Dir: Mark Robson | Boris Karloff, Anna Lee | US Fantasy horror

Evidently a subject close to his heart, the film with which Val Lewton concluded his series of low budget but intelligent horror films for RKO was one of the few on which he actually took a writing credit, albeit under his pseudonym ‘Carlos Keith’, with results so raw that the British censor paid it the backhanded compliment of banning it outright.

Lewton bore his erudition lightly but he displays moments of sly wit as when moving pictures are shown to be the idea of a patient in a lunatic asylum and he demonstrated the lethal effects of applying coat of gold paint to the skin over ten years before Ian Fleming had the idea in ‘Goldinger’.

As the asylum director, Boris Karloff plays one his most fiendish, leering villains, and comes to a satisfactorily grisly end; while Anna Lee is charmingly different as the heroine. @RichardChatten