Programme notes CH 03 — The Haunted Screen
Dead Men Walk
A country doctor burns his brother’s books of black magic, buries the brother, and finds him at the bedroom window a week later.
George Zucco twice, often in the same shot, for PRC’s money: Dr. Lloyd Clayton, the village doctor everyone trusts, and Elwyn, the twin who studied the other thing and comes back from the crypt for Lloyd’s niece. Zucco makes them two men by the set of the mouth alone. Dwight Frye, Renfield in Dracula twelve years before, carries the coffin as the hunchback Zolarr; it was nearly his last part. The village believes the doctor, then the mob believes the vampire, and the film moves faster than either. Watch the titles: they run over a book of spells going into the fire, and Zucco’s face burning with it.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Sam Newfield
- Photographed by
- Jack Greenhalgh
- With
- Al St. John · Mary Carlisle · Dwight Frye · Forrest Taylor · George Zucco · Nedrick Young
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
George Zucco at PRC, a year apart, from the same director and the same writer: once as the scientist who makes the monster, once as the doctor whose brother is one. The studio could afford him, and built both pictures round him.