Come to the Institute of Crazyology for a double-feature of classic cat themed horror films.
Halloween Night! Sunday, October 31st 2021
Doors open at 7:30 PM
“The Black Cat” 8 PM
“Curse of the Cat People” 10:30 PM
Admission: $13.00
https://www.eventbrite.com/…/halloween-vintage…
Notes on the films by Neil Martinson:
The Black Cat (1934) is a pre-Code horror film, and among the first movies with an almost continuous music score. It became Universal Pictures’ biggest box office hit of the year, and helped to create and popularize the psychological horror subgenre, emphasizing atmosphere, eerie sounds, the darker side of the human psyche, and emotions like fear and guilt to deliver its scares.The British critic Philip French wrote, “The movie unfolds like a nightmare that involves necrophilia, ailurophobia (fear of cats), drugs, a deadly game of chess, torture, flaying, and a black mass with a human sacrifice. This bizarre, utterly irrational masterpiece, lasting little more than an hour, has images that bury themselves in the mind.”Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer.
Produced by Carl Laemmle Jr. and E. M. Asher.
Starring Boris Karloff, Béla Lugosi, David Manners and Julie Bishop.
The Curse of the Cat People (1944)
A moody psychological fantasy thriller that follows Amy, a young girl who befriends the ghost of her father’s deceased first wife, Irena, a Serbian fashion designer descended from a race of people who could transform into cats. Although sharing some of the same cast and characters and marketed as a sequel to 1942’s Cat People, the film is self contained and only tangentially related to its predecessor.The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther called it “a rare departure from the ordinary run of horror films [which] emerges as an oddly touching study of the working of a sensitive child’s mind”.Directed by Gunther von Fritsch and Robert Wise.
Produced by Val Lewton.
Starring Simone Simon, Kent Smith, and Jane Randolph.
