The Best Laid Plans of Not-So-Nice Madmen

We’re all waiting with bated breath as the world’s finest medical and scientific minds tirelessly work to come up with a vaccine for the coronavirus. When it happens, it will rank among humanity’s greatest medical achievements, right up there with Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin and Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine.

The difference being that there will almost certainly not be an individual man or woman to point to as the latest hero of the 21st century (although no doubt some politicians will try to take credit). The complexity of the challenges and the resources needed to address them dictate that literal armies of brilliant minds work cooperatively and collectively, versus leaving it up to an eccentric lone wolf scientist burning the midnight oil in a secluded lab.

"It's okay doc, I'm feeling much better now... really I am!"

Society is deeply ambivalent when it comes to brilliant lone wolves. On the one hand, we say we cherish individualism, ambition and initiative, and yet also seem to be smugly satisfied when some modern-day Icarus flies too high and comes crashing back down to earth.

One of the purest expressions of that love-hate relationship is the B-movie mad scientist. Whether they’re busy stitching together body parts and animating them with life, or concocting serums that can turn human beings into mind-controlled zombies, there’s nothing more fascinating or more deserving of punishment than the mad doctor dabbling in things better left alone.

It seems as if we value intelligence up to a certain point -- then, when we’re confronted with extraordinary genius, we’re deeply suspicious that such a gift is a license to disregard the value of “normal” human life. The movies help us work out the conundrum and restore order to the universe, at least on celluloid.

The mad doctors and scientists profiled below -- represented by some of the greatest names in classic horror -- are all inheritors of the Frankenstein tradition of lonely brilliance, a tendency to flout society’s norms, and hubris bordering on a God-complex. They up the ante by being willing to experiment on live people; no digging up subjects from the local graveyard for them.

While the mad theories, serum formulas and lab equipment vary from film to film, some plot elements pop up time and again:

• A brilliant but highly eccentric scientist is denounced and/or ostracized by his colleagues for his mad theories
• Seething with resentment, he locks himself away in an isolated lab, often in a large, remote mansion, working round the clock to prove himself to the world
• To anyone who will listen, the scientist compares himself to the great thinkers of history who were misunderstood in their day
• An innocent woman -- a daughter, niece, sister or colleague -- initially stands by the beleaguered scientist, holding out a slim hope of redemption for him
• The scientist is not just content to prove his discredited theory, but has to exact revenge on his disbelieving colleagues, even those who still respect him but don’t understand his mad obsession
• A young man, the boyfriend or fiance of the scientist’s daughter/niece/colleague (and often a newspaper reporter), becomes suspicious and starts nosing around

Please note: Thanks to the amazing Embed-O-Magic process, the full-length movies shared on this page are queued to a clip illustrating each mad doctor’s peculiar modus operandi. If you want to see how he gets his just deserts for flouting the laws of humanity and Nature, you’ll have to watch the full movie.

The Man Who Changed His Mind (aka The Man Who Lived Again, 1936)

The Man: Dr. Laurience (Boris Karloff)

The Plan: Dr. Laurience is a brain specialist whose eccentric theories got him kicked out of the research institute he was working at in Genoa. Now on his own, Laurience hires brilliant neurosurgeon Clare Wyatt (Anna Lee) to assist him with his experiments.

Laurience claims that he can “take the thought content from the mind of a living animal and store it as you would store electricity.” This content can then be transferred to another living being. To Clare’s amazement, he exchanges the minds of two chimpanzees, one gentle, the other fearful and aggressive.

Against his better judgment, the doctor takes up the offer of Lord Haslewood (Frank Cellier), a newspaper mogul and patron of the sciences, to relocate his equipment and experiments to Haslewood’s institute.

