The Black Sleep (1956)

The Black Sleep (1956) is an American black-and-white horror film, scripted by John C. Higgins from a story by Gerald Drayson Adams developed for producers Aubrey Schenck and Howard W. Koch, who had a four-picture finance-for-distribution arrangement with United Artists. The film was re-released in 1962 as Dr. Cadman's Secret.

The film was directed by Reginald LeBorg and included in its starring cast Bela Lugosi in his last true film role. Also featured were Basil Rathbone, Lon Chaney, John Carradine, and Akim Tamiroff in a role originally written for Peter Lorre. In a "prominent" supporting role was Ed Wood regular Tor Johnson.

Synopsis

Set in England in 1872, the story concerned a prominent, knighted surgeon whose wife has fallen into a coma caused by a deep-seated brain tumor. Due to medicine's state of the art at the time, he does not know how to reach the tumor without risking brain damage or death to the woman he loves, so he undertakes to secretly experiment on the brains of living, but involuntary, human subjects who are under the influence of a powerful Indian anesthetic, Nind Andhera, which he calls the "Black Sleep". Once he has finished his experiment, surviving subjects are revived and placed, in seriously degenerated and mutilated states, in a hidden cellar in the gloomy, abandoned country abbey where he conducts his experiments.

Actors