The Black Cat & The Raven

A double feature starring two horror icons! Bela Lugosi & Boris Karloff!

I watched The Black Cat last night and The Raven Tonight, and I thought “well you can’t talk about one without talking about the other”.

7. The Black Cat, 1934

This film is awesome! This was the first that features both Karloff and Lugosi. Oddly enough, the black cat has little to do with the plot, but the idea of a a black cat representing pure evil sets the mood to the movie.

For it’s time it was pretty hardcore stuff, deals with death, satanism, necrophilia, murder and torture. Boris Karloff is just great, an all around badass here, he’s  the bad guy just for the sake of being evil. Lugosi’s character is a bit more complex, and his performance in this movie is just flawless.
Censors in Italy, Finland and Austria banned the movie outright, while others required cuts of the more gruesome sequences.



8. The Raven, 1935

This one was not as shocking as The Black Cat, but still it was pretty awesome, here the stories of Edgar Allan Poe have more to do with the plot.

The character Lugosi plays is obsessed by the Poe stories. Karloff has a lot less lines than Lugosi, but never the less he gives a great performance, you feel his emotion and at some point even sympathize with his character. Still, Lugosi is at his best in this movie, a lot of great deliveries.

Too strong for 1935 tastes, with its themes of torture, disfigurement and grisly revenge, the film did not do particularly well at the box office during its initial release, and indirectly led to a temporary ban on horror films in England.