While Robert Louis Stevenson is best known for Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, his lesser-known work inspired lesser-known films, like The Body Snatcher. Celebrating its venerable 80th birthday today, The Body Snatcher was the seventh in a series of nine horror movies released by RKO Pictures and produced by Val Lewton. Known for their moody, atmospheric tone, suggestive terrors — and, ironically, for inventing the jump scare — Lewton’s horror output included seminal films like Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), The Seventh Victim (1943), and, in 1945, The Body Snatcher, directed by Robert Wise.
Based on an 1884 Stevenson short story, The Body Snatcher starred Boris Karloff as John Gray, a depraved carriage driver who also works as a grave robber for a well-known Edinburgh doctor named Wolfe MacFarlane (Henry Daniell). The film was also loosely inspired by the notorious real-life Burke and Hare killings, in which two Edinburgh men circa 1828 took to murdering people to procure bodies for a Dr. Robert Knox to use in anatomical studies.
Also featured in the cast was Bela Lugosi. Although he and Karloff, best known respectively for playing Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster, were Universal’s top horror stars in the 1930s, Karloff’s career continued to thrive while Lugosi was penned in by typecasting and wracked by addiction and illness. While Lugosi’s role in The Body Snatcher is relatively small — he plays a janitor at MacFarlane’s medical school who tries to blackmail Gray — his interaction with Karloff marked the eighth and final time these genre giants appeared together.
At one point, the two actors had equal stature. Karloff was a struggling British bit player and character actor who’d appeared in 81 films before landing the role of the creature in Frankenstein (1931), while the Hungarian-born Lugosi had similarly worked on stage and screen with little notice before portraying Dracula on Broadway, then reprising the part for the 1931 film (Lugosi actually turned down the Frankenstein role, clearing the path for Karloff to get it). Both became instant stars with performances that set the standard for all future interpretations of their characters.
Hollywood legend says the two terror titans disliked each other, a myth largely debunked by their families. Yet in the six major horror and sci-fi films they did together, Karloff was always billed above Lugosi, even when Lugosi played the main character in The Raven. While the latter was frustrated with his career, and may well have envied Karloff’s ability to transcend his breakout role, the relationship between the two actors was reportedly cordial and professional, if not close.
No matter how large their respective roles, Karloff and Lugosi brought electricity to their shared horror filmography. The first of these collaborations was 1934’s The Black Cat, a genuinely eerie, Expressionistic tale of an obsessed doctor (Lugosi) out for revenge against the ghoulish cult leader (Karloff) who stole his wife and daughter. The two actors are sensational in their increasingly horrifying game of cat-and-mouse, with Lugosi in a rare sympathetic role, while the climax, in which Lugosi skins Karloff alive, is unforgettable.
Their other genre films together — The Raven (1935), The Invisible Ray (1936), and Black Friday (1940) — vary in quality (they never even share a scene in Black Friday), although the grisly Raven is held in high esteem. As for The Body Snatcher, it’s frequently ranked in the top tier of the Lewton horror oeuvre, and deservedly so. It’s a grim Gothic yarn with some notably unsettling scenes, underlying social commentary on class and medical ethics, and a knockout performance by Karloff as the title ghoul.
Karloff’s career continued, with great success, until his 1969 demise, as he starred in a wide range of films, appeared on Broadway, hosted his own horror anthology series called Thriller, and narrated the classic holiday special Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Lugosi, meanwhile, faded into poverty and obscurity, appearing in a string of famously inept, no-budget movies made by Ed Wood before passing away in 1956. The Body Snatcher marked the last time the world saw Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi together onscreen before their lives took very different trajectories, but in the end, both actors received cultural immortality as two of horror cinema’s greatest icons.