When Laurience presents his theories to a distinguished group of colleagues and is promptly ridiculed as a fraud, Haslewood fires the doctor and tells him that all his equipment and notes are the mogul’s property to do with as he sees fit. Laurience decides on the spot that he has the means to make the rich blowhard change his mind…

Man Made Monster (1941)

The Man: Dr. Paul Rigas (Lionel Atwill)

The Plan: When Dan McCormick (Lon Chaney, Jr.) becomes headline news as the sole survivor of a bus crash into power lines that electrocuted 5 other passengers, electro-biologists Dr. John Lawrence (Samuel S. Hinds) and Dr. Paul Rigas (Atwill) offer Dan room and board on Lawrence’s sprawling estate if he will agree to let the doctors examine him to find out why he is so immune to electricity (yes Virginia, there really is a branch of science called electro-biology).

Lawrence has a normal scientific curiosity with regard to Dan, but Rigas sees the potential for so much more: “I believe that electricity is life, that men can be motivated and controlled by electrical impulse supplied by the radioactivities of the electron. That eventually, a race of superior men can be developed, men whose only wants are… electricity!”

Lawrence’s niece June (Ann Nagel) and her fiance, newspaper reporter Mark Adams (Frank Albertson) are leery of Rigas. Adams sums up his impression of the doctor: “I bet he spent his childhood sticking pins in butterflies.”

While Lawrence is away at a scientific conference, Rigas pumps poor Dan with higher and higher doses of electricity in an effort to create an electro-man obedient to his will. When Lawrence returns and finds out what Rigas is doing, the madman must silence his colleague…

The Mad Monster (1942)

The Man: Dr. Cameron (George Zucco)

The Plan: Cameron’s mad theory -- that you can pass on the characteristics of animals to humans via blood transfusions -- has gotten him denounced by his colleagues and dismissed from his prestigious academic post.

When he succeeds in transforming his simple-minded gardener Petro (Glenn Strange) into a wolf-man, he imagines bringing together all his critics for an “I told you so” session:

“Just picture gentlemen, an army of wolfmen, fearless, raging, every man a snarling animal! My serum will make it possible to unloose millions of such animal men, men who are governed by one collective thought -- the animal lust to kill without regard to personal safety. Such an army will be invincible!”

But Cameron is not satisfied to just deliver tongue-lashings in his daydreams. He devises a diabolical plan to get his chief rival, Professor Blaine (Robert Strange), alone in a room with Petro, and have Blaine himself inject the handyman with the serum that turns him into a mindless killer…

The Ape Man (1943)

The Man: Dr. James Brewster (Bela Lugosi)

The Plan: Brewster, a famous gland expert but a sloppy scientist, uses himself as a guinea pig in his experiments and ends up as a hairy, hunched over human-ape hybrid. With the help of his colleague Dr. Randall (Henry Hall) and his sister Agatha (Minerva Urecal), he stages his own disappearance and hides out in the cellar of the family manor, desperately seeking a cure for his condition.

There is one hope, but there’s a catch. Human spinal fluid might help him return to his normal self, but it has to be harvested from living bodies, meaning instant death for the donor. When Randall draws the line at killing people, Brewster explodes in a fit of self-pitying rage: “It’s my life against somebody else’s -- I don’t want to live the rest of my life this way, and I WON’T!”

When a wisecracking reporter (Wallace Ford) and his photographer (Louise Currie) start snooping around the manor, the pressure is on. Brewster, with the aid of his pet gorilla, takes matters into his own hands to secure the precious spinal fluid…

The Unearthly (1957)

The Man: Dr. Charles Conway (John Carradine)

The Plan: Conway runs a private sanatorium in the middle of nowhere, where a number of people, including the beautiful but vulnerable Grace Thomas (Allison Hayes), are convalescing. They’ve been referred to the sanatorium by a duplicitous crony of Conway’s, Dr. Wright (Roy Gordon), to become unwitting guinea pigs in Conway’s secret experiments with glands (there are those glands again!) None have any family members who will notice if they go missing. Lobo (Tor Johnson), a hulking giant with the mind of a child (and a product of Conway’s experiments), is on hand to make sure the “patients” stay put.

