The Undead (1957) on Netflix
Approved19571h 11mFantasyHorror
Quintus Ratcliff, back from seven years in Tibet, hypnotizes Diana Love into a past life. She becomes Helene, a woman accused of witchcraft and sentenced to die at dawn.
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- Netflix2.4/5
- IMDb4.8/102,917 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Trailer
Plot summary
Quintus Ratcliff returns from seven years in Tibet with a plan to send someone back into a past life through hypnosis. He hires Diana Love, a prostitute, for five hundred dollars and arranges a session at the American Institute of Psychical Research. His former professor, Ulbrecht Olinger, agrees to observe as Quintus places Diana in a trance meant to last forty-eight hours. Diana regresses to the Middle Ages as Helene, a woman chained in a dungeon and sentenced to die at dawn for witchcraft. That night is the witches' Sabbath, and by custom the town must put a suspected witch to death so the rest of the year will be safe. Helene can hear Diana's voice in her mind, and the voice urges her to break free with the chains on her wrists.
Cast
- Val Dufouras Quintus Ratcliff
- Aaron Saxonas Gobbo, the Jailer
- Don Garrettas The Knight
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Undead (1957)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Screenwriter Charles Griffith wrote The Undead, first titled The Trance of Diana Love, in iambic pentameter, and had to rewrite it into plain English after Roger Corman handed the script around and nobody understood the dialogue.
- Mel Welles recalled that the cast almost died of asphyxiation from the creosote fog created inside the supermarket where the film was shot, and Richard Devon said a bee-smoker was used to produce the dreadful-smelling fog.
- Richard Devon said Roger Corman went "maniacal" and screamed his head off when one of Devon's speeches was accidentally left out of the script, because anything costing a penny over his minuscule budget turned him into a monster.
- Special effects artist Paul Blaisdell was drafted to play the corpse in the coffin in the graveyard scene, and said it was difficult to keep his eyes open and staring while little particles of the coffin lid fell into them.
- The bats that the imp and the witch continually change into were left over from another Corman movie, It Conquered the World.
