Sightlines · reception

How The Black Cat was received

1934 · Edgar G. Ulmer · The Black Cat on Sightlines

The arc

A big hit for Universal in 1934 but treated as a baffling oddity by critics of the day; decades later the auteurists reclaimed Edgar G. Ulmer, and it's now routinely called the strangest and most perverse of the classic Universal horrors — maybe the best of them.

What’s debated

Fans still argue whether the plot's delirious incoherence is a flaw or exactly the point — a dream logic that the film's defenders say was never meant to make sense.

Its footprint

It set the template for the horror-icon face-off by pairing Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi for the first time, and Lugosi's 'Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney, perhaps not.' remains one of the most quoted lines in 1930s horror.

Where it stands

A pre-Code cult cornerstone of the Universal horror canon — the connoisseur's pick among the studio's classics, beloved precisely because it has no monster at all.

Did you know? Despite the opening credit 'suggested by the immortal Edgar Allan Poe classic,' the film has essentially nothing to do with Poe's story — and it was still Universal's top-grossing release of 1934, the first of eight Karloff–Lugosi pairings.

Named by the director

• Gustav Meyrink — Ulmer told Peter Bogdanovich the story grew out of an idea by Meyrink, author of The Golem, about the French fortress of Doumont and the horrors of the First World War.