The original negative of Eerie Tales is lost; what remains is a partial restoration.
The film, an anthology, begins with a prelude in an antiquarian bookshop. After the shopkeeper turns out the lights at night, the characters in three portraits -- the Devil, a prostitute, and Death -- come alive and read scary stories, each tale depicted featuring the same actors (Reinhold Schünzel, Anita Berber and Conrad Veidt) who play the living paintings.
In the first story, the Apparition, a man falls for a woman who is being stalked by her abusive ex-husband. When the woman disappears, the man discovers that the woman died of the plague. Or at least I think that is what happened. I have to admit that I was little confused, the lack of adequate title cards for the dialogue making this one difficult to follow.
Next up is The Hand. Two men play a game of dice to decide which of them will romance the beauty that they both have the hots for. The loser of the game promptly strangles the winner, but is haunted by the dead man's ghost. A mediocre tale of the macabre, although the ghostly footprints and the spectral hand effects were fun.
Director Richard Oswald tackles Edgar Allen Poe's The Black Cat next. I am sure you know the story to this one, suffice to say that this version holds few surprises but is still reasonably entertaining.
The penultimate story is Robert Louis Stevenson's The Suicide Club, in which a man is inducted into a club where the members gamble with their lives. This one is a lot of fun, as the man draws the unlucky Ace of Spades from a deck of cards and is given only a few minutes left to live. Both The Black Cat and The Suicide Club would be revisited by Oswald for his superior 1932 talkie Tales of the Uncanny.
Lastly, we have The Spectre, a rather weak tale to finish with. A married woman is romanced by a baron, her jealous husband pulling some spooky pranks to frighten the bounder.
Having read their stories, the three characters from the portraits resume their places within their frames.
4.5/10, rounded up to 5 for all of the heavy black eye make-up.
