ABCs of Horror 3: "M" Is for The Man They Could Not Hang (1939)

Paste’s ABCs of Horror 3 is a 26-day project that highlights some of our favorite horror films from each letter of the alphabet. The only criteria: The films chosen can’t have been used in our previous Century of Terror, a 100-day project to choose the best horror film of every year from 1920-2019, nor previous ABCs of Horror entries. With many heavy hitters out of the way, which movies will we choose?

There are any number of enduring American horror tropes that are primarily associated with specific periods, but few that call to mind a specific year range quite as much as the “mad doctor” film. Like the “old dark house” niche that preceded them, films featuring mad scientists, doctors and researchers run amok absolutely ruled the American horror landscape for roughly a decade, from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s. If you were a doctor with a dream of a better world, but also a penchant for playing god, then look out–odds are strong that you’re going to die in a catastrophic lab explosion at the pinnacle of act three. Perhaps if you’re lucky, you’ll get a last-second face turn, allowing you to redeem yourself or justify some of your actions in your dying moments. Boris Karloff manages all of the above, and then some, in the 1939 feature The Man They Could Not Hang, a film that could be considered a prototypical example of the mad doctor genre, albeit one with some pretty clear influences on other horror flicks that would arrive decades later.

Karloff had of course long been a horror icon at this point, a consummate professional who already had more than 80 screen credits in Hollywood before he first donned Jack Pierce’s famous makeup as Frankenstein’s monster in 1931. That role totally transformed his reputation and Hollywood notoriety, minting Karloff as the preeminent horror star of the Universal Monsters generation. He reprised the role in films like Bride of Frankenstein but also appeared in other classics like 1932’s The Old Dark House and The Mummy, and a string of films starring opposite Bela Lugosi in the mold of The Black Cat and The Raven. The seemingly ascendant horror genre was about to enter a barren, fallow period, but Karloff was ready and waiting to capitalize when it returned in 1939, stepping back into the shoes of the Monster in Son of Frankenstein, but also returning to his Mad Doctoring in The Man They Could Not Hang. Today, the former is far better remembered than the latter, but it’s the latter that was actually echoed and copied most consistently in the years that immediately followed.

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The Man They Could Not Hang stars the inimitable Karloff as Dr. Savaard, an altruistic medical researcher in the mold of Dr. Frankenstein who has developed an artificial heart machine that is potentially capable of bringing a recently dead person back to life. As the film opens, we see Dr. Savaard preparing to test this device on what must be noted is a very trusting laboratory assistant, who has agreed to let the doctor kill him and then recall him from beyond the veil. The only problem: The rash young man’s girlfriend calls the police, who burst in on Dr. Savaard and arrest him for murder, preventing him from going through with his experiment. Condemned to death in the subsequent trial, Savaard makes his other colleague promise to obtain his body after death and bring Savaard back to life with the machine, so he can subsequently take revenge against everyone who condemned him to death.

This sets the stage for a revenge plot that brings together the judge and jurists from Savaard’s trial and then reintroduces the man as the arch villain mastermind in total control of their various means of demise. In terms of tone, it’s one part The Twilight Zone’s “The Masks,” one part The Abominable Dr. Phibes and one part twisted torture devices straight out of Saw, as the guests now trapped in the mad doctor’s home are killed by various booby traps and death devices. Indeed, the similar, Vincent Price-starring Dr. Phibes series of the 1970s eventually reused one of the deaths–the “poison needle from the phone receiver into the brain”–in almost entirely the same way, more than 30 years later. The apple of vengeance didn’t fall far from the tree here. The whole thing ventures into old dark house film territory as the victims blunder their way through Savaard’s traps, but it imbues this style with a more modern, technologically savvy version of these dangers than audiences were used to seeing at the time.

Through it all, Karloff is really a delight, seeming to relish his starring role as the diabolical mastermind. The role plays perfectly to the actor’s dual ability to portray eloquent sophistication and grim fatalism, and he lends Shakespearean sympathy to Savaard, a man who had nothing but the purest of intentions in his original work, unfairly condemned by a society that distrusts and vilifies progress. Of course, he ends up becoming unrepentantly evil in his quest for vengeance, but he’s undeniably justified in his bloodlust all the same. The audience takes a certain sick pleasure in watching Karloff score some well-earned revenge, before a last-minute weakening of his resolve when his daughter becomes involved is thrown in to mollify the censors at Joseph Breen’s Production Code Administration. Still, The Man They Could Not Hang manages to leave some bodies in its wake, providing a mold that would be steadily replicated by Hollywood for the next six or seven years, until the horror genre’s next fallow period.

Ultimately, the film was the first (and best) in a what would become an entire series of technically unrelated but suspiciously similar flicks with Karloff playing various mad doctor characters, including The Man with Nine Lives, Before I Hang and The Devil Commands. The series closed with a little film entitled The Boogie Man Will Get You (1942), now suddenly a horror comedy in which the ever-game Karloff found himself satirizing the very roles he had spent much of the last decade playing. So it goes, in the horror genre–let it never be said that Boris Karloff was reluctant to turn his keen intellect and acerbic sense of humor upon himself. For the next three decades, his boundless energy and menace would continue to make him a beloved star of both stage and screen.

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.

ABCs of Horror 3: “M” Is for The Man They Could Not Hang (1939)