“In September 1927, two films came out in America which were made by German directors working for the first time in Hollywood – Paul Leni’s The Cat and the Canary and F.W.Murnau’s Sunrise. For most critics, these two full length films show, each in its own way, the great influence of German cinema on American cinema in the latter years of the 1920s – Ernst Lubitsch had already settled in Hollywood and others were rapidly adapting to American cinema. One notes the use of camera movement, the special effects in the ‘setting up sequences’ in the initial scenes and the sets built in expressionist style. Sunrise was an important and fairly prestigious project for the Fox Film Corporation but at the same time a financial disappointment. The success of The Cat and the Canary encouraged Universal to promote this form of production right up to the 1930s.

The thriller had its roots in the Broadway theatre taste for mystery. The Cat and the Canary, made in 1922, was another great success of the moment. In this genre of film, the heroes are characters who find themselves, often at night, in a haunted house as guests at a masked ball or at the reading of a will. Here they meet deformed or demented beings who, using secret passages, wander the house and terrorise the guests, either for revenge or out of pure malice. The first film of this kind, Griffith’s One Exciting Night (1922) did not achieve any great success. But after the success of The Bat (1926) and The Cat and the Canary the haunted house became one of cinema’s favourite locations. One of the last silent cinema examples was Seven Footprints to Satan (1929) by the Danish director Benjamin Christensen.

The success of The Cat and the Canary encouraged Universal to propose another mystery film to Paul Leni, Le Perroquet Chinois (1928), which was to have equal success. His third film for the studios was a highly ambitious costume film, The Man Who Laughs (1928). The box office receipts for the film were disappointing and Universal therefore suggested that Leni should return to the gothic thriller with The Last Performance (1928), a story which brings together once more a group of deformed people, this time inside an old abandoned theatre that hides a mysterious attacker.

Leni died of septicaemia in 1929. Had he not met this tragic end, he would certainly have become one of Universal Studios major horror film producers of the 1930s. Most of these films, in fact, were made by foreign directors (Whale, Florey, Freund), which helps to ensure that they have that European atmosphere which, to American eyes, characterises the genre”.

(Kristin Thompson, Les Cahiers du Muet, no.17, 1994)