In his research on human glands, Conway has found a way to “control the flow of vitamins” to them in order to create giants like Lobo, but he has also created a new artificial gland that in theory is the key to eternal youth: “I can prolong life for thousands of years, perhaps forever! Think of it, to be always, exactly as you are now. Suppose you could wake up every morning and see your face untouched by time!”

But to prove his theories, he needs a “completely sound physical specimen, mentally and physically perfect!” He thinks he has such a specimen in Mark Houston (Myron Healey), a fugitive criminal that Lobo found lurking around the property, and whom Conway has blackmailed into sticking around.

In the meantime, Conway continues to experiment on the other patients who have been lured to the house of horrors…

Labor Day Weekend Travel Advisory: Avoid Roadside Tourist Traps

Now Playing: Tourist Trap (1979)

Pros: Adds a layer of surreal eeriness to the slasher genre; Pays clever homage to traditional horror tropes.
Cons: Based on your tolerance, it may require more suspension of disbelief than usual.

As the Covid-19 quarantine has ground many of us down to frazzled nubs of human beings, it’s perhaps not surprising that some sources are predicting that millions are going to say “screw it” this holiday weekend and hit the open road like it’s still 2019.

Well, maybe not exactly like 2019. Predictably, airline, rail and cruise ship bookings are way, way down. AAA estimates that when Labor Day closes the books on the summer of 2020, 97% of Americans’ travel will have been by car. Oil company executives are no doubt rubbing their bony, rapacious hands with glee as people in droves climb into cars and RVs to escape cabin fever.

There are just so many Netflix shows you can binge, boxed mac and cheese meals you can eat, and four grimey walls you can stare at before your brain and body rebel. It’s perfectly natural to want to mix things up, but hopefully people’s travel plans include prudent social distancing, mask-wearing and avoidance of maniacal killers.

Of course, there are plenty of homebodies who won’t be joining the fevered flight down America’s highways and byways. We all know the type (or maybe we are the type) -- hearth, home, family and familiar routines are reward enough. They (we) may even be relieved to be in quarantine, as there’s no pressure to leave the comforts of home.

And then there is that tiny fraction of homebodies who have built their comfortable surroundings on top of the bodies of unfortunate travelers and itinerants who have happened to wander into their lairs.

We tend to think of serial killers as predators in constant motion, stalking their prey and striking in deserted streets and victims’ homes. But a significant number of killers have been more like spiders patiently waiting for the next meal to stumble into their carefully crafted webs.

H.H. Holmes infamously built an ostensible hotel and “murder castle” near the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where people would check in, but never check out. Lavinia Fisher, reputed to be America’s first female serial killer, slyly interviewed travelers staying at the roadhouse she managed with her husband to determine if they were worth murdering.

Similarly, Tourist Trap is all about the spider waiting for the fly, but in this case at a dilapidated roadside attraction sitting on a forgotten stretch of road.

When one of the cars in a two-car caravan of vacationing young people gets a flat tire, Woody (Keith McDermott) goes looking for help, but stumbles upon a deserted gas station fronting a shabby roadside museum, “Slausen’s Lost Oasis,” that looks like it hasn’t seen a visitor in years.

The film quickly gets down to business. Woody becomes trapped in a room at the back of the gas station that seems to have life of its own. The door is locked as if by an invisible hand, and then suddenly grotesque mannequins are hurling themselves through windows and out of closets and even bottles on a shelf shoot out at the panicked youngster. As he tears at the door trying to get out, a hollow pipe shoots across the room like a missile, embedding itself in his back, and everything becomes eerily quiet.

Woody is having no fun in the "Lost Oasis" escape room.

When Woody doesn’t come back, the rest of the group -- Eileen, Becky, Molly and Jerry -- pile into Jerry’s jeep to search for their friend.

They too end up as the “Oasis,” where the Jeep mysteriously breaks down. They meet the proprietor, Mr. Slausen (Chuck Connors), who seems like a garden-variety hayseed eccentric, complaining to the kids about the decline of his business since the opening of a new expressway.

