Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

peculiar expressionistic lighting and eccentric geometric forms all intensify the sordid
subject matter of the film (fig. 27).
Figure 27. The Black Cat
The film opens with the Orient Express arriving in Budapest with Joan (Jacqueline
Wells), a beautiful young lady, and Peter Allison (David Manners), a young mystery
writer, recently married and honeymooning in Hungary, sharing the same train
compartment with enigmatic Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi), who is on a journey from
a Russian prison camp to the remains of a town he shielded and fought for before
becoming a prisoner of war for fifteen years. They all disembark at the same station at
Vizhegrad in the rain and board an unsteady bus which, on the way, crashes and skids off
into a ravine, leaving Joan unconscious. The travellers find shelter in a fortress-like
mansion, overlooking the site of Fort Marmorus, a bloody battlefield described as “the
greatest graveyard in the world”. 36 They manage to reach the famous architect Hjalmar
36 The script actually runs like this: “All of this country was one of the greatest battlefields of the war. Ten of
thousands of men died here. The ravine down there was piled twelve deep with dead and wounded man. The
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