Horror Express: The Devil Commands (Edward Dmytryk, 1941)

 Darker, creepier and more intense than the other ‘mad doctor’ movies Boris Karloff made for Columbia between 1939 and 1941, this fourth and final instalment in the loosely connected series finds incoming director Edward Dmytryk really upping the ante, delivering a film which remains startling and somewhat unnerving to this day, in spite of its brutally foreshortened 64 minute run time and all too evident budgetary constraints.

A brief but highly effective prologue gets the antennae of us Lovecraft-fanciers tingling right from the off, as the daughter of Karloff’s Dr Julian Blair delivers an ominously deadpan voiceover narration, intoned over a series of very well done model-shots which take us on a slow pan toward the doors of a derelict, storm-lashed cliff-top mansion;

“In Barsham Harbour, on nights like this, when lightning rips the night apart, why do people close the shutters which face toward my father’s house, and lock their doors, and whisper? Why are they afraid? No one goes near my father’s house. I don’t know where my father is. I only know that for one brief, terrible moment, he tore open the door to whatever lives beyond the grave.”

I don't know about you, but I’m sold.

Thereafter, we rewind seven years, and the film’s first act settles down into a pattern very much in keeping with the Karloff’s other Columbia pictures, as the gentle and soft-spoken Dr Blair, a research fellow at a fictional New England college, astounds his fellow boffins by demonstrating that the human brain generates an electro-magnetic impulse which can be recorded, and potentially ‘read’, via electrodes attached to the subject’s temples, hooked up to a primitive, EEG-like encephalogram. (1)

Claiming that “the wave impulse of woman, the so-called weaker sex, is much stronger than man’s”, Dr Blair uses his beloved wife Helen (Shirley Warde) as his primary experimental subject. His beliefs become both more questionable and more obsessive though when, stricken with grief after Helen dies in a car accident, he observes that his machinery is still recording the unique ‘signature’ of her brainwaves, convincing him that his wife’s spirit remains present in the ether, attempting to communicate with him.

As you might well imagine, ‘The Devil Commands’ becomes a gloomy and rather sad affair at this point, and Karloff conveys Dr Blair’s misery and exhaustion with almost painful conviction. Viewers who had previously turned out to see Karloff in Nick Grinde’s ‘The Man They Could Not Hang’ (1939), ‘The Man with Nine Lives’ or ‘Before I Hang’ (both 1940) will have been more than familiar with the path the good doctor subsequently takes, as his mental health gradually crumbles, and as he repeatedly ignores the advice proffered by the film’s procession of straight-laced supporting players, who urge him to give up his weird work and take a well-earned break.

The film’s tone shifts considerably however when, on the advice of his simple-minded assistant Karl (Cy Schindell) - only potentially mad scientists are assigned one of those, you see - Dr Blair attends a séance conducted by a renowned medium, the stentorian Mrs Blanche Walters (Anne Revere).

Though Mrs Walters is initially pretty pissed off when the doc busts up her phony séance, easily exposing the assorted gimmicks she has been using to hoodwink her clients, she nonetheless reveals herself to be as cold, avaricious and amoral an operator as any film noir spider-woman - so naturally, when Blair suggests that she could make herself a great deal of dough assisting him with his experiments, she’s all ears.

Before long, the doctor’s increasingly unhinged attempts to channel vast amounts of electricity through Mrs Walters’ brain in an attempt to make contact with Helen’s roving spirit lead to poor old Karl getting accidentally lobotomised. Blanche, who seems suspiciously well versed on how to handle such situations, suggests they duck out and make a quick getaway before anyone finds out about the accident, prompting the unlikely trio to flee the campus and hit the road, setting themselves up in the remote cliff-top manse we saw during the film’s prologue.

Once this memorably eerie set-up, reminiscent both of Lovecraft’s ‘From Beyond’ and the unhinged finale of Michael Curtiz’s Doctor X a decade earlier, has been established, palpable fear and loathing on claustrophobic interior sets is soon the order of the day. In a neat turn-around, we’re reintroduced to our characters a year or two down the line, through the eyes of the county sheriff, who comes a-knocking, investigating, oh, y’know, just some bodies which have gone missing from the local cemetery (uh-oh).

After the door is opened by a cowering, lantern-bearing maid (a great performance from character actress Dorothy Adams), the sheriff soon encounters the lumbering, Igor-like Karl, before Blanche descends the rickety, shadowed staircase, glaring daggers in full-on, imperious Lady Macbeth mode. And as to the good doctor, who shambles into view behind her, meanwhile… well, he’s certainly given up brushing the dust out of his hair, let's put it that way.

Under Blanche’s encouragement no doubt, Blair has of course gone full loony by this stage, and the crooked couple have indeed been re-appropriating the carcasses of the local citizenry for use in their experiments. In a breathtaking tableau of psychotronic weirdness, they have in fact wired up the mouldering corpses in what look for all the world like antiquated, metallic diving suits with flashing Tesla coils appended to their helmets. They are seated around a table with their arms out-stretched, in some perverse, quasi-scientific imitation of a séance, whilst the doctor’s banks of McFadden-esque electrical equipment whir and drone behind them. Good lord!

