The Walking Dead

John Ellman has just come out of prison. He cannot find work. A gang gives him a job: he is to wait with a car at a certain place. That night a judge is killed and the body is placed beside that car. Ellman is arrested. Two witnesses know he is innocent but they are afraid and say nothing. Ellman is executed. The witnesses speak at last, and are too late. A scientist takes the body and applies a procedure. Ellman comes back. He kills nobody; he only looks at them and stands beside them. Michael Curtiz directs. Boris Karloff plays Ellman; Ricardo Cortez, Edmund Gwenn and Marguerite Churchill are in the cast. The film is one of the short productions the Warner studio was making at the time; it runs a little over an hour. The narrative joins horror with the crime film; the first half is entirely court and gang. Karloff's character uses no violence; the narrative draws its fear not from the presence of the dead but from the guilty men's own conscience. The matter it treats is capital punishment; the narrative takes the possibility of a wrong verdict as a direct subject. The scientist asks a question at the end and the film does not answer it. Curtiz was making many films for the studio in this period and this comes out of that fast production. Its limit is scale; the budget shows, the effects are plain and the characters thinly written. Who it is for: viewers who like studio horror of the thirties and Boris Karloff. Who it is not for: it is short, the plot simple, and the horror mild.