Screen horror is particularly effective when it concerns real-life horrors.  Back in the Victorian age, such a real-life horror was the pain of surgery--there was simply no anesthetic to give the patient when they met the surgeon's knife.  Another horror of the period was graverobbing...not only the desecration of the dead but also the occasional murder of the living to supply fresh bodies for the medical marketplace.  The film we're about to "dig up" effectively combines these two historical horrors and does so with good performances, convincing sets and costumes, a literate script, effective direction and--well, two more factors that make the film so significant in terms of horror film history that, instead of Corridors Of Blood, this fright flick might better be entitled...

By JOE WINTERS

Boris Karloff as Dracula? If Bela Lugosi had been alive to hear that in 1958, it might have killed him all over again!

Executive producer Richard Gordon’s deal with MCA (the agency representing Karloff) called for an option on a second film (after The Haunted Strangler) to be exercised within a certain period of time, subject to Karloff’s availability. MGM was interested in doing a Dracula film in color and Cinemascope, but copyright legalities kept it from happening.

As it turned out, Hammer Films would soon do Horror Of Dracula with Universal’s enthusiastic support. Meanwhile, the MCA Karloff contract was "play or pay," and so Gordon and producer John Croydon had to come up with something fast. The result would be The Doctor From Seven Dials to be known Stateside, eventually, as Corridors Of Blood.

On the heels of The Haunted Strangler, moviegoers saw Boris in the American-made Frankenstein 1970 (Allied Artists, 1958) as the Baron himself. Numerous television appearances kept Boris busy through the spring of ‘58, and upon returning for a summer in England he began work on the Gordon picture at Britain’s MGM Borehamswood Studio.

In 1840, surgical pain and the knife are still inseparable. Doctor Thomas Bolton (Karloff) wants to remedy that with an opium-based solution and Nitrous oxide to render a patient insensitive to the agonizing pain that accompanies surgery. Before a room full of skeptical doctors, Bolton’s demonstration is a failure. The patient, not sufficiently anesthetized, reacts violently to the first incision. Imagine yourself being operated on without being put under first.

Many of the doctors are also annoyed at Bolton’s donating time to help the poor in the Seven Dials slum district. There he is tricked into signing a death certificate by the black-bearded, black-hearted Ben, a lodging house owner, whose side-lines include selling dead bodies to the hospital for medical practitioners to dissect. To ensure a steady supply of corpses, Black Ben encourages co-conspirator Resurrection Joe to use a variation of the time-tested "Burke and Hare" smothering technique of undetectably murdering patrons of Ben’s multi-purpose establishment.

Meanwhile, Bolton begins experimenting on himself with an increased amount of opium in the solution. Soon laughing uncontrollably and thrashing about his laboratory, he gashes his hand, but feels no pain. He’s on the right track, but the side effects of confusion, behavioral changes and decreased skill result in suspension from medical practice.

To make matters worse, a young pickpocket lifts Bolton’s notebook and turns it over to Ben, who blackmails Bolton into signing another death certificate in return for the notebook. Bolton enlists the further participation of Ben to get the now needed drugs in exchange for signing a stack of blank death certificates. Ben sends Joe with the doctor to break in to the hospital pharmacy where Joe fatally stabs the night porter. Besides being an accessory to murder, Bolton now realizes he’s an addict.

Inspector Donovan is soon on the trail of the false death certificates and the murderous resurrection racket. The police close in on Black Ben’s, where the confused Bolton is now staying. To avoid loose ends, Joe plans to "Burke" Bolton, but must opt for stabbing him instead. Bolton, in turn, throws acid into the villain’s face. Meanwhile, the fleeing Ben falls from a rooftop and is impaled on a set of railings. As for Bolton, before dying he urges his son to carry on the research, which he does in a more practical manner, and successfully proving that pain and the knife can be separated.

Opium and Indian hemp were indeed the most important anesthetic agents known to the ancients. Centuries later, a colorless gas was prepared by heating ammonium nitrate. The result, Nitrous oxide, more popularly known as "laughing gas," was discovered around 1800 and first used as an anesthetic around 1844. The organic compound ether was first used in 1842, and in 1847 the anesthetic properties of chloroform were discovered.

