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7 The Fall of the House of Ulmer Europe versus America in the Gothic Vision of The Black Cat TheAmericanpublicapparentlydoesnotwantustogivescreenplaysanatural ending, because movie fans really do not want motion pictures like the books fromwhichtheyareadapted....InEuropearealisticproductionisconsidered splendid entertainment by the masses, even though it is a stark tragedy. In America, however, every picture must end with the hero and heroine dying in each other’s arms. They must live happily ever after, but life isn’t like that. —Carl Laemmle Sr., Universal Weekly The horror story is one of the many exotic goods that Americans have traditionally imported from Europe. This was already true in American Gothic fiction in the early nineteenth century; the situation persisted even in the twentieth century and the new medium of cinema.1 To be sure, the horror movie seems at first to be a quintessentially American phenomenon—a rite of passage for American teenagers and a genre in which America has come to dominate the world. It is due to American movies that the faces of Dracula and the Frankenstein monster are known all around the globe. Yet both these creatures were originally the creations of European authors (Bram Stoker for Dracula and Mary Shelley for the Frankenstein monster). Even as motion picture figures, they can be traced back to European precursors in German expressionist cinema—Nosferatu (1922) for Dracula (1931), and The Golem (1920) and Metropolis (1927) for Frankenstein (1931). Importing Horror An excellent example of the equivocally American character of the horror movie is The Black Cat (1934), one of the highlights of the groundbreaking 223 224 Edgar G. Ulmer horror series that the Hollywood studio Universal turned out in the 1930s.2 Several commentators regard it as one of the greatest achievements in the genre.3 As its title indicates, The Black Cat was intended to evoke the spirit of America’s most famous native exponent of the horror story, Edgar Allan Poe.4 But at the same time, the movie was made to capitalize on the popularity of Universal’s two most famous—and exotic—horror movie stars, an Englishman named William Henry Pratt, who had adopted the very European -sounding stage name of Boris Karloff, and a Hungarian actor with the equally European name of Bela Lugosi.5 The director of the film, Edgar G. Ulmer, was an émigré from the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire who had worked with several German expressionist film directors, including the great F. W. Murnau.6 The film has a European feel in all its aspects, including the art direction and the casting of the minor roles (Ulmer drew upon fellow émigrés to fill several of the parts).7 With its abstract, geometric sets, unusual camera angles and tracking shots, and artful use of light and shadow, The Black Cat at times looks like pure German expressionism on the screen.8 The musical score is one of the most remarkable in Hollywood history for its unabashed use of European classical music, with passages from Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, Schubert, Schumann, and Tchaikovsky, often used as Wagnerian leitmotifs to highlight the action.9 Thus, one of the greatest of American horror movies appears upon closer inspection to be European through and through. Moreover, the film turns out to have Europe as a theme. It stages a confrontation between the Old World and the New and attempts to define the one way of life by comparison with the other. Ulmer draws upon the European Gothic tradition to create a ruined castle for the twentieth century, a haunted house shadowed by the new horrors of the modern world, specifically the nightmare of the Great War, 1914–1918. Faced with the task of creating an American horror movie, Ulmer had a brilliant idea. He realized that if Americans wanted to see something horrific in 1934, all they had to do was to look across the Atlantic to a European landscape permanently scarred by World War I. But at the same time, as a sophisticated European himself, Ulmer could not avoid a certain condescension in the way he portrays his American protagonists in the film.10 He sees something childish in his Americans, with their naïveté and lack of culture. Ulmer thus joins a long line of Europeans who regard the United States as offering an alternative to Europe as a way of life and a challenge to its assumptions. If Americans have been fascinated by Europe as the source [3.16.212.99] Project MUSE (2024...

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