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The Undead

by Charlie Largent Feb 01, 2025

The Undead
A CineSavant Revival House Review
1957 – 75 Min.
Starring Pamela Duncan, Val Dufour
Cinematography by William A. Sickner
Written by Charles B. Griffith
Directed by Roger Corman

Roger Corman began directing movies in 1955 and almost immediately his ambitions were at war with his budgets—films with apocalyptic titles like The Day the World Ended and It Conquered the World deserved a vast arena and a cast of thousands, not the skeleton crews and cramped soundstages where Corman’s storied career was born. All that changed rather abruptly in 1960s House of Usher, the first in a series of wildly successful horror films photographed in Cinemascope and sumptuous PathéColor. Until then Corman’s greatest challenge was to adhere to the bottom line without tripping over it—a high-wire act that made so many of his early films such ineffable experiences. One of those uniquely Cormanesque productions was among his most strange and adventurous movies, The Undead.

The Undead had its genesis in the story of a Colorado housewife named Virginia Mae Morrow and her collaboration with an amateur hypnotist named Morey Bernstein. Once under Bernstein’s spell, Morrow “became” a nineteenth century Irishwoman called Bridey Murphy, speaking in a thick Irish brogue and being quite specific about Mrs. Murphy’s time on earth, even recounting her own death and burial.

Bernstein eventually wrote a book about his experience that attracted the same dreamers who embraced the theories of self-professed psychics like Edgar Cayce and lovable crackpots like Criswell. The rights to Morrow’s story were sold even before Bernstein’s book hit the stands and before long America was in the grip of Brideymania. In the summer of ’56 Paramount pulled out the stops for The Search for Bridey Murphy, a VistaVision production directed by Noel Langley and starring Teresa Wright.

Corman usually knew a good fad when he saw it; he hired Chuck Griffith to fast-track a screenplay called The Trance of Diana Love but Paramount’s picture, a static and hopelessly talky melodrama, tanked, and the Bridey Murphy craze, like most American infatuations, sputtered and died. Langley’s film may have helped kill it, but for Corman and Griffith, Paramount’s loss was their gain. Their script was retitled The Undead and, more to the point, freed from any constraints regarding Murphy or real life in general.

Griffith’s imagination ran wild—within budget of course—whipping up a mix of black magic, science fiction, hypnotism, telepathy, reincarnation, satanic rituals, Grimm’s fairy tales, dancing zombies, and iambic pentameter. It was, according to the speedy Griffith, “the best thing I’d written to that time.” Though Corman did away with most of the writer’s blank verse, the film retains its unusually complex, near-Lynchian construction; dream-like voiceovers, shifting time frames, and doubled identities.

Val Dufour, a ubiquitous performer in soap operas, plays Quintus Ratcliff, a renegade psychotherapist with dangerous notions about hypnotism and reincarnation, and he needs a subject compliant—and desperate enough—to cooperate. He happens upon Diana Love, a wandering soul who Corman introduces in classic bad-girl fashion, setting up shop by the nearest streetlamp. The church had condemned Bernstein’s book for glamorizing reincarnation and now Corman was ready to push the envelope by featuring a prostitute as his heroine.

No doubt there was a distinctly erotic allure to a straight-laced woman revealing a more provocative personality on the couch, but Corman didn’t have time for such subtleties; for the pivotal role of Diana, literally a woman out of time, he cast Pamela Duncan, a voluptuous head-turner who could bring a man to his knees even as she slept. As the hooker with a fairy tale past, Duncan transforms Bernstein’s potboiler about a sleepwalking housewife into a risqué take on Sleeping Beauty.

Engineering Diana’s transmigration to the Middle Ages strained Corman’s already meager budget, those time-traveling scenes called for the kind of hallucinogenic effects and uncanny matte paintings that Corman would employ in the dream sequences of Pit and the Pendulum and Tales of Terror. But for The Undead Roger had to depend on the run and gun talent of cinematographer William Sickner (The Mummy’s Ghost), the nimble editing of veteran Frank Sullivan (The Philadelphia Story), and a very busy set decorator named Karl Brainard (longtime AIP prop master).

The result was a stripped-down Dark Ages built with papier-mâché castles and plaster of Paris dungeons. It’s in one of those unconvincing prison cells that Diana meets her medieval soulmate, a look-alike named Helene imprisoned for the crime of witchcraft. Helene manages to escape the torture chamber but finds a different kind of torment: a bizarre conglomeration of peasants, gravediggers, and hobgoblins; beautiful but cruel witches, shapeshifting imps, and slinky vamps who turn their own burial ground into a Vegas catwalk.

The present day is dull in contrast and Ratcliff, anxious about his hold on the somnambulant Diana, decides to spirit himself back into the past, an act of hubris that will save Diana’s present day incarnation while condemning the smug psychiatrist to a life among the undead rabble. Remarkably, Corman shot this mini-epic within the walls of a reconfigured supermarket. He had only ten days (Duncan swears it was six) to charge through Griffith’s sprawling narrative, and if it weren’t for the director’s unofficial stock company, a gung ho gang of seasoned pros and wannabes who understood the pitfalls of a typical Corman schedule, there probably wouldn’t have been a movie at all.