None of this is the stuff of horrific entertainment, and Corridors Of Blood itself is not so much a "N-E-R-V-O-R-A-M-A Shocker" (as the preview trailer declared) as it is a darkly sensationalist shuffling of historical events. While fictional, the story and screenplay by Jean Scott Rogers could be about any unsung medical trailblazer whose failure teaches and makes possible the success of those that follow.

Here we have a movie that combines the atmosphere and shady characters of that Karloff classic The Body Snatcher (RKO, 1945) with shadings of his mad (or "misunderstood") doctor roles of the late 1930s and early 40s. Columbia’s The Man They Could Not Hang (1939), The Man With Nine Lives and Before I Hang (1940) and The Devil Commands (1941).

Universal’s Black Friday (1940) and Monogram’s The Ape (1940) gave us Boris as a sympathetic scientist trying to benefit humanity and always coming to a tragic end. He does it again in Corridors Of Blood, and is as compelling as ever. What’s more, whereas The Haunted Strangler explored the dual personality theme of the old Jekyll & Hyde story, Corridors Of Blood approaches another part of the Stevenson tale: drug addiction.

Whether Robert Baker and Monty Berman, the producers of the similarly styled Jack The Ripper (1959) and The Flesh And The Fiends (1960), had seen either the making or end result of Gordon and Croydon’s The Haunted Strangler or Corridors Of Blood and were perhaps influenced by them, who knows? The four black & white films, all produced in Britain, do share a grimy, Dickensian atmosphere and an effective presentation of time and place. The Haunted Strangler’s set designer John Elphick did serve as art director on The Flesh And The Fiends.

Boris Karloff had gained stardom a quarter century earlier as the Monster of Universal’s Frankenstein (1931). Christopher Lee would do the same after playing the Monster in Hammer’s groundbreaking Curse Of Frankenstein (1957). Lee’s price would soon go up, but not apparently before Hammer’s head James Carreras suggested to Richard Gordon acquiring the actor quickly at a lower cost.

As Resurrection Joe, Lee contributes a quietly menacing presence, and of course, would go on to horror icon status with Hammer Studios and in a slew of Euro-horror films, while playing character parts outside the horror genre, just as Boris had. And needless to say, Lee’s price would go up.

Lee had earlier worked with Karloff in an episode of Boris’ British TV series Colonel March Of Scotland Yard (1954-1955). The two became neighbors in the mid-1960s toward the end of Karloff’s life in London’s Cadogan Square. They worked together one more time in Curse Of The Crimson Altar (filmed in 1968 and released in 1970 in the States as The Crimson Cult), along with genre favorites Barbara Steele and Michael Gough.

Corridors Of Blood is filled with faces that would become familiar to fans. Francis Matthews, who played Doctor Bolton’s son, worked in Hammer’s Revenge Of Frankenstein (1958) with Peter Cushing, and with Christopher Lee in both Dracula, Prince Of Darkness (1965) and Rasputin, The Mad Monk (1966).

Francis DeWolff (1913-1984), who played Black Ben, was the Spirit of Christmas Present in A Christmas Carol (1951). He reared his bearded head in several Hammer films, including Hound Of The Baskervilles and The Man Who Could Cheat Death (both 1959), The Two Faces Of Dr. Jekyll (1960) and Curse Of The Werewolf (1961), and he appeared in executive producer Richard Gordon’s Devil Doll (1964).

Betta St. John played Bolton’s niece Susan. She co-starred with Christopher Lee in what was technically his first leading role in the psychological thriller Alias John Preston (1956). She was in the Hammer psycho thriller The Snorkel (1958) and appeared again with Lee in Horror Hotel (1960), shortly after which the young actress apparently retired from the screen.