Slausen takes the group over to the museum, where they gape at a bizarre assortment of mannequins dressed in costume, including a western gunfighter, a civil war soldier, and even General George Armstrong Custer in his own special alcove. When the group splits up (never a good idea in a horror movie) -- Jerry (Jon Van Ness) going with Slausen to fix the jeep, Eileen (Robin Sherwood) taking off to the main house behind the museum in search of a phone, and Molly (Jocelyn Jones) and Becky (Tanya Roberts) staying behind with the creepy mannequins -- the trap is set.

Slausen gives the gang a tour of his house of horrors, er, wax museum.

Tourist Trap checks off all the elements of the traditional slasher: a group of fun-loving, naive kids; car failure; characters heading off by themselves in spite of warnings; a final girl; and of course, a masked homicidal maniac. But the film adds a surreal, sci-fi element to the proceedings that makes it stand out from the late ‘70s/early ‘80s pack of slashers.

Per form, healthy young people die in a variety of grisly ways at the hands of a batshit crazy killer, but the film adds a fever dream layer to the proceedings. Everyday objects can seemingly move around on their own volition. Nothing and no one can be trusted, including scarves, chairs, bottles, lead pipes… 

And then there are the mannequins. They’re everywhere in the museum and main house, sitting in parlors, standing in hallways, situated in every nook and cranny and seemingly preferring the shadows. Some are uncannily realistic, others generic department store, but by sheer numbers they up the creepiness factor by several orders of magnitude. Plus, some of them have the disconcerting ability to follow you with their eyes and drop their jaws and scream at climactic points. Director (and co-writer) David Schmoeller cleverly inserts live actors among the dummies in the shadows to keep the audience off-guard.

He also pays homage to films like Mystery of the Wax Museum and House of Wax with an intense scene located in a basement workshop. Jerry and Becky, who have been captured and tied up, watch helplessly as the madman, wearing a chilling mask and bizarrely dressed in ill-fitting formal attire complete with top hat, attends to an unidentified girl strapped to a table (apparently the vacationing youngsters aren’t the only ones who have fallen into the Lost Oasis trap). The maniac slathers plaster over the face of the terrified girl, all the while describing what will happen to her as the plaster hardens and dries. Yikes!

The Phantom of The Lost Oasis channels Lionel Atwill and Vincent Price.

Another scene -- the obligatory chase through the woods at night -- ups the weirdness factor considerably. It’s one thing to be chased by your standard ax-wielding maniac. But poor Molly gets a double dose of terror by being pursued and tormented by the masked weirdo and his friend, a detached mannequin’s head that has a demonic life of its own. It’s a ventriloquist act from Hell, and Molly is not amused.

As the film races to its climax and the ranks of the youngsters thin out, the ranks of the mannequins seem to multiply into a veritable army. They surround and almost smother the final girl, who is rapidly losing her mind.

Slausen seems to be everywhere too, giving aid, comfort and sympathy to the innocent youngsters even as they’re cut down one by one by a force they can’t begin to comprehend. At each juncture, he provides a piece of backstory -- a beautiful wife who died young; a troubled, jealous brother -- that provide clues to the insane mystery.

Slausen and his star attraction.

Oldsters like myself will no doubt take note of Chuck Connors’ presence in the film, which is a long way, chronologically and thematically, from his signature role as the upstanding Lucas McCain in The Rifleman TV series (1958-1963).

Jack Palance, among others, was reportedly offered the role before Connors. While a lot of fans apparently believe that Palance would have been a perfect fit, he was a very intimidating (not to mention urbane) figure, and from the very beginning would have been a bright red flag signalling danger ahead. Connors’ rough-hewn folksiness is not only a better fit for the backwoods setting, it lures the protagonists and the audience into a false sense of security and familiarity, making the ensuing developments all the more ominous and effective.

The other notable name is Tanya Roberts (Becky), who, shortly after Tourist Trap, joined the cast of Charlie’s Angels in the show’s last season. She leveraged that fame into becoming a Bond girl in A View to a Kill and securing a role in the cult favorite The Beastmaster before taking the acting escalator down to the direct-to-video market and the occasional TV appearance.

