The Undying Monster (1942)

Director: John Brahm

So, in 1941, Universal had a hit with The Wolf Man, and the people at 20th Century Fox decided they should do something like that as well. Except that they apparently saw no need to go the whole hog and make it an A production… but the end result still looks like one somehow. Not sure exactly what they did to save money, but The Undying Monster looks extraordinary when it comes to art direction and cinematography (an early job by Lucien Ballard); apparently a blu-ray is forthcoming and it should look amazing in HD given how good it looked in the OK online copy I watched. The film was adapted from a 1922 novel of the same name, but I suspect the aforementioned 1941 film was really more of an influence… from what I can gather, the film slims down the novel considerably though it does seem to retain the general outline. As the title may indicate, there is a monster afoot (and if, like me, you discovered this film via a reference work like Wm. Everson’s Classics of the Horror Film, you’ll know exactly what it is), but the film keeps it off-screen until the last reel; I imagine that even viewers in 1942 who didn’t know what the monster was were wondering long before then when it would finally appear. But the film is so compact (something like 63 minutes—like I said, this is a 1940s B film we’re talking about) that it doesn’t matter that much, and the only foot it really puts wrong is the comic relief detective’s assistant character (Heather Thatcher has some impressive other roles to her credit, but this was not her finest hour, evidently). Otherwise, it’s a fascinating little late-Victorian Gothic tale (dressed up with some of the finest science 1900 could buy), told with fine expressionist visual flair, and it should be better known than it probably is these days.