The Black Sleep (1956) is an American black-and-white horror film, scripted by John C. Higgins from a story by Gerald Drayson Adams developed for producers Aubrey Schenck and Howard W. Koch, who had a four-picture finance-for-distribution arrangement with United Artists. The film was re-released in 1962 as Dr. Cadman’s Secret.
The film was directed by Reginald LeBorg and included in its starring cast Bela Lugosi in his last true film role. Also starred were Basil Rathbone, Lon Chaney, John Carradine, and Akim Tamiroff in a role originally written for Peter Lorre. In a “prominent” supporting role was Ed Wood regular Tor Johnson.
Set in early 19th-century England, the story concerned a prominent, knighted surgeon whose wife has fallen into a coma caused by a deep-seated brain tumor. Due to medicine’s state of the art at the time, he does not know how to reach the tumor without risking brain damage or death to the woman he loves, so he undertakes to secretly experiment on the brains of living, but involuntary, human subjects who are under the influence of a powerful Indian anesthetic which he calls the “black sleep”. Once he has finished his experiment, surviving subjects are revived and placed, in seriously degenerated and mutilated states, in a hidden cellar in the gloomy, abandoned country abbey where he conducts his experiments.
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Kev
“Classic Hokey – Cool”
Thanks
Rich
Damn it, I blinked and missed Lugosi!
Umm, he is in this movie, right?
He was the butler. By this time, he was well on his way to being dead of drug and alcohol addiction.
Oh, there he is, I was just expecting his roll to be a bit bigger. Of course the time that he was on screen must have been difficult what with him almost being dead, as you’ve previously mentioned.
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