{Blu-ray Review} What Makes You So Nervous Tonight: The Legacy of The Cat and the Canary (1927)

“I always look under the bed but I’ve never found anything yet.”

In 1922, John Willard wrote a stage play that would become one of the ur-texts of one of my favorite horror movie subgenres: the old dark house picture. At one time, The Cat and the Canary had been brought to the screen more times than Dracula, though today it is largely forgotten by comparison to its peers, its impact on cinema so considerable that any modern attempt at adaptation would feel like pastiche even to people who had never heard of the original.

Today, we remember the 1930s and ‘40s as the age of the Universal monsters: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, and so on. But during those years, these pictures were actually outliers, and the dominant form of horror film was the old dark house story, in which a group of people are isolated in an eponymous domicile (often for the reading of a will, as is the case in The Cat and the Canary) and stalked by a maniac who utilizes the many secret passages and hidden compartments of the house against them.

By the time James Whale made The Old Dark House in 1932 – itself an adaptation of J.B. Priestley’s 1927 novel Benighted – it was already something of a send-up of the genre, which had dominated theatrical stages and even silent movie screens for most of a decade and would continue its popularity into the 1940s before largely fading away after World War II, kept alive only sporadically in films such as William Castle’s House on Haunted Hill and later spoofs like the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

An essay by Craig Ian Mann in the booklet that accompanies Eureka’s beautiful new Blu-ray release of Paul Leni’s 1927 version of The Cat and the Canary argues that the timing of the old dark house cycles coincided with the materialistic excesses of the 1920s – that these early stories of wealthy individuals fighting and consuming each other like the eponymous cats and canaries were cautionary tales against society’s materialism.

While Leni’s The Cat and the Canary wasn’t the first such film – it was predated by other adaptations of popular stage plays including The Ghost Breaker (1922), The Monster (1925), The Bat (1926), The Gorilla (1927), as well as D. W. Griffith’s One Exciting Night (1922) which, while ostensibly an original scenario, was called by Variety “a sock at the mystery play gold-mine” – it has been hailed as the most influential in establishing the formula that would come to define Hollywood horror films for decades to come.

Indeed, “horror” wasn’t really a marketing term that was in use yet in 1927. Though it was predated by silent versions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1923 and The Phantom of the Opera in 1925, The Cat and the Canary has been called Universal’s “first horror movie,” and it certainly has more in common with the films that would define the studio’s output throughout the early years of the talkies than either of those previous flicks.

Which is to say that it isn’t just the case that The Cat and the Canary truly is an older cousin to films like Dracula and Frankenstein, but that it feels like one. (In fact, Leni was in consideration to direct Dracula before he died of blood poisoning in 1929.) What’s more, with its restless camera, visual trickery, and clever use of intertitles, The Cat and the Canary feels more modern than just about any other silent film I’ve ever seen. If a movie were released today to try to recapture the energy silent films, there is almost no way it would be as inventive as Leni’s already was a century ago.

And that’s something we’re always in danger of when we talk about these old movies. We discuss their legacy, their importance, the places where they arrived first, and so we set them up as significant and sometimes lose sight of the fact that they are also a blast to watch. Though the plot elements of The Cat and the Canary were already creaky by the time Leni’s version of it appeared on screen, the film never is. It feels light and lively and novel, even as it unfolds events that the viewer knows like the back of their hand. “We want to fall for every trick, to be led up every blind alley,” Imogen Sara Smith writes in another of the essays accompanying Eureka’s stunning Blu-ray release.

Which means that it’s time to talk about that Blu-ray. I had previously seen Leni’s The Cat and the Canary many years ago, on a YouTube rip or something that was so faded and grainy, the sound so tinny and awful, that I could barely make heads or tails of it – and even then it impressed me enough to buy the Blu-ray sight unseen.

The Blu is a treasure. The restoration is gorgeous, with lovely color tinting and an absolutely dynamite score by Robert Israel, itself based on music cue sheets issued to coincide with the film’s original 1927 release. (For those who aren’t aware, silent films were originally released in a form more truly silent than how we watch them today, their scores played live in the theaters where they were shown.)

To say that the movie has never looked or sounded better is to engage in faint praise, given the earlier versions we had at our disposal, but such an upgrade is always a cause for celebration – especially when the film in question is as important and as delightful as this one.