Doctor Blood's Coffin (1961) on Netflix
Dr. Peter Blood returns to his Cornish hometown and sets up a laboratory in a disused tin mine. He plans to restore life with hearts taken from people he considers unworthy.
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- IMDb5.0/101,278 votes
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Trailer
Plot summary
In the Cornish town of Porthcarron, doctors' surgeries are being burgled and people are vanishing. The stolen medical supplies have furnished a laboratory in a disused tin mine, and the missing have been drugged and brought there. Peter Blood comes home from Vienna, where he held a biochemistry research grant. Porthcarron is his birthplace, and his father Robert serves as the village doctor, with the young widowed nurse Linda Parker assisting him. Sergeant Cook is investigating the crimes. When another man goes missing, George Beale, Peter offers to join the search of the mines, wanting to keep Cook away from the laboratory. Peter believes that hearts taken from people he judges undeserving can restore life to bodies he thinks deserve it.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Doctor Blood's Coffin (1961)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Doctor Blood's Coffin is one of the first two zombie films ever shot in color, the other being the obscure 1961 American film The Dead One, and it was an early portrayal of zombies as homicidal, rotting cadavers.
- Doctor Blood's Coffin was shot in only 10 days on a budget of £25,000, out of which director Sidney J. Furie's salary came to £3,500.
- Nathan Juran wrote the screenplay under the pseudonym 'Jerry Juran' as Face of Evil and sold it to Sidney J. Furie, who had James Kelly and Peter Martin rewrite it because the original story was set in an American gold-mining town out west.
- The British Board of Film Censors gave Doctor Blood's Coffin an X-certificate restricting it to viewers over 16, and only after cuts had been made to 'one or more versions' of the work, though no details of those cuts survive.
- Hazel Court said the tin-mine interiors were not shot on a studio sound stage but inside 'the real thing' - a 'very wet' cave in Cornwall - though one source claims they were filmed on a sound stage.
- It was one of the last movies shot at Walton Studios in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, and its Cornish locations included Zennor, standing in for the fictional village of Porthcarron, and the Carn Galver tin mine near St Just.