Scottish-born Adrienne Corri played Rachel, Black Ben’s wife and partner in crime. Like Lee, she had appeared in an episode of Karloff’s Colonel March Of Scotland Yard. She was also in Devil Girl From Mars (1954), but not in the title role. She went on to co-star in The Tell-Tale Heart (1960), and in a re-telling of the Burke & Hare/Dr. Knox tale The Anatomist (1961), as well as the Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper movie A Study In Terror (1965). She was the police chief on the Moon in the Hammer "sci-fi western," Moon Zero Two (1969). Possibly her most famous role was that of the victim in the "Singing In the Rain" rape sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971). She was ring mistress of Hammer’s Vampire Circus (1972) and the mad Fay Flay in American International’s Madhouse (1974) with Vincent Price and Peter Cushing.

Nigel Green (1924-1972), who played Inspector Donovan, would portray Hercules in Jason And The Argonauts (1963), co-star with Vincent Price in Masque Of The Red Death (1964), and with Lee and Cushing in The Skull (1965). As Inspector Nayland-Smith, Green matched wits with Lee’s Oriental mastermind in The Face Of Fu Manchu (1965), and he played the frustrated lover to Ingrid Pitt’s title character in Hammer’s Countess Dracula (1971).

Another familiar face (and form) to fans is Yvonne Romain (then Yvonne Warren), who played Rosa, a prostitute attacked by Resurrection Joe and thus warned by Rachel about wiggling her bottom once too often. Yvonne was later on view in Circus Of Horrors (1961), Hammer’s Curse Of The Werewolf (1961) and Night Creatures (1962), and in the aforementioned Devil Doll.

Robert Day had previously filmed The Haunted Strangler and would also direct First Man Into Space (1959) and went on to do lots of television in England and America, as well as Hammer’s She (1965).

Buxton Orr (1924-1997), who provided the music for The Haunted Strangler, is on hand with another good score for Corridors Of Blood. Proficient in various forms of music, his film work also includes Fiend Without A Face (1958), First Man Into Space (1959), Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), Dr. Blood’s Coffin (1961) and Snake Woman (1961).

Richard Gordon helped bring a number of often enjoyably bizarre items to the screen. These include The Woman Eater (1957), Escapement, a.k.a. The Electronic Monster (1958), Fiend Without A Face (1958), First Man Into Space (1959), The Playgirls And The Vampire (1962), Tomb Of Torture (1963), Devil Doll, Curse Of The Voodoo (1965) and the reputedly better, but seldom seen voodoo movie Naked Evil (1966). The list goes on with the science fiction Island Of Terror (1966) and The Projected Man (1967), the body count thriller Tower Of Evil (1972), the scare comedies Horror Hospital (1973) and The Cat And The Canary (1979) and the outer space Alien clone Inseminoid (1981).

MGM didn’t release this film as The Doctor From Seven Dials in the U.K. until 1962 and as Corridors Of Blood in the U.S. until 1963 (on a double bill with Werewolf In A Girls Dormitory). By then, The Raven (1963), co-starring Karloff, had already been released. By this time, Boris had also done two television series, the unsold The Veil (the completed ten episodes are now available on DVD), which he hosted and acted in, and the two seasons of NBC’s Thriller, which he hosted and occasionally acted in.

Decades earlier, Lon Chaney Senior had given the younger Boris Karloff a bit of advice which Karloff decades later passed along to the younger Christopher Lee. "Find something other actors can’t or won’t do. If you succeed, you’ll never be forgotten, and you’ll survive." Karloff and Lee did more than survive in the film business…they thrived. And for just one of many reasons why, check out Corridors Of Blood.

Thanks, Joe.  It's interesting that MGM delayed releasing Corridors Of Blood so long--perhaps it was the lack of color that swayed the studio, since that was one of the big selling points of the early Hammer horrors.  Yet, the moody and shadowy black-and-white photography used in the film fits it perfectly.  This is a very well made and engaging horror flick, one with some intriguing historical references and, of course, it features the first--and most memorable--film matchup of Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee, the venerable Master of Horror sharing the screen with the new Master of Horror.  That's worth the price of admission alone.  As it was, the film was released at a time when black- and-white films were held in poor regard by the public and it's really only now--thanks once again to DVD--that Corridors Of Blood is finally getting its just due.     

Article copyright © Joe Winters

Return To Archives