"The Black Cat" is an oddball effort from Lucio Fulci, the infamous Italian genre film director. Fulci has worked on a wide variety of movies, but he is best known for his exploitative and excessively gory horror films like "Zombie", "City of the Living Dead", and "The New York Ripper". This particular film is a loose adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name. It is a loose adaptation in that the film only borrows the title and the ending of Poe's "The Black Cat", and makes up everything else.
The film opens with a series of bizarre and seemingly unrelated accidents in a small English town, tied together only by the presence of a black cat. A man suddenly loses control of his car and crashes, and two young lovers are asphyxiated when they are mysteriously locked into an airtight room. The cat lives with an old man, Professor Robert Miles (Patrick Magee), a psychic medium whose hobby is recording audio tapes at old gravesites. While the police investigate the strange and seemingly accidental deaths, an American tourist named Jill Travers (Mimsy Farmer), comes into contact with Miles. She soon begins to suspect that he may have something to do with deaths.
However, it is not Miles that is behind the deaths, but his black cat. The feline has psychically detected Miles's resentment towards the local townsfolk and has been wreaking vengeance on his behalf. Horrified, Miles drugs and kills the cat in an effort to stop the murders, but not even death can stop the four-legged fiend. The cat returns as a ghost, haunting both Miles and Travers. Even before it became a ghost-cat, the creature could seemingly teleport to the most convenient spot to intimidate its victims. No longer bound by earthly confines, the cat can disappear from frame with an accompanying magic sound effect. The zaniness only falters in the film's final moments. Miles is merely arrested for his crimes, although narratively it would have worked better if the cat got revenge on its owner. Given Fulci's penchant for gory violence, Miles gets off considerably lucky.
Italian horror films are distinctly different from those produced in America. The plots are frequently freewheeling and dreamlike, there is a heavy reliance on mood and atmosphere, and the violence is frequently grotesque and surreal. "The Black Cat" checks off all these boxes. The opening ten minutes of the film introduces all of the major plot threads (killer cat, old man convening with spirits, American tourist) concurrently, cutting between the three without initially establishing any kind of relationship. It is a uniquely dreamlike feel, as the film jumps around between strange scenarios with no explanation. The connection between these opening scenes is eventually established, but it is nonetheless surreal to be dropped into the middle of several seemingly unconnected and bizarre occurrences.
The film's atmosphere is prime Italian horror. There are ominous shots of foggy cobblestone streets and eerie cemeteries. Miles's home is splendidly decorated with dozens of giant portrait paintings and oddly placed mirrors. Careful attention is placed on creating an unsettling environment so that the strange events that unfold do not seem so out of place within this movie's world. The violence, too, fits the film's off-putting atmosphere. This is perhaps Fulci's tamest horror film, but the death scenes are staged with elaborate suspense so that they feel horrifyingly impactful. Fulci has a penchant for frequently using close-ups of actor's eyes, and here this technique is used to convey the imposing evil gaze of the cat. The second the camera zooms in on any character's eyes, it is quickly apparent they are doomed.
"The Black Cat" is everything great about Italian horror movies. It is captivatingly strange and gorgeously shot. I cannot think of another movie that features a killer ghost cat, let alone another killer ghost cat movie that is actually good. It is equal parts baffling and spooky. The film rides the line between ridiculous and legitimately unsettling. Patrick Magee is quite imposing as the old psychic; it is strange to see the "Try the wine!" guy from "A Clockwork Orange" in a leading role, but he is quite effective. The ending perhaps a bit anticlimactic, but the rest of the film is so strong it outweighs this minor fault. There is nothing else quite like this film, and it is certainly worth seeking out.
Rating: 9/10
