90 Years Later, Boris Karloff Still Elevates A Forgotten Horror

Following his iconic role in Frankenstein, Boris Karloff soon found himself typecast as monsters, villains, and mad scientists. Previously finding steady work as a tertiary supporting actor, he was now set for life. Frankenstein led to The Mummy, The Old Dark House, and The Black Cat, followed by a string of sci-fi and horror movies with titles like The Ghoul, Isle of the Dead, and The Body Snatcher. Some actors would balk at this kind of one-note casting, but Karloff seemed to embrace it. Years later, he would advise Christopher Lee that typecasting could be a blessing: “Find something that nobody else can do or will do… there's nothing wrong with that.”

Much of Karloff’s work has now sunk into obscurity, in part because so many of his early silent films are lost to time, and in part because Frankenstein cast such a long shadow. But Karloff’s extensive B-movie resume belies his depth and versatility as an actor. Debuting 90 years ago today, 1936’s The Walking Dead provides a crossover point between his many Frankenstein copycat roles and his ability to wring emotional authenticity from silly material.

Directed by legendary Golden Age filmmaker Michael Curtiz (Casablanca, Captain Blood), The Walking Dead is a chaotic mash-up of three popular 1930s subgenres: gangster movies, mad scientist horror stories, and preachy morality tales about crime and punishment. In the opening scenes, we learn about a conspiracy between a group of wealthy racketeers. They plan to cover up their corrupt activities by assassinating a judge, but first, they need to find someone to take the fall.

Recently released from jail, the down-on-his-luck John Ellman (Karloff) is an easy mark. After paying someone else to bump off the judge, the conspirators frame Ellman for his murder, rigging his trial so he gets the electric chair. Little do they know that Ellman won’t be dead for long. By sheer, absurd coincidence, Ellman’s framing was witnessed by a young couple who work as lab assistants for a Dr. Beaumont. They plead with their boss to resurrect Ellman so he can prove his innocence, leading to an extremely Frankenstein-looking scene where Karloff lies on a tilting hospital bed in a laboratory full of weird gadgets and bubbling test tubes.

As per the film’s title, Ellman does indeed come back from the dead, although he struggles to communicate any useful information about the days leading up to his execution. Resurrected as a partially mute amnesiac, he’d much rather play the piano, a job he’d hoped to resume after his original stint in prison. Ellman was always a sensitive soul, too naive to comprehend the machinations of the strangers who orchestrated his death.

The Walking Dead’s crime/horror conceit is undeniably trashy, reflecting the tastes and creative restrictions of a singular period in Hollywood history. Just a few years earlier, Universal Pictures had released a cluster of iconic horror movies in quick succession: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, and The Invisible Man. These influential films were facilitated in part by the lax censorship of the Pre-Code era, a brief window between 1930 and 1934 when studios had more freedom to depict sex, drugs, profanity, and morally controversial themes. Naturally, this was a great time for both horror and crime cinema.

But by the later 1930s, American filmmakers faced stricter censorship. Horror movies became cornier and less grotesque, and the bleak cynicism of Pre-Code gangster cinema was sanded down to prioritize moral messaging. So in The Walking Dead, we don’t actually witness Ellman’s execution. The moment might have warranted some gruesome theatrics a few years earlier, but thanks to tightening guidelines about onscreen violence, the film spends more time on the ominous moments leading up to the electric chair, cutting to a different location when it’s time for Ellman to die.

Likewise, there’s a very clear delineation between the story’s heroes and villains. The young couple who act as our viewpoint characters are chaste and morally upstanding, while Ellman is a tragic victim of injustice. And as the racketeering conspiracy’s body count grows, the actual violence is toned down, focusing on a sequence of implausible scenarios where the villains die by convenient accidents rather than intentional acts of vengeance. The underlying implication is that God is punishing them for their sins, and once the villains have received their comeuppance, John Ellman gets killed off a final time. Despite his identity as an innocent man, his undead state is against the laws of nature, so he can’t be permitted a happy ending.

After Ellman’s initial resurrection, Karloff’s performance blatantly capitalizes on the audience’s recollection of Frankenstein’s Monster: a sympathetic figure whose quasi-supernatural revival makes him freakish in the eyes of others as he struggles to articulate his desire for basic human kindness. Before his first death, however, Ellman was a regular guy, a quiet and mournful middle-aged man who just wanted to build a new life for himself.

That’s where Karloff’s star power makes itself known, because in a fairly simple movie otherwise populated by stock characters, he brings real pathos to Ellman’s ridiculous return from the dead. If Karloff didn’t have this kind of arresting screen presence, then his career wouldn’t have flourished the way it did, bringing unexpected depth to decades of B-list horror roles.

The Walking Dead is available on Prime Video.