| The Walking Dead | |
|---|---|
theatrical poster |
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| Directed by | Michael Curtiz |
| Produced by | Louis F. Edelman |
| Written by | Robert Adams Lillie Hayward Peter Milne Joseph Fields Ewart Adamson |
| Starring | Boris Karloff Edmund Gwenn Marguerite Churchill |
| Music by | Bernhard Kaun |
| Cinematography | Hal Mohr |
| Editing by | Thomas Pratt |
| Distributed by | Warner Bros. Pictures |
| Release date(s) | March 1, 1936 (NYC) March 14 (US wide) |
| Running time | 66 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $217,000 (est.) |
The Walking Dead is a 1936 horror film starring Boris Karloff as a wrongly executed man who is restored to life by a scientist (Edmund Gwenn). The film was directed by Michael Curtiz, and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures.
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John Elman (Boris Karloff) has been framed for murder by a gang of racketeers. He is unfairly tried and despite the fact that his innocence has been proven, he is sent to the electric chair and executed. But Dr. Evan Beaumont (Edmund Gwenn) retrieves his dead body and revives it, as part of his experiments to reanimate a dead body.
Dr. Beaumont's use of a mechanical heart to revive the patient foreshadows modern medicine's mechanical heart to keep patients alive during surgery. Interestingly, although John Elman has no direct knowledge of anyone wishing to frame him for the murder before he is executed, he seems to have an innate sense of knowing those who are responsible after he is revived. Elman takes no direct action against his framers, and in the end it is their own guilt that causes their deaths.
This was the first of a multi-film contract between Karloff and Warner Bros., and according to film historian Greg Mank's audio commentary for the DVD release, the original script was drastically different from what was eventually produced. Karloff's innocent, cruelly victimized character of John Ellman was initially meant to be dramatically transforemed into a huge, hairy, mindless killing machine in the wake of his execution by electric chair. This vengeance-crazed creature was then supposed to wander around the city by cover of nightfall, scale the outsides of towering highrise buildings, corner its intended victims, and physically hoisted them off their feet to break their backs in a murderous rage. Karloff scoffed at the level of senseless violence, and lobbied strongly to have the Ellman character presented as more of a tragically sympathitic man caught up in extraordinary circumstances. The new direction relied heavily upon the suggestion of divine intervention whenever one of Ellman's sinister foes met their ironically untimely ends.