Scary Tales (1932)

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Movie
Original title Scary stories
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1932
length 89 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Richard Oswald
script Heinz Goldberg
Eugen Szatmari based
on the novels " The Secret of the Black Cat " by Edgar Allan Poe and " The Suicide Club " by Robert Louis Stevenson
production Richard Oswald for Roto, Berlin , and Gabriel Pascal for GP Films, Berlin
music Rolf Marbot
Bert rice field
camera Heinrich Gärtner
cut Max Brenner
Friedel Buckow
occupation

Eerie Tales is a German horror film from 1932. For this early sound film, director Richard Oswald only partially oriented himself to his silent film of the same name from 1919 .

action

A creepy scientist who lives with his wife in a remote house is working in his basement on models of strange machines, the purpose of which no outsiders can understand. His wife is also not privy to his research activities. Her one and only is a black cat, which is why there is a heated argument between the couple. Just at the moment when the scientist kills his wife in a wild outburst of anger, the young journalist Frank Briggs is stopping at the front door with his car. He was about to top up the cooling water when he heard the woman's death scream. Briggs knocks on the house to see if everything is going well. The host opens the door, but brusquely rejects Briggs.

But this cannot be rejected so quickly. Frank Briggs calls the police, who now take a closer look at the house. When you hear a meow behind a wall, the police break open the wall. The man had inadvertently walled up his wife's beloved black cat when he buried his wife's body. The murderer evades arrest, flees and initially hides in the mechanical museum. Then he finds shelter in an emergency room. Since the scientist stiffly claims to be a murderer, the doctor in charge in the emergency room transfers the obviously confused man to an asylum.

Frank Briggs tries to track down the killer. After he has lost sight of him in the meantime, he tracks down the man in the asylum again. When asked by Briggs, the head physician of the clinic remains strangely disinterested and instead takes the somewhat confused journalist to a party for his patients. The patients celebrate the takeover of the institution by themselves, the nursing staff has been captured. When Briggs discovers the wife murderer among the madmen, he uses a ruse to arrest him. But the scientist is able to escape again, while the police are again required to pull Briggs out of a situation that is becoming threatening to him.

About half a year later: Several people have recently disappeared in mysterious ways. Eventually one of the missing people is found murdered. Briggs investigates this matter and learns during his research that there is such a thing as a suicide club. This secret society meets at Turmgasse 13, and Briggs immediately sets off there. In a macabre card game, each meeting draws lots to see who is the next to “kill” himself. Briggs' long-sought nemesis , the murderous scientist, turns out to be the club president . This forces Briggs to participate in the game of death and succeeds in getting the journalist to draw the fatal ace of spades . Briggs' death is said to occur in just 15 minutes on a special chair in the next room. But Briggs manages to maneuver the club president himself into the chair and hold him there until the police arrive.

Production notes

With Eerie Tales , Oswald followed up on his time with fantastic and creepy material from the 1910s. The shooting took place between June 23 and the end of August 1932. The shooting location was the UFA studios in Berlin-Tempelhof . The premiere took place on September 7, 1932 in Berlin's Ufa-Theater Kurfürstendamm .

The manager was Walter Zeiske that Filmbauten were from Walter Reimann and Franz Schroedter designed or executed. The young Robert Jungk was involved as an assistant director and in a small supporting role .

In Uncanny stories was Paul Wegener his late debut in talkies. John Gottowt , Wegener's former film partner and opponent in The Student of Prague , also made his debut here in talkies. The part in Eerie Tales was Gottowt's last film role.

Reviews

LHE wrote in the Film-Kurier : "Richard Oswald was very lucky to have reshaped his" uncanny stories ", with which he won his success in the silent film era, for the sound film. The supernatural, gruesome that the film captures with optical means can be enhanced by the sound. Oswald used this tone sparingly (which Fritz Seeger took care of here); in this way he avoids horror ever turning into comedy. [...] The evening party of the mad is conceived most strongly; Oswald is not looking for exaggerations, exaggerations, he lets the actors soar into the state of mind only by that single nuance that separates the mentally mad from the healthy. And it is precisely in this way, without going astray into the abstract, that a distortion of living puppets is achieved that is decisive. "

Hans Wollenberg wrote in the Lichtbild-Bühne : “Here the tension is heightened to horror, the crime deepened to mental abnormality. If the actual crime film requires the pretense of the clearest realism, here the fantastic, the super-real should ban us. Such a film is at home in the districts of demonic poetry, in the sphere of Stevenson and Poe. One should wait with interest how the public, weaned from such fare, would react to it. It was noted with satisfaction that the whole house clearly went along with this eerie story and let itself be packed and willingly led into its dark regions. And when at the end the dreadful and tense atmosphere erupted in lively applause, for which Richard Oswald and his leading actor Paul Wegener were able to thank, one should note that there is no more critical, skeptical auditorium than that of West Berlin. [...] The fact that Oswald, the business savvy, has managed to reach for such material again will have to be taken into account. In doing so, he tied in with the decisive success of a previous silent film epoch: with his "Weird Stories" from 1919/20, to which he owed his artistic reputation. He was certainly not always very careful with this reputation. But with the remake of the scary stories, he justified it again. […] Richard Oswald's directing here will be a surprise - a very pleasant surprise - for some who only know him from somewhat loud, talkative, crude and overly clear productions. It has atmosphere, nuances; she instinctively knows how to steer past the limit at which the horror turns into the comic. And that's difficult, especially with Paul Wegener's facial style. "

The Lexicon of International Films wrote: “From stories by EA Poe […] and RL Stevenson […] distilled, absurd horror movie in the follow-up to Paul Leni's“ wax museum ”. A piece of German film history. "

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Robert Jungk: Nevertheless. My life for the future , Munich / Vienna 1993, p. 77.
  2. ^ Film-Kurier, No. 212, of September 8, 1932
  3. ↑ Lichtbild-Bühne, No. 211, of September 8, 1932
  4. ↑ Klaus Brüne (Red.): Lexikon des Internationale Films, Volume 8, p. 3969. Reinbek near Hamburg 1987

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