NIGHT MONSTER

released 23 July 1942 | 12 | DVD

Director Ford Beebe Cast Bela lugosi, lionel atwill, Irene Hervey, ralph Morgan

Bela Lugosi earns star billing in this Universal chiller, but it’s a bait-and-switch – demoted from Transylvanian aristocracy, the Dracula icon brings what haughty charisma he can to the brief, thankless role of a butler.

It’s a fitting metaphor for a studio at the tail-end of its horror glory years. Night Monster is very much a late period entry from the once mighty Universal, a routine take on the Old Dark House tradition that spices its murder mystery tropes with an intriguing dollop of metaphysical weirdness.

Ingston Towers is the Old Dark House in question, a stately pile where “the air is charged with death and hatred and something that’s unclean”. A maid frantically scrubs blood from the stairs while a murderer prowls the fogbound swampland around the estate.

Universal always had a gift for atmosphere and it’s slathered as thick as the killer-concealing mists: the prowler’s presence is cued by the creak of an old door and the sudden silence of the everchattering frog population. Elsewhere there’s a delicious vein of genuine weirdness. A swami materialises a skeleton in a darkened drawing room, summoning it by pure willpower from a distant tomb. All matter is “cosmic substance in vibration”, we’re told. Noel Edmonds would approve.

Extras None. Nick Setchfield