Cat And The Canary

It was a dark and stormy night, as the saying goes, and the greedy relatives gathered in a gloomy old mansion for the midnight reading of a 20-year-old will were unnerved by sinister events: a clawed hand emerging from the wall, a familiar body falling from behind a secret panel and word that an escaped lunatic was at large. All in an evening´s entertainment, for audiences of the silent film era.

THE CAT AND THE CANARY is so clever and stylish that it would appear to be the wellspring of all "old dark house" mysteries. But when it was filmed by Universal in 1927, John Willard´s play was already a theatrical warhouse, along with other popular melodramas such as THE BAT, THE MONSTER, and THE GORILLA. In their stage and screen incarnations, these chestnuts promised as many laughs as thrills, and audiences thoroughly expected their houses´ hauntings to be revealed as the criminal schemes of mortals. For both Broadway and Hollywood, the supernatural would not take center stage until the arrival of Count Dracula.

Even so, THE CAT AND THE CANARY was a milestone of the American horror film, thanks to the ingenuity of it´s german director Paul Leni. One of the first of several film artists imported from Germany by hollywood. Leni invigorated this stage-bound genre with expressionist flair, transforming conventional material into a visual feast.