With shit like this going down, it’s naturally only a matter of time before a torch-wielding mob is called for - but, given that we know the house is still standing seven years hence, they’re required on this occasion to nix the flames and do their worst with clubs and wooden poles instead. Yikes.

Edward Dmytryk would soon of course go on to play a significant role in defining the aesthetic of film noir with the classic ‘Murder, My Sweet’ (1944), and he takes the opportunity here to prove himself a post-expressionist stylist per excellence here, ladling on angular shadows, spot-lighting, venetian blinds and dutch angles as if they were going out of fashion, and employing harsh, jagged editing patterns to produce a rather fevered, dissonant tempo.

The film’s production crew meanwhile douse practically every scene in thunder, lightning and squalling gales, undercutting the science-based plotting with the kind of quasi-gothic atmos you could cut up and sell by the pound, whilst mournful cellos saw away on the stock music score, emphasising the essentially tragic nature of the storyline.

Towering over the bumbling, submissive Karloff during the second half of the film, Anne Revere likewise acts up a storm, giving us the kind of vile, emotionless femme fatale / heartless bitch character who could eat Phyllis Dietrichson or Mrs Danvers for breakfast.

The uncertain nature of her relationship with Karloff’s character is in fact one of the movie’s most intriguingly perverse elements. Could they really have a romantic connection? Seems unlikely, given that Dr Blair is still utterly fixated on trying to establish contact with his late wife. We’ve already established that Mrs Blanche Walters is driven by a desire for money, but surely hanging around in a dilapidated mansion living off the diminishing resources of a crazy old geezer wasn’t exactly what she had in mind. Does she just get a kick out of lording it over the doctor and his mindless servant, or - is she hooked on the thrill she derives from having thousands of volts of electricity (and potentially the disembodied brainwaves of the dead) blasted through her nervous system on a regular basis..?

The latter possibility could have conceivably made her an early precursor to Barbara Crampton’s character in Stuart Gordon’s adaptation of From Beyond, but, forced to rattle through its potent story at breakneck speed to hit the era’s one hour b-movie finishing line, ‘The Devil Commands’ is allowed little time to explore such niceties as character motivation, leaving a wealth of rampaging ambiguity in the gaps between scenes which makes the film all the more fascinating.

Of course, the title and poster blurb assigned to this movie by Columbia upon its release are a complete misnomer. The film contains no reference to the devil, and he certainly issues no commands. Indeed, it is interesting to note that there is no allusion to religion or Christian belief to be found anywhere in the film; even the obligatory blather about defying God’s law or somesuch which was routinely shoehorned into this era’s post-Frankenstein mad doctor movies in notable by its absence.

Perhaps one explanation for this is that the script for ‘The Devil Commands’ (credited to Robert Hardy Andrews & Milton Gunzburg) was loosely derived from William Sloane’s science-based supernatural novel ‘The Edge of Running Water’ (first published in 1939) - an acclaimed work, often hailed as a landmark in the field of ‘cosmic horror’, which I’ve been meaning to obtain a copy of for many years at this point. (2)

Whilst I’d imagine that the film probably ditches or reworks many of the details of Sloane’s story, disquieting remnants of what I understand to be his core premise remain. Namely, we’re talking here about the idea that, whilst Dr Blair believes that his experiments allow him to make contact with departed human souls, he is actually tapping into something else entirely.

This truly frightening concept, beautifully implied by the novel’s title, is realised rather more bluntly during the frenzied climax of Dmytryk’s film, wherein we see Dr Blair’s table of wired up corpses become possessed by some unholy St Vitus’ dance as the riled up mob of townsfolk approaches, summoning up what, in their audio commentary for the film’s blu-ray release, the ever-reliable Kim Newman and Stephen Jones identify as perhaps cinema’s first example of a full-blown trans-dimensional vortex.

If on one level ‘The Devil Commands’ remains a morbid and joyless rumination on the self-destructive futility of seeking solace from beyond the grave, it is simultaneously animated by a crazed spark of total morbid madness which proves extremely compelling. Crashing heedlessly into the realm of what-man-was-not-meant-to-know with a fervour far more alarming than than anything generally encountered in the rather sedate world of early ‘40s scientific horror films, it stands as a raw, wild and genuinely unnerving classic of the weird/cosmic end of the genre.

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(1) I’m no scientist, but it’s interesting to note that, whilst Karloff’s learned colleagues in ‘The Devil Commands’ treat his theories as if they pretty far-out speculation, Dr Blair’s initial ideas about brainwave activity are essentially correct, and paper-and-ink EEGs very much like the once he demonstrates in the film had actually been in use since at least the early 1920s.

(1) This 1967 Bantam edition of Sloane’s novel, with its IMPOSSIBLY CREEPY cover illustration, is a particular paperback holy grail of mine.