The Walking Dead

Bringing the dead back to life was an extremely popular horror movie theme of the thirties and forties and Boris Karloff could certainly lay claim to being the king of this specialized genre. Between 1936 and 1941, he made seven films in which he either played a mad scientist experimenting with corpses or an avenging zombie: The Walking Dead (1936), The Man Who Lived Again (1936), The Man They Could Not Hang (1939), The Man With Nine Lives (1940), Before I Hang (1940), Black Friday (1940), and The Devil Commands (1941). The best of these was easily The Walking Dead (1936) in which he was cast as John Elman, a recently paroled convict who is framed for a murder and condemned to die in the electric chair. Despite frantic last minute efforts to save him from his fate, Elman is electrocuted but later brought back to life by Dr. Beaumont (Edmund Gwenn), a scientist known for his experiments reviving dead animals. Needless to say, Elman's return from the beyond spooks the gangsters who framed him and the "living dead man" comes calling on each one of them, resulting in a series of mysterious deaths. Part gangster melodrama, part supernatural thriller, The Walking Dead was the second collaboration between director Michael Curtiz and Boris Karloff. Their first film together was The Mad Genius (1931) which was the result of a casting misunderstanding. Curtiz later told Karloff: "The reason I called you in was because I thought you actually were a Russian. Your name certainly sounded Russian! When you came in you seemed so anxious to get the job that I decided to let you have it!" Curtiz was no stranger to the horror genre and had already proven his expertise in this arena with two superb thrillers - Doctor X (1932) and The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). The Walking Dead is equally evocative with its Depression era setting, Hal Mohr's expressionistic cinematography, and Karloff's eerie presence. As for the bizarre medical equipment used in Elman's resurrection scene, it was a real device known as the Lindbergh Heart which functioned as a mechanical circulating system. The aviator pioneer Charles A. Lindbergh developed it with the assistance of Nobel Prize winner Dr. Alexis Carrel and several researchers. (From tcm.com)