6 - Voices and Vaults: Pillow of Death

Summary

During World War II, Universal Pictures licensed the name “Inner Sanctum Mystery” for a series of low-budget horror films. These were designed to borrow from the popularity of the eponymous radio show that aired from 1941–1952, which also had print and later television incarnations. The radio show was noted for its tongue-in-cheek format, with a succession of pun-happy hosts. Somewhat more serious in tone were the six low-budget Inner Sanctum films: Calling Dr. Death (1943), Weird Woman (1944), Dead Man’s Eyes (1944), The Frozen Ghost (1945), Strange Confession (1945), and Pillow of Death (1945). Only the last was directed by Wallace Fox, whose horror credits in previous years included The Corpse Vanishes (1942) and Bowery at Midnight (1942) for Monogram.

The Inner Sanctum series mixes supernatural and crime/mystery elements. Dealing with topics like hypnotism (Calling Dr. Death, The Frozen Ghost), voodoo (Weird Woman), experimental surgery (Dead Man’s Eyes) and spiritualism (Pillow of Death), they are largely what Tzvetan Todorov calls “fantastic- uncanny” narratives. In such tales, the audience is obliged to hesitate between supernatural and naturalistic explanations, only for the naturalistic one to ultimately be affirmed narratively (in contrast to “fantastic-marvelous” narratives that resolve with the supernatural confirmed as “real” in the textual world and “pure fantastic” ones that never supply clear answers). Testing the generic lines between film noir, the murder mystery, the paranoid women’s film, and horror, the Inner Sanctum style is reflective of the uncertain boundaries between these categories in the early 1940s.

All of the Inner Sanctum series starred Lon Chaney Jr., the world’s first second-generation horror star. Chaney vaulted to genre fame with Universal’s The Wolf Man (1940) after a decade as a bit player. It has been complained, perhaps justly, that the series placed its “most exploitable asset … at a disadvantage by putting [Chaney] in roles unsuited to his working class persona”; doctors, scientists, and lawyers, much less artists, were hardly the most natural fit with Chaney’s acting style. At best, something interesting comes from that disjuncture. Mark Jancovich notes that Chaney’s characters are most often “tragic figures, men who were victims of forces beyond their control,” and in the Inner Sanctum films those forces were often explicitly psychological.