A Film Canon

 

 

This camp classic bears no resemblance to Edgar Allen Poe's short story, apart from its use of the cat as a symbol for amorphous, inexplicable evil. Like most of the 1930s Universal Horror cycle, it brings high camp and naturalism into collision, to the extent that one of the characters is moved to ask: "What use are these melodramatic gestures?" The answer lies in their contribution to a pervasive superficiality, clearest in the inimitable rapport between Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, but also evident in the lurid spectacles, constant music, stilted delivery, and monologic pronouncements, all of which reduce the characters to their faces and, in turn, reduce those faces to a series of stock expressions; a camp typage. This superficiality serves to emphasise the return of sexual, supernatural and, above all, historical information, as well as its cinematographic corollary - a dramatic depth-of-field - whose canvas is the bizarre, modernist house where most of the action occurs. The shared domain of an architect and psychologist, this overwhelmingly cerebral space is explored through a highly fluid camera, whose movements conjure up a circumambience analogous to the preservative fluid surrounding Karloff's mummified victims, bearing out his claim to be as dead in spirit as they are in body, and explaining the soporific impact that the house has on the heroine. This pervasive morbidity is enhanced by Ulmer's tendency to temper the supposed objectivity of the camera with architectural accoutrements, whose dim, blurred presence at the edge of the screen identifies the viewer with a covert satanic gaze.