As if Duncan weren’t sufficient eye candy, the statuesque Allison Hayes—bigger than life in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman—plays the conniving witch Livia while the delightful Dorothy Neumann is Meg-Maud, a witch as cartoonish as Margaret Hamilton but with the benign instincts of Billie Burke. A weirdly creepy Billy Barty is the imp, Bruno Vesota is a slowwitted innkeeper who loses his head, and stalwart Dick Miller is wasted in a fleeting appearance as a leper who sells his soul to the devil.

That devil, a very self-satisfied Prince of Darkness, is played by Richard Devon whose sinister laughter haunted the dreams of many a middle-schooler. Equipped with pointy ears and a formidable trident, Devon, among all the cast members, appears to be having the most fun. The film went out on a double bill with Voodoo Woman starring another of AIP’s  camera-ready sexpots, Marla English, who had just appeared in her own reincarnation thriller as The She Creature.

Since anytime is the right time to celebrate Mr. Corman and his career, one could suggest a more appropriate doubleheader for the revival houses: The Undead and The Masque of the Red Death, in which Corman revisits the middle-ages with an modish morality play about plagues of all shapes and sizes, human and inhuman.

Photographed by Nicolas Roeg in the most iridescent primary colors, it is almost certainly Corman’s most beautiful and brutal film, a catalog of exquisite finery and Sadean cruelty. Though Masque makes Corman’s first foray into the dark ages look very rickety indeed, The Undead remains a lovably rickety joyride, and part of the fun is waiting for the wheels to fall off. They never do but the 31-year-old Corman took chances with his tall tale that make the stately Masque appear just a little stuffy (Hazel Court’s translucent gowns excepted).

The Undead has never had a proper home video release. A substandard dvd from DVD UK Ltd. was released in 2003 that did the film and its fans no favors. A Blu ray could certainly perk up the currently drab presentation, but for those who don’t mind the occasional commercial, a serviceable print can be streamed on both Pluto and Tubi. It’s somehow appropriate that the best-looking print of The Undead—as far as I can tellwas broadcast on the April 3, 2021 episode of Svengoolie. 

Here’s Joe Dante on The Undead:

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Katherine M Turney

THE UNDEAD was also on DVD, temporarily, in a set of four AIP movies given the Mystery Science Theater treatment. Here is the blurb for this long out of print set: Commercially released on DVD by Shout! Factory in December 2015 as part of Volume XXXIV, a 4-disc set along with The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent, War of the Colossal Beast, and The She-Creature. Great riffing on all four movies, but the set was yanked by Shout because they were sued by She Who Shall Not Be Named who holds the rights to the movies. Poopie!

Joe Dante

She’s under the erroneous impression that the titles she holds rights to (including the most famous one, I Was a Teenage Werewolf) are some how worth more than they actually are, especially as the audience for them heads inexorably toward the graveyard. These things need to be restored while the elements are still extant–if indeed they still are.

Cory Haffly

I’d make them the last thing I grab before hitting the graveyard. I would not claim to be entirely normal and well balanced.

Chris Koenig

I forget where, but on a podcast interview someone at Kino Lorber revealed Susan Hart wants a million dollars plus for all the titles she has! I love those AIP 50s movies…BUT, if nobody was going to liscense those for that sum during the DVD boom, what makes her think anybody will pay that amount in today’s niche Blu-Ray/4K UHD market! If any, it looks like she has made it borderline impossible to offer her titles on home video at a decent fee…and then there is the cost of film preservation/restoration on the liscensors end as well, something I’m sure Hart has not taken into account with her asking price.

Last edited 7 days ago by Chris Koenig
Chris Koenig

For the record: back in 2022, Dragon’s Domain was supposed to put out a CD of Albert Glasser’s scores for “The Amazing Colossal Man” and “War of the Colossal Beast”. That CD was immediately pulled before it’s street date…and I’m sure we all know it was a little lady by the initials ‘S.H.’ that did so.

Chris Koenig

Hmmm…Susan Hart doesn’t own any of those titles you mentioned in that Volume XXXIV set; those titles were part of the Sam Arkoff holdings with AMC. So, if true that she sued, I can’t see why Hart was able to do so since she never owned those titles (unless, it was because “War of the Colossal Beast” features some flashback footage from “The Amazing Colossal Man”, a movie that she DOES OWN…but then, Shout! Factory released “War of the Colossal Beast” on Blu-Ray some years back with no pushback from her, so who knows?).

Last edited 7 days ago by Chris Koenig
Cory Haffly

I’ve searched far and wide for a decent DVD of this sadly neglected film, and settled on a standard frame print available from various bootleggers, differing slightly in mastering quality. I’ve yet to see a widescreen print of the film for sale by anyone. Without exception these bootlegs run slightly faster and shorter than the original, generally 71 min instead of 75 min, no doubt owing to PAL/NTSC conversion.

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