugosi, and the genuinely macabre vibe of the film which redeems it and makes it deserving of repeat viewings as long as you set out to experience it rather than understand it.

Eerily catmospheric, proving there's more than one way to skin a felonous feline.

Despite what the opening credits say, "The Black Cat" is not in any way based on the excellent short story by Edgar Allan Poe. According to Svengoolie, Universal Studios decided to put a mention of Poe's classic story in the credits in an attempt to boost ticket sales. Overall "The Black Cat" is not a terrible movie, but it is just mediocre. The late Boris Karloff and the late Bela Lugosi carry this movie in my opinion. They play off one another very well as they do in all the movies they made together. That does not mean the rest of the cast is bad, but they are the standouts. The movie is titled "The Black Cat" mainly because Bela Lugosi's character is deathly afraid of black cats. Oddly, this is never explained. I wonder why it was even put in the movie in the first place, presumably to justify the use of the title. The basic story is decent and I will admit that I was very interested in seeing where the story would go. In the end, I will say that I don't regret seeing the movie, but I think that both Karloff and Lugosi have done better.

A horror film most remarkable for its establishment of premise and structure that would influence later horror, opting for psychological thrills rather than screams. The objective plot is left rather shaky in order to focus on atmosphere and star power; the battle of wills between Lugosi and Karloff is certainly entertaining, their macabre chess match scaled up, but constantly reminding you of its lack of realism, especially through the inaction of Lugosi's Werdegast despite what seems like ample oppotunity. The final act in particular is disappointing, where the film decides to firmy veer back into familiar monster-movie territory rather than capitalizing on the groundbreaking work they had completed prior. Still, the Blak Cat crawled so later psychological horror could run, and the leads have great chemistry that they would continue to capitalize on later in their careers. And damn, who knew Karloff was so shredded? (3.5/5)

"Do you know what I am going to do to you now?" Bela Lugosi asks a chained Boris Karloff, "Have you ever seen a cat get skinned? That's what I am going to do to you now!" and he damn well does! Without a drop of on-screen blood, this manages to be more haunting than any 'Saw' movie.

Early horror film with good old Boris Karloff in it and very little to do with a black cat. It is very dated and includes lots of shrieking and characters who seem fairly non pluses by all the death and weirdness going on around them. Pretty rubbish film if we're being honest.

Despite the short runtime, Ulmer manages to create a valid Expressionist atmosphere, playing with the contrast between the modern architecture of the house and its gothic underground. Lugosi and Karloff are set one against the other until the vivid and surprisingly violent (for the time) reckoning. The lingering shadow of the Great War also serves as a warning about the rising Nazi menace.

Solid horror movie with great performances from Karloff and Lugosi. Seems to be ahead of it's time with the inclusion of the horrors of war and it's decision to ditch the traditional creepy mansion for a more modern one. However, the atmosphere remains eerie and it is fairly violent and controversial for it's time. The skinning scene, satanic ritual, and incestuous aspects were all surprising. The only downside to the film are the couple on the honeymoon. They aren't given a whole lot to do for the plot and aren't as interesting as the conflict between Karloff and Lugosi. Also, it's refreshing to see Lugosi as somewhat of a hero for once.

Dated yet still better than average horror flick. A young newlywed couple are on their honeymoon in Hungary (?!) when they are unexpectedly asked to share their train compartment with a mysterious doctor Verdegast (Lugosi). They all get off together and while enroute to their hotel, the bus they're in goes off the road, killing the driver. They are compelled to take refuge in the home of the architect Poelzig (Karloff) who also happens to be Lugosi's nemesis from WW I. Well, strange events begin to transpire in the starkly modern and spooky house of Poelzig, built on a destroyed fort that is the grave to thousands of soldiers. The movie doesn't hold up that well in the scare department yet it has some fantastic sets as well as the chilling performances by the two horror masters Lugosi and Karloff. Worth catching if you can.

Karloff and Lugosi in their prime. Very enjoyable.

Nothing to do with the Poe story, but Lugosi and Karloff are captivating. The plot is difficult to follow though.