Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!
I do love horror movies, and while there are plenty of modern horror movies that I enjoy a great deal, there’s a part of me that is drawn to the classics, the pre-gore films that have that Gothic flair to them. Despite the name, Corridors of Blood is exactly this sort of film. It’s arguably terribly misnamed, because there’s not a great deal of blood here, and perhaps not even that many corridors. The truth is, though, that if it were actually named for what the film is about, a film called The History of Anesthesia isn’t going to put a lot of butts in the seats.
It really is what the film is about, though. Dr. Thomas Bolton (Boris Karloff) works in a hospital in the 1840s in London. Dr. Bolton is frustrated, not because he lacks skill. In fact, he is noted as being a very good and successful surgeon because of his speed. No, what frustrates him is that the common expression of the time suggests that the surgeon’s knife and pain in the patient are inseparable. His goal is to find a way to prevent pain in the patient during surgery—too many of his patients lose their minds or die from shock thanks to the pain. He begins experimenting with ways to handle thing, mildly assisted by his son Jonathan (Francis Matthews) and his niece Susan (Betta St. John).
