Edgar J. Ulmer's The Black Cat from 1934 is very interesting here
because of its references to World War I. It is a trully political
Horror film but with a rather confusing message. It presents the Boris
Karloff and Bela Lugosi characters as survivors of war who try to come
to terms with their traumatic experience - one by building a modernist
building on the remnants of a fortress and by becoming a satanist, the
other by becoming Hungary's most famous psychiatrist. The film is very
campy and offers more sadism than real horror. It illustrates the
problem to which John pointed, whether the political meaning we
attribute to films has anything to do with the horror they create. But I
think there is one scene which offers some kind of political horror. The
elegant tracking shot throught the vaults of the fortress (in the style
of Last Year at Marienbad), accompanied by Karloffs voiceover who
comments that they are both victims of war, is also one of the few
scenes which creates genuine horror.
I can very well understand skepticism towards political interpretation
of horror and science fictions films. I was always wondering, whether
Americans in the 1950s really imagined the threat of communism and the
soviet union as a threat of conformism and brain washing (I would think
of the Soviet Union of the 1950s more in terms of communist folklore). I
think there are some texts that refer to this fear of conformism as
expressing the threat to individualism in post-war, capitalist,
consumerist society, as a threat coming from within.
Herbert
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