THE INVISIBLE RAY 1936
The Invisible Ray (1936) is uncanny science fable of cosmic discovery and human downfall, a film that glows—sometimes literally—with the anxieties and ambitions of its era. Directed by Lambert Hillyer and anchored by Boris Karloff’s haunted intensity, it is a Universal horror that straddles the border between science fiction and Gothic tragedy, its plot pulsing with radioactive energy and the slow, inexorable unraveling of a man who dares to touch the stars.
Karloff is Dr. Janos Rukh, a reclusive scientist in the Carpathian mountains whose castle laboratory is a cathedral of obsession. With wild hair, a brooding gaze, and a touch of Poe in his ancestry, Rukh is a visionary outcast, convinced that a meteorite of unimaginable power—Radium X—fell to Earth millions of years ago. His wife, Diane (Frances Drake), is much younger and increasingly distant, while his blind mother (Violet Kemble Cooper) hovers with a mix of eerie devotion and psychic foreboding. When Rukh invites a group of skeptical colleagues—including the benevolent Dr. Felix Benet (Bela Lugosi, in a rare, warmly sympathetic role), Sir Francis and Lady Arabella Stevens (Walter Kingsford and Beulah Bondi), and the earnest Ronald Drake (Frank Lawton)—to witness his cosmic revelations, the film’s central conflict is set in motion.
The early scenes are a marvel of visual invention, with George Robinson’s (Dracula 1931, Dracula’s Daughter 1936, Son of Frankenstein 1939, Tower of London 1939, Tarantula! 1955) cinematography conjuring a world of towering, shadow-soaked sets and flickering laboratory lights. The planetarium sequence, where Rukh projects the Earth’s ancient past onto a swirling cosmic canvas, is a highlight of 1930s effects work—John P. Fulton’s technical wizardry gives the meteor’s journey a mythic grandeur, while the castle’s vertical lines and endless doorways evoke a sense of Gothic claustrophobia. The film’s score, composed by Franz Waxman, swells with drama and unease, weaving together motifs of wonder and impending doom.
The expedition to Africa, though marred by dated and regrettable depictions of “native” laborers, featured Black characters who are depicted as laborers exploited to carry equipment and supplies for the white scientific expedition into Africa. In real terms, these roles were typically assigned to Black actors, often in minor or uncredited parts. They were written in a way that reflected the racial and colonial attitudes of 1930s Hollywood.
All this shifts the film’s mood from chilly European gloom to feverish adventure. Here, Rukh, driven by a solitary madness, discovers the meteor and exposes himself to its radioactive core. The transformation is both physical and psychological: Karloff’s skin begins to glow with an unearthly light, and his touch becomes instantly lethal. The effect—achieved through painstaking work on the film negative—renders Rukh a living specter, a man marked by his own ambition.
Lugosi’s Dr. Benet, moved by compassion, concocts a daily antidote that keeps the poison at bay, but warns that madness will be the price if Rukh ever falters.
As the party returns to Europe, the narrative tightens into a noose. Rukh’s wife, now in love with Ronald Drake, leaves him, and his scientific triumph is stolen by the very colleagues he invited, at least in his fevered mind. Karloff charts Rukh’s descent with aching subtlety: at first, he is a man wounded by betrayal, then a specter stalking the streets of Paris, his glowing hands leaving death in their wake. The murders are marked by chilling ingenuity: a glowing handprint on the neck, a victim’s terror frozen in the cornea, a city gripped by invisible menace. All the while, Lugosi’s Benet uses Radium X to heal the blind, a counterpoint to Rukh’s spiral into destruction.
The film’s climax is a symphony of Gothic melodrama. Rukh, now a fugitive, fakes his own death and plots revenge against those he believes have wronged him. The statues of the Six Saints, looming over Paris, become his totems of vengeance, each destroyed as another victim falls. In the end, it is his mother, Violet Kemble Cooper, in a performance of otherworldly stateliness, who intervenes, destroying the antidote and forcing her son to confront the full consequences of his actions. Rukh, his body consumed by radiation, bursts into flame and throws himself from a window, a dying star collapsing under the weight of its own ambition.
The Invisible Ray is a film of striking contrasts: Karloff’s performance is both monstrous and mournful, his descent into madness rendered with a tragic inevitability. Lugosi, so often the villain, radiates warmth and decency, his Benet a beacon of hope in a world gone mad. Frances Drake’s Diane is torn between loyalty and love, her anguish palpable as she watches her husband’s transformation. The supporting cast—Bondi, Lawton, Kingsford—bring depth and humanity to roles that could easily have been overshadowed by spectacle.
Yet it is the film’s mood that lingers: the interplay of light and shadow, the pulse of Waxman’s score, the sense of a world trembling on the brink of discovery and disaster. The Invisible Ray is a cautionary tale about the perils of unchecked ambition, the seductive danger of forbidden knowledge, and the thin line between genius and madness. The film unfolds like a hush of horror poetry, its terrors whispered rather than shouted—an elegy of shadows and longing that invites true aficionados of classical horror to lean in closer, to savor the artistry hidden between each haunted frame. In Karloff’s glowing hands, it becomes a story not just of horror, but of heartbreak—a luminous tragedy that still casts its eerie glow across the history of horror/science fiction cinema.
THE WALKING DEAD 1936
Boris Karloff in The Walking Dead (1936): A Resurrection of Pathos and Menace
Michael Curtiz’s The Walking Dead (1936) is a film that hums with the eerie cadence of a funeral dirge—a story where justice, science, and vengeance collide in the shadowy intersection of life and death. At its heart is Boris Karloff, delivering a performance that transcends the macabre trappings of his role, transforming what could have been a simple horror flick into a melancholic meditation on mortality and morality.
