A fan named Matthew shared his thoughts with us on what he thought we some of Bellairs's purported inspiration for
The Mansion in the Mist:
Myriad references to THE BLACK CAT (a 1934 horror film from Universal Studios, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi) exist in THE MANSION IN THE MIST. Wasn't John Bellairs a Karloff fan? (Karloff is (subtly) alluded to too.)
That tidbit popped into mind when this was posted to
CraveOnline recently:
The Black Cat (dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934) came
out during the rise of the Universal Monster Film’s golden era. And
while it has never achieved the worldwide fame of a Dracula or a
Frankenstein, is still bears the beautifully twisted 1930s horror
sensibility of those classics. The story of the film has actually very
little to do with the original story, about a man who bricked his murder
victim up behind a wall (hiding dead bodies is a common theme in Poe),
following, as it does, a Satanic priest who looks after a car-wrecked
traveling couple, but it’s still wildly atmospheric, and has wonderfully
towering horror actors to menace our heroes. No one less than Boris
Karloff plays the Satanic priest Hjalmar Poelzig, and the
even-more-towering Bela Lugosi plays the wounded Hungarian doctor who
must match wits (and even play a deathly game of chess) with Poelzig.
Again, it drifts from Poe (as so many of his films do), but it’s still
one of the great horror films.
Anyone else see a connection?
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