Nov 281932
 
two reels
Unheimliche-geschichten-1932

Zealous reporter Frank Briggs (Harald Paulsen) hears a scream while driving down a road, and hops out to investigate, going to the house of inventor Mörder (Paul Wegener) who had just murdered his wife. This begins a chase that has the two passing through events from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat and The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether, and Robert Lewis Stevenson’s The Suicide Club.

Eerie Tales, also known in the US as The Living Dead for no damn reason, is a follow-up/semi-remake of director Richard Oswald’s silent film of the same name. Both are anthology films, the first with five tales, including two in this movie, The Black Cat and The Suicide Club. But what binds the stories together is new. Oswald doesn’t just reuse actors for each segment, as is common with these sorts of movies, but connects them into one narrative by inserting his two main characters into each part. It’s ingenious, and I wonder why it hasn’t been done more often. However, some of the stitching is rough and in several cases poor choices were made in the roles these two played in the stories. It’s a great idea, with mediocre execution.

Paul Wegener is a force on screen. Best known as the Golem in three silent pictures, he conveys his entire character with a few facial expressions. Mörder is filled with anger, fear, hate, and desire and I could feel it all. He gobbles up the screen and I was completely absorbed by him. When he was missing from a scene, I was just waiting for him to come back..

Harald Paulsen, on the other hand, is an emotional void. He brings nothing to the part, which is doubly unfortunate as the part supplies nothing on its own. He’s a reporter, and reporting is really important to him. And that’s all we know. Is he heroic? Is he brave or a coward? Is he intelligent, dim, kind, vicious, humble, proud? Is he even, in the broadest terms, the good guy? I’ve no idea. He’s nothing. That wouldn’t be a problem if he was just a shadow, always in the background chasing our villain, as he probably should have been, but he gets more screen time than Wagener. He’s there, lapping up frames, stretching out scenes, and giving nothing.

There was a lot of potential here, and occasionally, with Wegener and with the darkly comical inmates of the asylum, it comes close. Over all, Eerie Tales is a disappointment.