"Say hello to my little friend!"

This was director David Schmoeller’s first feature-length film. He would go on to other horror projects, most notably the very creepy Crawlspace with Klaus Kinski, and the franchise-spawning Puppet Master for Charles Band.

Tourist Trap is a low-budget cinematic attraction that has something for everyone (at least in the horror community): slasher fans will appreciate its concessions to and variations on the genre, and conventional horror fans will appreciate its masterful handling of surreal suspense and weird set pieces. Especially the mannequins, the creepy, creepy mannequins.

Where to find it: Tourist Trap is currently available on DVD, Blu-ray, and to rent; a new “VHS Retro Big Box collection” (Blu-ray & DVD) is due out in November, 2020.

Roger Corman's Price-less Poe Picture

Now Playing: The Premature Burial (1962)

Pros: As usual for a Corman Poe adaptation, the cinematography and production design make for a sumptuous and expensive-looking B-movie.
Cons: Adds a lot of padding to a simple story, resulting in slow pacing and dull stretches; the reveal at the climax is predictable and disappointing.

The idea of being mistaken for dead and buried alive seems so antiquated to us advanced lifeforms living in the 21st century. Medical science has progressed way beyond the hoary old cliches of checking for a pulse and holding a mirror up to the nose to detect a faint breath. We can diagnose brain death now, and all those crude methods for determining death were long ago buried by history and science.

Or so we thought. I don’t want to scare you, but for all our vaunted technology and expertise, misdiagnosed death is still a thing. In 2014, there was a case of a 78 year old hospice patient who was declared dead, only to wake up the next day in a body bag in the morgue. The same year, a woman who was declared brain dead at a New York hospital revived just as she was being prepared for organ harvesting.

Fortunately, such cases of Lazarus Syndrome are rare -- only 38 cases have been reported since the syndrome was first described in the medical literature in 1982. [Honor Whiteman, “The Lazarus Syndrome: When the ‘Dead’ Come Back to Life,” MedicalNewsToday.com, May 2017]

But that’s cold comfort for anyone who has been unlucky enough to be prematurely given up for dead. The same Medical News Today article describes the hair-raising experience of a UK woman with “locked-in syndrome,” a form of catalepsy wherein

“...a patient is aware of their surroundings, but they experience complete paralysis of voluntary muscles, with the exception of muscles that control eye movement.

In 2014, The Daily Mail reported on 39-year-old British woman Kate Allatt, who had locked-in syndrome. Unaware of her condition, doctors declared her brain dead. Medics, family, and friends stood by her bedside and discussed whether or not to switch off her life support. Allatt heard everything, but she was unable to tell them that she was fully conscious.

‘Locked-in syndrome is like being buried alive,” said Allatt. “You can think, you can feel, you can hear, but you can communicate absolutely nothing.’” [Ibid.]

With knowledge of such uncomfortably recent documented cases, the protagonist’s obsession in The Premature Burial becomes more relatable and less dated.

Ray Milland plays a wealthy middle-aged bachelor, Guy Carrell, who lives with his sister Kate (Heather Angel) in a gloomy mansion located in the fog-shrouded countryside somewhere in England. Guy’s mood is as gloomy as his surroundings, as he has recently witnessed the disinterring of a body for medical research purposes. To his horror, he saw that bloody scratches on the inside of the coffin and a look of abject terror frozen on the corpse's face indicated the poor man had been buried alive.

This poor fellow is the star of Premature Burial's pre-titles sequence.

This sends him into a deep depression. When Guy’s beautiful fiancee Emily (Hazel Court) shows up uninvited at the mansion, he tries to send her away, telling her that due to a family curse, they can never be married. It seems that his father was subject to cataleptic episodes, and when Guy was 13, the man slipped into a trance, was declared dead of a heart attack, and was promptly interred in the family vault below the mansion.

