This could be a repeat entry in this series for me, but this is also one of my favorite films and easily my favorite Boris Karloff performance.

The Body Snatcher (Not to be confuse with iteration of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.) is a 1945 film helmed by then novice director Robert Wise as part of Val Lewton’s cycle of psychological horror films, which included Cat People, for RKO. Based upon the short story by Robert Lewis Stevenson this movie is about doctors, students, and grave robbers. Rather than a retelling of the Burke and Hare affair, though that one has been put to film a number of times including in a flawed but lively comedy staring Andy Serkis and Simon Peg, this story deals with fiction characters involved in the sordid business of robbing graves and murdering people to supply medical schools with dissection specimens.

A young student, without the means to continue his education, becomes the assistant to a famous doctor, McFarland, and quickly finds himself caught in the middle of McFarland’s antagonistic with the cabman and resurrectionist John Gray, played with wonderful oily charm by Karloff. The young man, a person of good morals, find himself pulled deeper and deeper into the crimes of the school as he desperately tries to get the doctor to save the life of a paralyzed little girl. When grave-robbing turns to murder the stakes are raised and the confrontation long delayed between the doctor and cabman explodes.

This is a wonderful little film. I remember getting this on laserdisc when I still watched movies on that pre-DVD format. I found it in a used shop for something like $8 and I had never seen it. Figuring it wasn’t too much of a risk I bought the disc and that weekend discovered this classic of horror cinema. This is not horror that beats out from supernatural monstrosities , but rather from the pride and need to dominate in the human condition. Not all of the Val Lewton psychological horrors of this cycle are to my tastes, but this one and Cat People certain are worth the scant time they take to view. This film is highly recommended.