Format: Internet video on Fire!
I am a horror fan, but I’m finding more and more that I’m shying away from things that are explicitly and gratuitously gory. I don’t mind gore when it makes sense in the narrative, but I don’t see the point of the fan service when it’s there just to be there. Because of this, there is a real comfort in horror films from the 1930s and ‘40s. The Man They Could Not Hang came out in the glorious film year of 1939, and it’s one of those films that is right in the wheelhouse of its star, Boris Karloff. There’s a menace here that works really well—remade today this would be a lot bloodier, but it’s a story that would work today.
Like many horror films of the time, The Man They Could Not Hang is rooted firmly in the idea of the progress of medicine and medical experimentation. Dr. Henryk Savaard (Karloff) has experimented with the idea of bringing the dead back to life. He’s gotten a young medical student name Bob Roberts (Stanley Brown) to be his test subject—he’ll be temporarily killed and kept alive with an artificial heart. The idea is that this would allow doctors to perform procedures impossible on living patients, and then allow those patients to be revived.