That night, Guy heard his father’s cries dimly echoing from the vault, but he couldn’t get anyone to believe him. Guy is morbidly afraid that catalepsy runs in the family, and that at any moment he will have an episode and share his father’s terrible fate. Sister Kate sternly dismisses the notion that their father was buried alive, and Emily is able to convince Guy that he will fare much better with her by his side.

They are soon married, with many well-wishers in attendance, including Emily’s father, Dr. Gideon Gault (Alan Napier) and family friend Miles Archer (Richard Ney). The happy mood is quickly dispelled, however, when the new bride, prompted by the guests, sits down to the piano to play. She picks an old folk tune, Molly Malone, which coincidentally, one of the gravediggers was whistling when they dug up the man who had been buried alive.

Guy and Emily relax by taking a walk in a fog-shrouded cemetery. Uh-huh.

This sets Guy off into another bout of paranoia, and instead of going to Italy on a honeymoon, he uses his time and resources to construct a mausoleum with more fail-safe ways for a misdiagnosed “dead” man to free himself than you can shake a gravedigger’s shovel at.

Emily, chafing at being holed up in the gloomy house with her obsessed husband, teams up with Miles to convince Guy to tear down the mausoleum and free himself of his gnawing fear. But when they try to seal the deal by opening up Guy’s father’s crypt to prove he wasn’t interred alive, it backfires spectacularly, and Guy’s worst nightmare comes true.

All the elements of Roger Corman’s justifiably admired Poe adaptations are present in The Premature Burial (except for one -- Vincent Price -- which we’ll get to in a moment). The lush cinematography was by Floyd Crosby, who had lensed The Pit and the Pendulum the year before and would carry on with The Raven, Tales of Terror, and The Haunted Palace in the next couple of years.

Art director/production designer Daniel Haller was a genius at making Corman’s Poe pictures, budgeted in the mid $100,000s, look like a million bucks (or two).

Two very talented writers contributed the screenplay. In addition to Premature Burial, Charles Beaumont penned The Haunted Palace and The Masque of the Red Death for Corman, as well as some of The Twilight Zone’s most beloved episodes for Rod Serling, before his untimely death in 1967. Ray Russell was also a celebrated master of horror, whose credits include the source novel and screenplay for William Castle’s Mr. Sardonicus, and X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (a Corman cheapie that has gained an authentic and loyal cult following over the years, and features one of Ray Milland’s best performances).

In spite of all the talent behind it, The Premature Burial suffers from a lack of energy and suspense compared to Corman’s other Poe adaptations. The problem stems partly from the need to pad the main elements from the original short story -- a horrible discovery in a reopened crypt and the building of a “fail-safe” tomb to avoid a similar fate -- with filler to bring it up to feature length.

Raiders of the Lost Tomb, aka Guy and friends and family.

The film passes on too many spine-chilling opportunities. Guy relates a story about hearing his supposedly dead father crying out from the vault, but we don’t hear it directly (unlike Corman’s first Poe film House of Usher, where the audience, along with Roderick, hears his sister scratching and screeching in her tomb). The intermittent use of the Molly Malone tune that sends Guy into paranoid fits doesn’t quite cut it.

Premature Burial uses up most of its energy in a scene where Guy, manic with anxiety, shows off his new mausoleum to Emily and Miles. They stand there gaping as he demonstrates a trick coffin that opens from the inside, a belltower that can be rung by the “dead” man after he’s woken up, an escape hatch on the roof and rope ladder for access, and if all else fails, dynamite to blast the tomb open. And if that fails, there's poison on hand for the ultimate exit. It’s all so elaborate, it would make Wiley Coyote's head spin.

This is quickly followed by an hallucinogenic nightmare sequence in which Guy is trapped in the mausoleum -- seemingly years after he’s been placed there -- and every fail-safe contraption fails spectacularly. That really reminded me of poor Wiley.

Guy's mausoleum is the work of the finest designers on the planet:
Wiley Coyote and Rube Goldberg.

