The Black Cat (1934 Edgar G. Ulmer & co-scr)

I find it difficult to take anything with Lugosi in seriously; in this case it's compounded by the fact that Karloff kept reminding us of Phil Dunphy in Modern Family (played by Ty Burrell). Stilted acting (David Manners and Julie Bishop, Egon Brecher and Harry Cording) doesn't help. Controversial, censor-disrupted 'Black Magic' scene is just funny - 1930s audiences surely also found it so. The road is impassable - so who are all those people who suddenly appear at the ceremony?

The film though does have a creepy sense of the perverse - that's Karloff sleeping with a dead woman, isn't it? And Lugosi is about to peel all Karloff's skin off. And Karloff has 'married' Lugosi's daughter, etc etc.

Ulmer manages some quite interesting visuals here and there but the mood is always killed by the use of classical music cues over the action, which are just wrong. (No reviewers seem to notice this.)

Modern production design by Charles Hall, shot by John Mescall for Universal.