The first film to pair Bela Lugosi with Boris Karloff and it’s one of the more warped 1930s horror jobs. It may be the only film of its time in which someone gets skinned alive. Newlyweds David Manners and Jacqueline Wells become stranded in Hungary one stormy night after a car accident. They take shelter in Boris Karloff’s mansion—designed like a cross between a fancy modern penthouse and the artsy Martian settings in Aelita: Queen of Mars—and wind up in the middle of a conflict between him and Lugosi over an old 
grudge from World War I. Meanwhile, Karloff is also the leader of a Satanic cult and takes interest in using Jacqueline Wells as a ritual sacrifice.
Everything here is odd and off-balance. Karloff gives one of his best performances as an evil motherfucker and Lugosi is essentially the film’s hero, yet still creepy and with a most sadistic plan of revenge. The film, according to the opening credits, was “suggested by the immortal Edgar Allan Poe classic”, but it really has nothing to do with Poe’s story. Lugosi’s character has a severe phobia of cats (when he sees one, he has to kill it immediately), but that’s only a device to alienate us from him rather than an important plot point.
This was one of the few big studio films from celebrated B-movie director Edgar G. Ulmer. It was one of Universal’s biggest hits of 1934, but Ulmer was blackballed in the industry afterward when he had an affair with Shirley Alexander, the wife of Universal boss Carl Laemmle’s nephew. She eventually married Ulmer and would go on to work as his script supervisor on mostly low-budget films for the next thirty years.