Karloff: The Black Cat (1943)

Boris Karloff is most famous, of course, for his first big role as the creature in James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein.  In choosing a source pic of him, though, I wanted to show him with a little less makeup – his craggy face is a fascinating character study.  This shot came from one of my favorite films of his, The Black Cat, in which he co-starred with Bela Lugosi.  The film has nothing to do with the Edgar Allan Poe short story of the same name (Lugosi would later appear in another Black Cat film, loosely based on the Poe tale, in 1943, with Basil Rathbone ).  Karloff plays Hjalmar Poelzig, the leader of a Satanic cult, supposedly loosely based on Aliester Crowley.

While not a great film, the Black Cat is notable for several reasons:  this was one of the first films to pair Karloff and Lugosi together (they would work together on seven more films over the next  six years, including The Raven and Black Friday); it’s one of the few films in which Lugosi plays a hero, rather than a villain; and it’s one of the first ever films to feature a musical soundtrack throughout.

As with my Lugosi portrait, this one was created in Photoshop, using minimal layers and no effects (no selections, masks, adjustment layers, etc) except for a texture overlay on the background.