After his legendary performance in Frankenstein, Boris Karloff quickly became pigeonholed into roles as monsters, villains, and mad scientists. While he had previously worked consistently as a minor supporting player, he was now financially secure for life. Frankenstein paved the way for The Old Dark House and The Black Cat, which were followed by a series of sci-fi and horror films such as The Ghoul, Isle of the Dead, and The Body Snatcher. Though many actors would resist such repetitive typecasting, Karloff appeared to accept it wholeheartedly. In later years, he would advise Christopher Lee that being typecast could be advantageous: “Find something that nobody else can do or will do… there’s nothing wrong with that.”
A large portion of Karloff’s filmography has faded into obscurity, partly due to the loss of many early silent films to the passage of time, and partly because Frankenstein cast such a long shadow over his career. However, Karloff’s extensive B-movie credits conceal the true depth and range of his acting abilities. Premiering exactly 90 years ago today, the 1936 film The Walking Dead serves as a bridge between his numerous Frankenstein-inspired roles and his talent for extracting genuine emotional depth from outlandish material.
Helmed by the renowned Golden Age director Michael Curtiz (Casablanca, Captain Blood), The Walking Dead is a frenetic blend of three prevalent 1930s genres: gangster films, mad scientist horror narratives, and heavy-handed morality plays about crime and retribution. The opening sequences reveal a plot among a cadre of affluent criminals. Their scheme to conceal their illegal operations involves murdering a judge, though they must first locate a scapegoat to frame for the crime.
Fresh out of prison, the unfortunate John Ellman (Karloff) proves to be the perfect patsy. After hiring an assassin to kill the judge, the conspirators pin the murder on Ellman, manipulating his trial to ensure he receives the death penalty. Unbeknownst to them, Ellman’s demise will be short-lived. Through an incredible and absurd twist of fate, a young pair of laboratory assistants working for Dr. Beaumont witnessed Ellman’s framing. They beg their employer to bring Ellman back to life so he can establish his innocence, resulting in a scene that strongly evokes Frankenstein, with Karloff positioned on an angled hospital bed surrounded by bizarre apparatuses and fizzing test tubes.
True to the film’s title, Ellman does return from the grave, though he finds it difficult to convey any coherent details about the events preceding his execution. Revived as a semi-mute amnesiac, he prefers to spend his time playing the piano—a profession he had intended to return to after his initial prison term. Ellman had always been a gentle spirit, too innocent to understand the elaborate scheme devised by the men who arranged his death.
The crime/horror premise of The Walking Dead is undeniably pulpy, mirroring both the audience preferences and creative limitations of a unique era in Hollywood. Only a few years prior, Universal Pictures had unleashed a string of landmark horror films in rapid succession: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, and The Invisible Man. These groundbreaking pictures were partly enabled by the permissive censorship of the Pre-Code period, a short span from 1930 to 1934 during which studios enjoyed greater liberty to portray sexuality, substance use, profanity, and ethically questionable subject matter. Predictably, this proved to be a golden age for both horror and crime movies.
However, by the late 1930s, American directors encountered harsher censorship standards. Horror films grew more campy and less macabre, while the stark pessimism of Pre-Code gangster movies was diluted to emphasize moral lessons. Consequently, The Walking Dead never shows Ellman’s actual execution. While such a scene might have featured graphic drama in earlier years, stricter regulations regarding screen violence forced the film to focus instead on the tense moments preceding the electric chair, shifting to another setting when Ellman’s death occurs.
Similarly, the narrative draws a sharp distinction between its protagonists and antagonists. The young couple serving as our perspective characters are pure and virtuous, whereas Ellman is portrayed as a pitiable casualty of injustice. As the criminal conspiracy’s death toll rises, the depicted violence is deliberately muted, concentrating instead on a series of far-fetched incidents where the villains perish through fortuitous mishaps rather than deliberate retaliation. The implicit suggestion is that divine retribution is striking them down for their transgressions, and after the villains meet their fate, John Ellman is eliminated once more. Even though he is an innocent man, his unnatural resurrection defies the natural order, precluding any possibility of a happy conclusion.
Following Ellman’s initial return from the dead, Karloff’s acting deliberately leverages the audience’s memory of Frankenstein’s Monster: a compassionate character whose otherworldly resurrection renders him monstrous to observers as he strives to express his need for fundamental human compassion. Prior to his first demise, however, Ellman was an ordinary individual—a subdued, melancholic middle-aged man who simply wished to start anew.
This is where Karloff’s star quality becomes evident, for in an otherwise straightforward film filled with generic characters, he infuses Ellman’s absurd resurrection with genuine emotional weight. Without such a compelling screen presence, Karloff’s career could not have thrived as it did, lending surprising depth to thirty years of B-grade horror parts.
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