The Black Sleep (1956 film)

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Basil Rathbone, Patricia Blake, Herbert Rudley react to Lon Chaney Jr. (o.s.) in The Black Sleep

The Black Sleep (1956), is an American black-and-white science fiction film, scripted by John C. Higgins from a story by Gerald Drayson Adams developed for producers Aubrey Schenck and Howard W. Koch, who had a four-picture finance-for-distribution arrangement with United Artists. The film was re-released in 1962 as Dr. Cadman's Secret.

The film was directed by Reginald LeBorg and included in its starring cast Bela Lugosi in his last true film role. Also starred were Basil Rathbone, Lon Chaney, John Carradine, and Akim Tamiroff in a role original written for Peter Lorre. In a "prominent" supporting role was Ed Wood regular Tor Johnson.

Set in early 19th-century England, the story concerned a prominent, knighted surgeon whose wife has fallen into a coma caused by a deep-seated brain tumor. Due to medicine's state of the art at the time, he does not know how to reach the tumor without risking brain damage or death to the woman he loves, so he undertakes to secretly experiment on the brains of living, but involuntary, human subjects who are under the influence of a powerful Indian anesthetic which he calls the "black sleep". Once he has finished his experiment, surviving subjects are revived and placed, in seriously degenerated and mutilated states, in a hidden cellar in the gloomy, abandoned country abbey where he conducts his experiments.

Produced during 1955, the film went into theaters in the early summer of 1956, just ahead of the TV syndication by Universal Pictures of its two decades of "monster movies" through Screen Gems, under the package title of Shock Theater. It may or may not be coincidental that writer Higgins, director LeBorg, and stars Rathbone, Chaney, Carradine and Lugosi had all been significantly associated with Universal "horror films" or related b-films. It certainly recalls two "houseful of monster" films of Universal in the mid-40s, House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula, only relying on a completely new cadre of human monsters.

United Artists sent The Black Sleep out as the A-film as a double feature with The Creeping Unknown. In the days before critics paid attention to films in the horror or science-fiction genres, film fandom and Famous Monsters of Filmland did not exist, and "making of" books and news coverage were unheard of, the youthful audience had two stimulating and promising coming-soon titles to set off their imaginations in The Black Sleep and The Creeping Unknown.