THE BLACK CAT (1981)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

Since it's almost impossible to make Edgar Allen Poe's famous short story into a feature film without adding elements to complicate the plot-action, it's not a slight to say that Lucio Fulci's take on THE BLACK CAT isn't totally faithful to the story. In fact, in one thematic sense, it duplicates some of Poe's ambivalence as to the origins of evil. In some tales, Poe seems to feel that evil is the result of bad human choices, as seen in "Metzengerstein" and "William Wilson." In others, evil just erupts out the human soul with no choice involved, as in "The Imp of the Perverse" and "The Tell-Tale Heart." 

Fulci starts CAT in a small English town, as an evil black tabby gets into some random citizen's car and does some sort of hoodoo on the driver, so that he crashes and is killed. An American tourist, a professional photographer named Jill (Mimsy Farmer) gets drawn into investigating this and other strange deaths to help Scotland Yard Inspector Gorley (David Warbeck). She soon meets local eccentric scientist Robert Miles (Patrick Magee) and learns that he's been conducting experiments in talking to the spirits of the dead. In fact, early on he shows that he's less than a self-sacrificing ideologue, for he briefly tries to hypnotize Jill, implicitly to take advantage of her. But the young woman snaps out of the spell and runs away.

While the narrator of Poe's story kills a real cat and brings down on himself the vengeance of a possibly supernatural feline, there's no doubt that this Black Cat is some demonic spirit from the beginning, possibly called forth by Miles' messing with spirits. Sometimes the cat knocks off local victims in relatively naturalistic ways, but whether its methods are naturalistic or marvelous, Miles thinks the creature manifests from his own hatred toward the townsfolk-- which takes the emphasis off of his transgressions in the spirit world and puts the evil of Miles more in the realm of subconscious perversity rather than objective actions. 

There are some good shocks along the way, particularly as the Black Cat begins performing more overtly demonic acts. At one point, Miles duplicates the act of the Poe-narrator and hangs the nasty pussy, and for some reason this causes EXORCIST-style shenanigans to occur in Jill's apartment. Nevertheless, the cat is the star of the show, and Miles is doomed from the get-go. For all that, BLACK CAT sports Magee's best performance in a horror-flick, while everyone else is reduced to support-status.