USA 60m Dir: Edgar G. Ulmer Key Cast: Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff
It's a tantalising prospect to have two horror legends together in the same film. Here Bela Lugosi (Dracula) and Boris Karloff (Frankenstein's Monster) starred together for the first time (they could go on to appear together a further five times).
The film is supposed to be based on the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name but has very little to do with the story- in the UK it was released under the title 'House of Doom'. Newly-weds Peter and Joan Alison (David Manners and Julie Bishop) are on honeymoon in Hungary and for part of their journey find themselves traveling alongside Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Lugosi). Subsidence in the poor weather leads to an accident on the bus they are traveling in and Joan is injured so Vitus takes the couple to the house of Poelzig (Karloff). It turns out that Poelzig is a Satanist who married Vitus' wife and then his daughter and keeps a collection of dead women in glass cases. He plans to sacrifice Joan in a satanic ritual...
The film is very psychological with little horror actually happening. Karloff's physicality really helps the role- he's scary just to look at and for much of the film he just appears in a room and feels creepy without having to do much. When we discover his character genuinely is creepy he becomes really unsettling. The film had an important role to play in establishing the psychological horror genre, using fear and guilt to create scares rather than monsters.
Lugosi, though famed for being Dracula, is really the hero of this piece. He's the one character who never seems scared of Poelzig and casually agrees to a game of chess to compete for the Alison's' lives as if it were an everyday occurrence. When he finally defeats Poelzig though the most disturbing and best sequence of the film occurs when, shown in silhouette only, Vitus skins Poelzig alive. It's an incredibly brutal revenge that suddenly makes Vitus seem somewhat less heroic.
This is a film which has not aged especially well. There have been far superior psychological horror films than this since it was made and my comparison this is falls rather flat. It is important though to remember that it helped form the genre and perhaps that means it worked better at the time than it does today.
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