Starring Rose Hobart, George Macready and Jim Bannon | Directed by Will Jason | Written by Edward Dein | Columbia

If your distress call is answered by a woman whose shoulder pads are broader than Lon Chaney’s, don’t answer the door.

Such a lesson is learned by Anne Windon (Jeanne Bates) in The Soul of a Monster, now available through Sony’s Columbia Screen Classics by Request on the company’s website. While her husband (George Macready) lies on his deathbed from a mysterious ailment, Anne’s call to God for salvation goes unanswered. Naturally, she turns to the Devil, who sends Lylian Gregg (Rose Hobart), an owly, pale stranger in black.

After being revived by the stranger, George goes back to work, but all is not well in this role-reversed Faustian bargain. Despite once being a prominent and beloved surgeon — made painfully obvious by the spinning newspapers during the film’s opening sequence — he is now behaving badly. He hates his dog, he’s being lured around by a strange voice and doesn’t seem to bleed when his colleague, fellow surgeon Roger Vance (Jim Bannon, who would have been played by Lon Chaney had this been an Inner Sanctum serial from Universal), accidentally cuts his with a pair of scissors.

Unlike the Val Newton films at RKO, the character’s psychological health is never called into question here. All parties involves realize that the vampish Lilyan — who, despite her ethereal disposition, lives in a rather middle-class apartment — is to blame for George’s erratic behaviour.

Under the control of Libyan, George sons turns on his friends. In one of the film’s only suspenseful scenes, he follows Vance along a darkened street armed with an ice pick and the requisite malicious intent, while the score, by the prolific Mischa Bakaleinikoff (20 Million Miles to Earth, The Giant Claw) builds to a haunting, ear-perking crescendo of strings similar to the adagio in Wojchich Kilar’s score for Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) — a definite highlight. Eventually it’s up to Anne to battle Lilyan for George’s soul.

In the world of classic horror, the 1940s belonged to Val Newton, who psychological thrillers such as Cat People (1942) and Isle of the Dead (1945) moved the genre forward, while Universal, the stalwart of the 1930s, carried its monster-driven formula into the World War II era. Squeezed between these two titans was Columbia Pictures, whose horror output, although minimal, falls narratively somewhere in the middle. In The Return of the Vampire (1943), for instance, director Lew Sanders borrowed heavily from Universals conventions by teaming Bela Lugosi, as a vampire, with a werewolf (albeit one of the saddest looking ones you’ll ever see), while The Should of a Monster explores the more internalized style of horror that Lewton made famous. Not surprisingly, the studio — then best known for releasing Three Stooges shorts and Frank Capra’s screwball comedies such as It Happened One Night (1934) — never really mastered the horror film, and The Soul of a Monster, which its slow pacing and heavy religious overtones, which worked to greater effect in Warner Bros. The Walking Dead, is no exception.

But what does make this film more than a footnote in ’40s horror is that its antagonist, although an emissary of the Big Guy down below, is a woman. Women playing principals in horror films was not new, but they almost always played victims. For example, Gloria Holden in Universal’s Dracula’s Daughter (1936) wants to be rid of the family curse, while Simone Simon’s Irene Reed in the aforementioned Cat People, depending on your viewpoint, is afflicted with a psychiatric disorder.

Here, Hobart’s icy performance as the dominant Lilyan is one for the books. Undoubtedly inspired by Joan Crawford (Hobart’s hairstyle mimics the one popularized by the actress in the early ’40s, with a slight devil-horn lock in for good measure) and the femme fatales appearing in contemporaneous film noire, she is devoid of emotion and her scenes are framed in a way that makes her look down upon the other characters, enhancing her matriarchal, controlling nature. (She was no stranger to horror, either, having appeared in Paramount’s Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde and The Mad Ghoul at Universal.)

Writer Edward Dein also penned Calling Dr. Death of Universal’s Medicare Inner Sanctum film series based on the radio serials. If The Soul of a Monster had been of that series of films, it may have stood out as one of its best, but ultimately, it’s not surprising that this simply plotted 61-minute film with an interesting look at genre gender roles has been mostly forgotten.

This article was originally published by Rue Morgue Magazine, November 2010, Issue #106.