“The German expressionist director, Paul Leni, who created the decor of his celebrated film, Waxworks, out of paper and artfully controlled lighting, made several films in America. The Cat and the Canary, the best-known, is the earliest of the many films about haunted houses, wills read at midnight, sliding panels, maniacs on the loose, etc., and - after all these years - it remains the best. The reason is not far to seek: for sheer suggestiveness - in horror as much as in comedy - the silent film remained unequalled in the sound era, and Leni, whose mastery of silent cinema compares favorably with that of Dreyer and Eisenstein (the Ivan the Terrible sequence in Waxworks clearly foreshadows Eisenstein), made use of a cinematic repertoire forever lost scarcely a year later. The Cat and the Canary projects an atmosphere of brooding dread: the shadowy lighting, the slow tracking shots, the uncanny camera angles (in one astounding sequence chairbacks are photographed to suggest the bars of a cage) put Hitchcock to shame. Working under commercial conditions, Leni was forced into concessions that are all the more regrettable when one considers that even as it stands The Cat and the Canary is a masterpiece. Had Leni been free to shape the material in ways commensurate with his gifts, he might have given us the supernatural classic of all time.”