Shocktober: Boris Karloff

Boris Karloff (born William Henry Pratt in London in 1887) was 44 years old (by sheer coincidence, the same age I'm at now) and had been working in Hollywood for more than a decade in supporting roles when he seemingly came out of nowhere and gave the performance of a lifetime as the Monster in director James Whale's version of Frankenstein in 1931. From that point on, he starred almost exclusively in horror films, working steadily until his death in 1969.

It's possible--probably, even--that because Karloff had so many lean years, he took on so many acting jobs, even after he was famous, because he didn't want to be caught short if hard times befell him again. Consequently, he made a lot of movies that were mediocre at best. However, he made quite a few films beyond his hits at Universal Studios (the first three Frankenstein movies, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, etc.) that are certainly worth a look.

Here are a few you may not have heard of, but might well enjoy:

The Ghoul (1933). Karloff's first film in his native England was this awkward plot mashup of The Mummy and The Old Dark House, in which he plays an dying archeologist (or, as another, less charitable character puts it, a "robber of graves") who orders his butler to bury a valuable, supposedly mystical jewel with him so he can rise from the dead. When the jewel goes missing after relatives and various hangers-on gather at his spooky mansion for the reading of the will, Karloff rises from the dead anyway, stalking the hallways in search of the stolen artifact. The plot may creak, but the moody visuals create the properly creepy atmosphere (especially the rising-from-the-grave scene), Karloff's makeup is suitably gruesome and the supporting cast (including Cedric Hardwicke, Ralph Richardson and Ernest Thesiger) is unusually strong for such a low-budget effort.

The Black Room (1935). Karloff must have relished the opportunity to star in a historical gothic drama that not only allowed him to give three distinct performances--as en evil, lecherous baron, the baron's kindly twin brother, and the evil baron impersonating the kindly twin--but also didn't require him to be buried under gallons of makeup. The plot may be predictable (once you hear the legend of the Black Room early on, you pretty much know where this is going), but Karloff's performances more than make up for it.

The Man Who Changed His Mind (1936). In one of the earliest of Karloff's many, many mad scientist roles, he plays a doctor experimenting with transferring one person's mind into another person's body, which makes the movie's title a delightfully subtle pun (too subtle for some distributors, who tagged it with misleading monikers like Doctor Maniac and The Man Who Lived Again).

The Walking Dead (1936). In the 1930s, Warner Bros. specialized in gangster dramas, not horror films, which may explain this weird hybrid, in which Karloff plays a low-level hood framed and executed for a murder he didn't commit, but brought back from the dead by a less-mad-than-usual scientist (Edmund Gwenn). Karloff then haunts the thugs who did him wrong, causing them die without ever laying a cold, clammy hand on them. Even though it's obviously intended as a B-movie, it's got an A-list director (Michael Curtiz, who later helmed The Adventures of Robin Hood and Casablanca, among many others) and is made with an usual amount of care for a supposedly disposable product.

The Body Snatcher (1945). Producer Val Lewton was charged by executives at movie studio RKO with making a series of inexpensive horror films with exploitive titles to compete with Universal's popular line of fright features. Lewton delivered, turning out nine carefully crafted films that horror fans generally consider superior to the Universal movies they were designed to compete against. Karloff starred in three of these films for Lewton (the other two were Isle of the Dead and Bedlam), but The Body Snatcher, based on a story by Robert Louis Stevenson, was the first and best of the three. He plays a coachman who steals bodies for a doctor (Henry Daniell) to perform medical experiments on, sometimes not bothering to wait until the individuals are actually dead yet. There are lots of scary moments throughout, but the ending, in which Karloff's corpse haunts Daniell, is especially nightmarish.

Corridors of Blood (1958). Another take of the same turf as The Body Snatcher, this time with Karloff as the noble-minded doctor performing experiments in anesthesia (usually on himself, which leads to addiction) and Christopher Lee as a blackmailing, graverobbing killer. This was one of two movies Karloff made in England that year (the other was The Haunted Strangler), and both feature quality late-career performances by the Master of Menace.