From there, the film grinds down to an ending that, for all its morbid imagery, lacks any real suspense, and features a “twist” that you can see coming for miles.

It’s tempting to conclude that much of the film’s problems lie with the absence of Vincent Price in the title role. Ray Milland was a talented, award-winning actor, and he would prove just how much he could do with a B horror role with his inspired performance in The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. But Price was born to star in Corman’s Poe pictures, and his absence is a letdown. On the other hand, I suspect Vincent would only have made a nominal improvement. The script spends too much time with various characters trying to talk Guy down from his morbid delusions (not to mention the time spent showing off the mausoleum contraptions), and not enough on the horrors that have driven the man to near-insanity in the first place.

Corman wanted to make The Premature Burial with Vincent Price and without the involvement of American International Pictures, but again, like a Roadrunner cartoon, his best laid plans went astray. As Corman biographer Beverly Gray recounts:

[The Premature Burial] was a direct result of the Corman brothers’ [Roger and Gene’s] business relationship with Pathé American. Pathé’s owner, William Zeckendorf, had originally agreed to distribute The Intruder [Roger Corman’s social message movie about racial tensions in the Deep South] in exchange for Roger’s promise to shoot a Poe adaptation for his company. When [AIP head] Sam Arkoff got wind of the arrangement, which threatened the AIP monopoly on the highly lucrative Poe films, he warned that AIP would retaliate by withdrawing its business from Pathé’s respected film laboratory. Zeckendorf capitulated, and Corman was surprised to see Nicholson and Arkoff show up on the set of The Premature Burial, cheerfully informing him that he was once again working for them.” [Beverly Gray, Roger Corman: An Unauthorized Biography of the Godfather of Indie Filmmaking, Renaissance Books, 2000, p. 76]

To add insult to injury, when Corman started the project with Pathé’s backing, Vincent Price’s exclusive contract with AIP prevented him from appearing in the film. AIP took over anyway, and filming went ahead with Milland.

"I'm so glad I went with the sunroof option on this coffin!"

WARNING: AN IMPORTANT PLOT POINT REVEALED BELOW

A redeeming feature of the film is the presence of Hazel Court, who always brought elegance and class to her roles. By this point in her career, Court had established her horror credentials by appearing in Hammer’s groundbreaking Curse of Frankenstein and the less groundbreaking but nonetheless atmospheric The Man Who Could Cheat Death.

On the set of The Premature Burial she was the consummate trouper, to the point that she became uncomfortably familiar with the feeling of actually being buried alive. In her autobiography, Court recalls that she nixed the idea of a stunt double for the climactic scene:

“At the end of the picture, I had to be buried alive. Roger asked me if I would do it or if I would rather have someone double for me. I said, ‘Heavens no! I will do it.’ Well, I lay on the ground, with a straw in my mouth so that I would have air, as they shovelled the earth over me. The straw was removed when the director said ‘Action!’ I was to hold my breath for as long as possible. I made it for over one minute -- long enough to get the shot. As I got to the end of the minute, the pressure on my body began, as the claustrophobia was setting in. It was one hell of an experience.” [Hazel Court, Horror Queen: An Autobiography, Tomahawk Press, 2008, p. 112]

Acknowledging that The Premature Burial was not as successful as the other Poe films, Court offered her own theory.

“Some critics felt it was because Vincent Price wasn’t in it. I felt it might have been because a lot of people have fears of being buried alive -- or of developing the condition of catalepsy in which one would be alive but presumed dead. The film was kind to me, and as I’ve mentioned, a very good part.” [Ibid., p. 115]

Hazel rests after a hard day on the set.

Regardless of its deficiencies -- or its effectiveness in bringing on queasiness at the thought of being buried alive -- The Premature Burial features a talented cast, delivers a couple of morbidly imaginative scenes, and looks absolutely fabulous.

Where to find it: For the moment, The Premature Burial is streaming free for Amazon Prime subscribers, or own it on DVD or Blu-ray with an assortment of interesting extras.