Director: Edward Dmytryk
Writers: Robert Hardy Andrews, Milton Gunzburg
Stars: Boris Karloff, Anne Revere, Amanda Duff
Run Time: 1 Hour, 5 Minutes
Link: https://amzn.to/32P322n
Synopsis
“My name is Anne Blair” says the narrator. “My father was Dr. Julian Blair. No one goes near my father’s house; no one dares. He tore open the door to whatever lives beyond the grave seven years ago.”
We cut to a medical demonstration from seven years ago. Blair has a volunteer in a metal helmet. He plans to record brainwaves on a chart. In modern times, we’d call it an Electroencephalogram machine.
His wife comes to pick him up; today is Anne’s twentieth birthday. He wants to show the scientists his wife’s EEG, so he wires her into the machine, and she puts on the huge, metal helmet. Her brainwave is stronger than Blair’s assistant. He thinks that someday, it may be able to read thoughts from a distance by reading the graphs his machine makes.
The Blairs rush out to their daughter’s party. He goes into the bakery to pick up a cake, while she drives around the block. There’s a crash; and Mrs. Blair is killed.
After the funeral, Blair goes back to his lab and turns on the machine that the assistant forgot to reset. He sees his wife’s brain pattern on the graph, and he recognizes it. He thinks his wife is trying to reach him; proof in life after death. Blair thinks he can adapt radio technology to allow communication between the living and the dead. One of his colleagues explains that “there are some things that man was not meant to know.”
Blair’s assistant Karl suggests talking to his friend Blanche the medium, who claims she can talk to the dead as well. Is there a way to combine his technology and her ability? They go to a séance to take to Karl’s mother, and it is pretty impressive. Blair doesn’t believe her, and he proves that it’s all a trick; Blanche is a fake. Then again, Blair felt electricity that she didn’t use in her scam. He takes her back to the lab to test her. She actually can create an electrical voltage from her body.
He straps Blanche and Karl into his machine, and the graph starts working again; the lines are drawn for the EEG. The machine pops, and Karl is electrocuted. He survives, but has brain damage. Blair becomes obsessed. He sends his daughter away, resigns from the university, and moves to an isolated island to work.
The sheriff believes that Dr. Blair has been stealing bodies from the cemetery. The bodies have been going missing since Blair moved there. Blair tells the sheriff to leave. The sheriff warns that the townspeople will only stand for this for just so long before they are forced to act.
The servant woman sneaks into the lab and finds a head in a jar hooked to the machine. She’s killed. They keep experimenting with the machine, and the wind in the lab starts picking up. Blair can hear the dead voice of Helen, and he sees a tornado in the room. Blanche is eventually wired up to sex corpses, but that still isn’t enough; Blanche is killed.
Anne and her boyfriend stop by, and he appears reasonable. The townspeople are gathering to Lynch Dr. Blair. He decides that Anne is the key; her mind and her mother’s are “in tune.” He hooks her up to the machine, but he says it won’t hurt her. The villagers are breaking in downstairs just as Blair hears Helen’s voice and the ceiling collapses. Blair is sucked up into the tornado and the machine blows up.
Commentary
The narrator is cliché’d and melodramatic even in 1942. Still, the whole idea is pretty unusual and creative. It’s ridiculous, but if you go past that, it’s pretty creative. It’s well done, and the story is interesting, but it’s pretty far-fetched. Blair never really heard much more than a voice calling his name, and he killed multiple people. He definitely qualifies as a “mad scientist.”