'The Black Cat' aka 'Gatto Nero' (1981) – Lucio Fulci.

'The Black Cat' was made during an especially creative and prolific period in maestro, Lucio Fulci's illustrious film-making career. While his iconic Zombie trilogy is often celebrated, maestro, Fulci's singularly strange Poe adaptation has always maintained an uncommonly tenacious grip on my imagination. Much more than just another baroque bloodbath, The Black Cat's narrative is certainly no less morbidly cunning, despicably feral, and murderously unpredictable than the raven-hued, equally black-hearted, rooftop stalking feline flesh-flayer!

Evocatively set against against a prototypically quaint English village, there are eldritch forces fulminating evilly behind the lead-lined windows and pictorially groomed gardens! Following the sudden, inexplicably brutal deaths of three people, handsome Inspector Gorley (Peter Warbeck) is tasked to investigate these mysterious deaths. Working alongside pretty photographer and amateur detective, Jill Trevers (Mimsy Farmer) their combined sleuthing disturbingly takes a decent into the paranormal machinations of sinister necromancer, Prof. Robert Miles (Patrick Magee). His cavalier dabbling in the more nefarious aspects of the occult threatens to consume all those with the grave misfortune to come under the malign professor's murderously mesmeric thrall!

Inventive Horror stylist, Fulci doomily invokes one of his more accomplished, darkly fascinating tales of supernatural terror with his audacious retelling of the immortal, Edgar Allan Poe classic. The Black Cat excitingly remains an entertaining, beguilingly bizarre, visually compelling, grimly atmospheric grisly Gothic gem. Fulci's macabre masterpiece is bloodily bedazzled with his signature hyped-up hallucinatory nastiness, and the penetrating sense of some vile unknowable evil being given eerie verisimilitude by maestro, Pino Donaggio's atmospheric score. Celebrated actors, Mimsy Farmer, David Warbeck, Al Cliver, and the charismatically creepy, Patrick Magee have never been more delightful!