Unheimliche Geschichten | |
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Directed by | Richard Oswald |
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Cinematography | Heinrich Gärtner [1] |
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Country | Germany [1] |
Unheimliche Geschichten (lit.Uncanny Stories), titled The Living Dead in English, is a 1932 German comedy horror film, directed by the film director Richard Oswald, starring Paul Wegener, and produced by Gabriel Pascal. It is a remake of Oswald's 1919 film of the same name.
The story is a merging of three separate short stories, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat," "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Suicide Club , set within a frame story of a reporter's hunt for a mad scientist. It is a black comedy revisiting many of the classic themes of the horror genre. It was Paul Wegener's first talking movie.
A crazed scientist, Morder (Paul Wegener), driven even crazier by his nagging wife, murders her and walls her up in a basement, a la Poe's "The Black Cat". He then flees as the police and a reporter, Frank Briggs (Harald Paulsen), set out to track him down.
Morder eventually escapes, by pretending to be insane, into an insane asylum. Here, the patients have managed to free themselves, lock up the guards, and take charge (inspired by Poe's "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether"). After Morder's final escape, he turns up as president of a secret Suicide Club (based on the short story by Stevenson).
Unheimliche Geschichten was released in Germany on 7 September 1932. [1] It was released in the United States in 1940 as The Living Dead. [2]
In contemporary reviews, Variety declared in 1932 that Oswald had "succeeded in creating an effectively gruesome picture", [3] specifically praising the sound, acting and photography as "excellent". [3] In 1940, Bosley Crowther reviewed The Living Dead for The New York Times , declaring it "a nightmare reminder of the old pre-Nazi macabre school of German films, which did all right by such things as M , but apparently had its bad moments, too." [4]
"The Black Cat" is a short story by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe. It was first published in the August 19, 1843, edition of The Saturday Evening Post. In the story, an unnamed narrator has a strong affection for pets until he perversely turns to abusing them. His favorite, a pet black cat, bites him one night and the narrator punishes it by cutting its eye out and then hanging it from a tree. The home burns down but one remaining wall shows a burned outline of a cat hanging from a noose. He soon finds another black cat, similar to the first except for a white mark on its chest, but he develops a hatred for it as well. He attempts to kill the cat with an axe but his wife stops him; instead, the narrator murders his wife. He conceals the body behind a brick wall in his basement. The police soon come and, after the narrator's tapping on the wall is met with a shrieking sound, they find not only the wife's corpse but also the black cat that had been accidentally walled in with the body and alerted them with its cry.
The Black Cat is a 1934 American pre-Code horror film directed by Edgar G. Ulmer and starring Boris Karloff and Béla Lugosi. It was Universal Pictures' biggest box office hit of the year, and was the first of eight films to feature both Karloff and Lugosi. In 1941, Lugosi appeared in a comedy horror mystery film with the same title, which was also named after and ostensibly "suggested by" Edgar Allan Poe's short story.
Paul Wegener was a German actor, writer, and film director known for his pioneering role in German expressionist cinema.
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Richard Oswald was an Austrian film director, producer, screenwriter, and father of German-American film director Gerd Oswald.
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Lunacy is a 2005 Czech animated horror comedy-drama film written and directed by Jan Švankmajer. It is loosely based on two Edgar Allan Poe short stories, "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" (1845) and "The Premature Burial" (1844), and partly inspired by the works of the Marquis de Sade. The film was shot between October 2004 and April 2005, on location in the village of Peruc close to Prague, and in Švankmajer's studio in the village of Knovíz.
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"The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" is a dark comedy short story by the American author Edgar Allan Poe. First published in Graham's Magazine in November 1845, the story centers on a naïve and unnamed narrator's visit to a mental asylum in the southern provinces of France.
John Gottowt was an Austrian actor, stage director and film director for theatres and silent movies.
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Harald Paulsen was a German stage and film actor and director. He appeared in 125 films between 1920 and 1954.
The Case of the Black Cat is a 1936 American mystery film directed by William C. McGann and an uncredited Alan Crosland, based on the 1935 Perry Mason novel The Case of the Caretaker's Cat by Erle Stanley Gardner. The film stars Ricardo Cortez as Perry Mason and co-stars June Travis and Jane Bryan in her film debut. The film is the fifth Perry Mason adaptation distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures in the 1930s and the first in the series not to feature Warren William as Mason.
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Stonehearst Asylum, previously known as Eliza Graves, is an American psychological horror film directed by Brad Anderson and written by Joseph Gangemi. It is loosely based on the 1845 short story "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" by Edgar Allan Poe. The film, starring Kate Beckinsale, Jim Sturgess, Michael Caine, Ben Kingsley, and David Thewlis, was released on October 24, 2014.
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Unheimliche Geschichten, also known as Grausige Nächte or Eerie Tales, is a 1919 German silent anthology film directed by Richard Oswald and starring Conrad Veidt, Reinhold Schünzel, and Anita Berber. The film is divided into five segments: "The Apparition", "The Hand", "The Black Cat", "The Suicide Club" and "Der Spuk".