The Black Cat (1934 film)

The Black Cat is a 1934 American pre-Code horror film directed by Edgar G. Ulmer and produced by Universal Pictures, starring Boris Karloff as the Satanist architect Hjalmar Poelzig and Bela Lugosi as Dr. Vitus Werdegast, a psychiatrist seeking revenge for his stolen wife and daughter. It was the first film in which Karloff and Lugosi appeared together, and it became Universal's top-grossing release of 1934.^{1 • 2} Although released with the title and an on-screen credit for Edgar Allan Poe's 1843 short story "The Black Cat," the film retains only a trace of that text.^{1 • 3}

Production

Producer Carl Laemmle, Jr. approved the project on the strength of the Karloff-Lugosi pairing and the Poe name, and gave Ulmer nearly free rein. Ulmer and screenwriter Peter Ruric built a new story from scratch, discarding three existing treatments in the studio's script department as well as Poe's tale; Ulmer said plainly that "The Edgar Allan Poe story is not a story you can dramatize."³ In a later interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Ulmer confirmed that the Poe credit was retained despite the film's slight connection to the story.¹

The film was cheap and fast. Universal budgeted it at about a third of the cost of Dracula or Frankenstein; TCM's account describes a fifteen-day shooting schedule, while the Venice Classics restoration notes put the shoot at nineteen days including retakes, at a total cost of $95,745.31.^{3 • 4} AFI's production records give 28 February to 17 March 1934 for principal photography, with three days of retakes beginning 25 March.¹

Ulmer's background was in set design, first in the German theater under Max Reinhardt and then in collaborations with Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau on Metropolis (1927) and Sunrise (1927). He drew on German expressionism for the design of Poelzig's Art Deco mansion, which visually charges the minimal plot.^{3 • 9} The UCLA Universal catalog describes the film as a catalog of 1930s public fascinations: Poe, the two horror stars, modernist architecture, postwar trauma, and psychiatry, pathology, and the occult.²

Censorship

The MPAA/PCA files at the AMPAS Library record that many scenes were considered objectionable for sexual suggestiveness and "gruesomeness," particularly the flaying of Poelzig and the killing of the cat. Hays Office suggestions included deleting a scene of a cat licking blood from Joan's shoulder, the original wedding opening, the appearances of corpses, the suggestion that the ceremony parodied an actual religious service, any sexual intimacy or hint of homosexuality, and references to Czechoslovakians as "people who devour the young."¹

Censorship outcomes varied by jurisdiction. New York, Kansas, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania approved the film without deletions, while Ohio, Ontario, Chicago, Quebec, and Sweden required removal of the flaying scene. Great Britain, where the film was titled The House of Doom, and Japan released it with further deletions. Italy rejected it because "it could create horror," and Finland and Austria rejected it, the latter objecting that it portrayed an Austrian as a "military traitor and main criminal." When the picture was re-issued in 1938, the Hays Office granted it certification.¹

Music and style

The score, arranged by Heinz Roemheld, incorporates Johann Sebastian Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, and the film is counted among the earlier movies with an almost continuous music score.^{1 • 4} Critics have read the film as a marriage of German expressionism and psychological terror: the Venice Classics note calls it a work that helped create and popularize the psychological horror subgenre, relying on atmosphere, eerie sound, and emotions such as fear and guilt rather than a monster, and Paul Mandell's program note calls it "the first American psychological horror."⁴

Reception and legacy

The film was a box office success, Universal's biggest hit of 1934.^{2 • 10} Later critical standing is high: Rotten Tomatoes records an 89% Tomatometer from 36 reviews, with a critics' consensus crediting the Karloff-Lugosi pairing and the film's creepy atmosphere as making it an early classic of the Universal horror library.¹¹ BFI's list of a great horror film for every year selects it for 1934, and the film was screened in the Venice Classics restoration program in 2022.^{12 • 4}

The film also marked a career turning point for Ulmer. Despite its success, it remained his only work for a major studio; his subsequent career ran through independent and low-budget productions, including the noir Detour (1945).^{13 • 14} Universal reused the Poe title for a different 1941 film, The Black Cat, a comedy-mystery unrelated to the 1934 picture.¹⁵

References

1. The Black Cat (1934), AFI Catalog
2. The Black Cat 1934, UCLA Film & Television Archive Universal Catalog
3. The Black Cat (1934), TCM article by Bret Wood
4. The Black Cat, Venice Classics 2022, La Biennale di Venezia
5. The Black Cat, filmportal.de
6. The Black Cat (1934), British Film Institute
7. The Black Cat, ACMI collection
8. The Black Cat (1934), Universal Pictures At Home
9. The Black Cat, Harvard Film Archive
10. 1934: The Black Cat, The Bela Lugosi Blog
11. The Black Cat, Rotten Tomatoes
12. A great horror film for every year, from 1922 to now, BFI
13. Sonia Modonesi, thesis on The Black Cat, University of Padua
14. Detour, National Film Preservation Board treatment
15. The Black Cat (1941), AFI Catalog

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026

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