The Undead is a 1957 horror film directed by Roger Corman and starring Pamela Duncan, Allison Hayes, Richard Garland and Val Dufour. It also featured Corman regulars Richard Devon, Dick Miller, Mel Welles and Bruno VeSota. The authors' original working title was The Trance of Diana Love. The film follows the story of a prostitute, Diana Love (Duncan), who is put into a hypnotic trance by psychic Quintis (Dufour), thus causing her to regress to a previous life. Hayes later starred in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958). The film was released on March 15, 1957 by American International Pictures as a double feature with Voodoo Woman.
A beautiful woman is sent back in time via hypnosis to the Middle Ages where she finds she is suspected of being a witch, and subject to being executed.
Plot[]
Quintus, a psychic researcher who has spent seven years in Tibet, wants to send someone back in time into a past life. He hires (for $500) a prostitute, Diana Love, and plans to send her into a trance over 48 hours so she can access her past life. Quintus' former professor is present to witness it.
Quintus puts Diana into a trance and sends her back into the Middle Ages, where she shares the body of her past self, Helene, who is in prison, sentenced to die at dawn under suspicion of being a witch.
At Diana's urging, Helene escapes prison, earning the attention of Livia (the witch for whose crimes Helene has been blamed) and of Satan himself. Via the psychic link between Diana and Helene, Quintus physically goes back in time to convince Helene to avoid her death, so he can witness the results of history changing.
However, if Helene evades execution, her future selves, including Diana, will never come into existence, so she accepts her fated death. When Helene dies, her link with Diana disappears, leaving Quintus physically stranded in the past, much to Satan's amusement.
Cast[]
- Pamela Duncan as Diana Love/Helene
- Richard Garland as Pendragon
- Allison Hayes as Livia
- Val Dufour as Quintus Ratcliff
- Mel Welles as Smolkin
- Dorothy Neumann as Meg-Maud
- Billy Barty as The Imp
- Bruno VeSota as Scroop
- Aaron Saxon as Gobbo
- Richard Devon as Satan
- Dick Miller as The Leper
- Paul Blaisdell as the corpse in the coffin
Production[]
Script[]
The Undead was inspired by an interest in reincarnation during the 1950s (as was the film The She-Creature). Notably the book The Search for Bridey Murphy by Morey Bernstein was made into a film in 1956. Charles Griffith recalls:
It was originally called “The Trance of Diana Love”. Roger said to me, “Do me a Bridey Murphy picture.” And I told him that by the time Paramount finishes theirs, ours will fail. At the time, everybody was saying that they were making a bad picture. He just said that we’d get ours done ahead of theirs and clean up. So I did “The Trance of Diana Love” and it got shot funny, especially at the end, where you see the empty clothes before the revelation. It was in iambic pentameter and I had to rewrite it after it was ready to shoot because somebody told Roger that they didn’t understand it. Roger would give it to anybody to read or anybody out on the street. He’d send girls out with scripts.
Griffth later elaborated: "I separated all the different things with sequences with the devil, which were really elaborate, and the dialogue in the past was all in iambic pentameter. Roger got very excited by that. He handed the script around for everybody to read, but nobody understood the dialogue, so he told me to translate it into English. The script was ruined.
Mel Welles said "it was a wonderful script and it probably would have been the cult film rather than Little Shop of Horrors had it been shot that way. But either Roger or someone at American International Pictures didn't think it was commercially viable to do it that way and at the last minute a decision was made to rewrite the script without that."
By the time The Undead was being made, the popularity of reincarnation was starting to dwindle. Therefore, Corman decided that they needed to change it up a little and added the time travel elements of Quintis, and changed the title to The Undead.
Finance[]
In May 1956 Corman announced the movie was to be made for Walter Mirisch at Allied Artists.
In July 1956 Variety reported that Corman would fully finance the film himself, although it would be distributed by AIP.
Cast[]
Pamela Duncan says Roger Corman called her up "out of the blue" and offered her the lead. "I don't know what made him think of me except that he must have seen me in something; I worked a lot and I was on TV a lot." She later worked with Corman on Attack of the Crab Monsters.
Mel Welles called his role of Smolkin "one of the best characters I ever played. I played him kind of insane and what was wonderful was the one of my reviews compared me to Stanley Holloway in one of his Shakespearean gravedigger roles."
AIP's special effects artist Paul Blaisdell was drafted to play the corpse in the coffin in the graveyard scene, which he said was a lot of fun. His eyes however were supposed to remain open and staring throughout the scene, and he said it was difficult because little particles of the coffin lid kept falling into them like dust.
Critical reception[]
The Los Angeles Times called The Undead "a better than usual horror film... a rather imaginative yarn... for this type picture the acting is quite good... Corman has turned out a good product." Variety called the film a minor league programmer, finding it technically proficient.
External links[]
The Undead (1957) at the Internet Movie Database- The Undead (1957) at AllMovie
- The Undead (1957) at Rotten Tomatoes
- The Undead (film) at Wikipedia
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This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at The Undead (film). The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with Horror Film Wiki, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. |