The first cinematic teaming of horror greats Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi despite having little to do with the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name (though Poe's name is listed in the credits), is still a bizarre, haunting, and relentlessly eerie film that was surprisingly morbid and perverse for its time. Peter (David Manners) and Joan Allison (Julie Bishop,) a honeymooning couple in Budapest help a mysterious scientist Dr. Vitus Verdegast (Lugosi in a rare turn as a good guy) get revenge against the spectral Hjalmar Poelzig (Karloff), an architect and the leader of a Satanic cult. With corpses preserved in glass cases, frightening Satanic rituals, and a climactic confrontation in which one of the characters is skinned alive, combined with the stark black-and-white photography by John Mescall that makes Poelzig's futuristic mountaintop mansion even more disturbing, The Black Cat is widely regarded as the masterpiece of director Edgar G. Ulmer and was the biggest box-office hit of the year for Universal Peter Ruric (better known as pulp writer "Paul Cain") wrote the screenplay, and the character of Hjalmar Poelzig was inspired by the life of occultist Aleister Crowley. It bears no relation to the 1941 The Black Cat, starring Basil Rathbone except for the presence of Lugosi in both pictures. The near continuous classical music soundtrack was compiled by Heinz Eric Roemheld. The movie was released in the UK under the title the House Of Doom.