Programme notes CH 03 — The Haunted Screen
The Mad Monster
A disgraced scientist gives wolf’s blood to his gentle handyman and sends him after the professors who laughed him out of the university.
PRC had this in cinemas within months of Universal’s The Wolf Man, and does not pretend otherwise; it takes the curse out and puts a syringe in. George Zucco’s Dr. Cameron says it is for the war, a regiment of wolf-men for the Army, but the people he is really talking to are the colleagues who ruined him. Glenn Strange plays Petro, the farmhand who trusts him, and would later wear Frankenstein’s monster at Universal. The marsh is a soundstage with a fog machine, and it works anyway. Watch the hand on the shoulder: every time Cameron calms Petro down, he is measuring him.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Sam Newfield
- Photographed by
- Jack Greenhalgh
- With
- George Zucco · Reginald Barlow · Anne Nagel · Johnny Downs
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.