Part of Gods and Monsters: Universal Horror’s 90th Anniversary & Disreputable Cinema (2021)
Saturday, October 30, 2021, 6:30 p.m.
Museum of the Moving Image - Bartos Screening Room

Dir. Edgar G. Ulmer. 1934, 69 mins. 35mm. With Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Julie Bishop, David Manners. American honeymooners find themselves trapped inside the home of a satan-worshipper, their fates left to a ghoulish game of human chess played between Vitus Werdegast (Lugosi) and Hjalmar Poelzig (Karloff), who share a dark past. This bizarre, early psychological horror unfolds like a nightmare. Its haunting atmosphere and shocking depictions of satanism and torture would have all been muted had it been produced under the thumb of the coming Hays Code.