The Black Cat + Cat People

The Black Cat

Austrian Ulmer, English Karloff and Hungarian Lugosi collaborated on one of the most broodingly expressionist of all early Hollywood horror films, with two deadly enemies from the Great War engaged in a strange, sadistic and bitter battle of wits in a futuristic mansion built on the site of a massacre. Not so much an adaptation of Poe's story as a morbid meditation on the diabolical violence of recent European history.

Cat People

French-born Tourneur's first film for RKO horror producer Val Lewton boasts a wondrous performance from the fittingly feline Simone Simon as a young Serbian living in New York and wary of falling for suitor Smith because she believes herself the victim of an ancient curse linked to sexual arousal. With its superb set pieces bolstered by an evocation of the repressive brutality of European history, this is psychological horror of the first order.