The film opens on a web of corruption: John Ellman (Karloff), a wrongfully convicted pianist, is framed for murder by a gangster syndicate led by the slick, sadistic Nolan (Ricardo Cortez). Despite the efforts of Dr. Beaumont (Edmund Gwenn) and his colleague Dr. Evan (Warren Hull) to expose the conspiracy, despite last-minute attempts to clear his name, the witnesses come forward too late, and Ellman is led to the electric chair. Ellman is executed in a chilling, matter-of-fact electrocution sequence. But this is no end—it’s a beginning.
Beaumont, a scientist obsessed with reanimating the dead, revives Ellman’s corpse in a lab crackling with Tesla coils and existential dread. The resurrected Ellman staggers into a half-life, his soul tethered to a body that is neither fully alive nor dead. Haunted by fragmented memories and an uncanny ability to sense guilt, he begins stalking those responsible for his death. Yet this is no mindless monster: Karloff’s Ellman is a tragic avenger, his vengeance tempered by sorrow. The film crescendos in a rain-lashed climax where Ellman confronts his killers, not with violence, but with the unbearable weight of their own sins.
The Poetry of the Undead
Karloff, fresh off Frankenstein (1931) and The Mummy (1932), imbues Ellman with a vulnerability rarely seen in horror icons. His physicality—the slow, deliberate gait; the hands perpetually hovering as if unsure whether to caress or claw—suggests a man unmoored from his own existence. His face, gaunt and etched with sorrow, becomes a canvas for Curtiz’s camera: close-ups linger on Karloff’s eyes, which flicker with confusion, accusation, and a quiet plea for peace.
In the courtroom scene, as Ellman mutters, “I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it.” Karloff layers the line with a childlike bewilderment that makes his fate all the more harrowing. Later, resurrected, his voice drops to a hollow rasp, every word sounding dredged from the grave. When he corners Nolan in the film’s climax, his quiet “You know… you know” is less a threat than a lament—a ghost weary of haunting.
Curtiz, better known for Casablanca (1942) and Mildred Pierce (1945), here channels his knack for taut storytelling into Gothic expressionism. The film’s pacing is relentless, its shadows deep and woven like a shadow to the soul and threaded with sorrow. Curtiz frames Ellman’s resurrection not as a triumph of science, but as a violation—a violation underscored by Hal Mohr’s cinematography, which bathes the lab in cold, clinical light, contrasting sharply with the velvety darkness of the outside world.
Curtiz’s use of Dutch angles in Ellman’s post-resurrection scenes amplifies the character’s disorientation, while the recurring motif – Ellman ascending to the execution chamber, descending into the lab- becomes a visual metaphor for his liminal state. The director’s background in pre-Code crime dramas bleeds into the film’s moral ambiguity: the real monsters here are the living, not the undead.
Ricardo Cortez’s Nolan is all smirking malice, a gangster whose charm masks a rot within. His death scene—a frantic, sweaty unraveling—is a masterclass in comeuppance. Dr. Evan Beaumont, played by Edmund Gwenn, is introduced as a brilliant and ambitious scientist, eager to push the boundaries of medical science by experimenting with artificial organs and, ultimately, the reanimation of the dead. His scientific hubris is clear—he intervenes in the natural order by reviving John Ellman after his execution, driven by a desire to unlock the secrets of life and death and even to learn “secrets from beyond the grave.” Gwenn (later famous as Miracle on 34th Street’s Santa) brings gravitas to Dr. Beaumont, whose ambition is tempered by guilt. His final act of mercy toward Ellman adds a flicker of redemption. And finally, Marguerite Churchill as Nancy, the film’s moral compass, radiates a grounded warmth; her loyalty to Ellman anchors the story in empathy, and after reviving Ellman, Beaumont’s attitude shifts. He becomes conflicted and troubled by the moral and spiritual consequences of his actions. He is portrayed as well-meaning but ethically questionable, and a sense of guilt and responsibility increasingly overshadows his pursuit of knowledge for what he has done to Ellman. This is especially evident in the film’s final scenes, where Beaumont presses Ellman for revelations about the afterlife, only to be rebuffed with a warning to “leave the dead to their maker. The Lord our God is a jealous God.”
Hal Mohr, (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1935, Phantom of the Opera 1943) an Oscar-winning cinematographer, paints the film in chiaroscuro strokes. The execution sequence is a study in starkness: Ellman’s silhouette against the electric chair, his face swallowed by shadows. Later, his resurrection is lit with an unearthly glow, Karloff’s pallid skin gleaming like marble under a full moon. Mohr’s camera lingers on empty corridors and rain-slicked streets, turning the world itself into a character—a silent witness to Ellman’s purgatory.
The Walking Dead is often overshadowed by Karloff’s Universal monster films, yet it remains a gem of 1930s horror. Its themes of wrongful conviction and scientific ethics feel eerily modern, while Karloff’s performance—a blend of tenderness and terror—redefines the zombie archetype decades before Romero. This is not a film about the horror of death, but the horror of being denied rest. In Ellman, Karloff gives us a martyr for the damned, a man whose second life is a curse, not a gift.
To watch The Walking Dead today is to witness a masterclass in how horror can be humane—a reminder that the genre’s greatest power lies not in the monsters we fear, but the corrupted humanity we cannot escape.
