Corridors of Blood (1958)
Directed by Robert Day

Film Review

The title Corridors of Blood suggests something quite different to what the film actually offers - not a gory slasher romp set in a modern office block but a fairly grown-up period drama whose horror content owes far more to historical fact than the morbid imagination of a writer.  Encouraged by the massive success of Grip of the Strangler (1958), Amalgamated Productions recruited Robert Day to direct Boris Karloff in a similar kind of period horror-melodrama, but one that does away with the supernatural elements and derives its chills from the nightmarish reality of surgery in early Victorian England, a time when operations were performed with the patient conscious and able to see the horrors being performed on his or her person by knife-wielding surgeons.

The subject matter of Corridors of Blood alone is enough to make it one of the most gruesome films to be made in Britain in the 1950s, but the film struggled to find an audience and its release in America was delayed by five years owing to a restructuring at MGM.  Today, the film's main attraction is that it brings together two of cinema's greatest horror icons, Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee - the metaphorical passing of the baton is accomplished by Karloff throwing a bottle of sulphuric acid into Lee's face.  Even though the two actors only appear together in a few scenes, there's an enjoyable frisson to be had in seeing them in the same shot.  Just before he found fame as Dracula in Hammer's series of Gothic horrors, Lee has plenty of fun with an even more monstrous role, looking as sinister as Hell as a party to a Burke and Hare style enterprise.  As in his previous film for Amalgamated, Karloff plays a Jekyll and Hyde character, this time one whose demonic transformation is more moral than physical, the result of a deadly concoction of opium and well-meaning obsession.

Whilst Corridors of Blood boasts some strong performances and some surprisingly good production values, its pace is slack and a feeling of ennui sets in around the mid-point.  Day's leaden direction is partly to blame, but the main culprit is Jean Scott Rogers's screenplay which lacks tension and enough plot to sustain the feature-length narrative, although it is historically accurate for the most part (even if the characters are entirely fictional). It may not be as compelling as the similarly styled and equally mis-titled The Flesh and the Fiends (1960), but Corridors of Blood still has more going for it than most of Karloff's films of this era, and it never hurts to be reminded just how bad things were in the good old days before anaesthesia.

Film Synopsis

London, 1840.  'Pain and the knife are inseparable' is the prevailing view in the medical profession, but one man who disputes this is Dr Thomas Bolton, a philanthropic surgeon who devotes his spare time to developing a safe anaesthetic that will make surgery completely painless.  Dr Bolton is confident he has achieved his aim but ridicule is heaped on him by his peers when his public demonstration fails and a patient regains consciousness in the course of having his arm amputated.  Disgraced and dismissed from his position, Bolton continues his research in secret, with chemicals stolen for him by a gang of murderous criminals.  In return, the latter coerce Bolton into signing bogus death certificates for their victims, whose bodies they sell for medical research.  Unwittingly, Bolton becomes addicted to the anaesthetic gases he is experimenting with and in time he begins to lose his mind...