A maniac is killing people, and attaching news clipping to their bodies. Those news clipping must be an important plot point… Nope. Never mind. Anyway, the Maniac is of little interest to Professor Arthur Hornsby (George Meeker), who has discovered a secret formula which allows a person to survive in suspended animation. At his lab inside the Rinehart mansion, he prepares for his grand experiment: To be buried alive. Richard Rinhart (Tully Marsh) is supportive, but worried, particularly about Arthur keeping the formula to himself. His daughter, Mary Rinehart (Sally Blane), is engaged to Arthur, but is being pursued by extremely pushy and obnoxious reporter Tom Hartley (Wallace Ford), who is the hero for some reason. The household servants include Degar (Bela Lugosi), who is apparently some sort of South-Asian…maybe, and Seka (Mary Frey). who is maybe a gypsy, or an Indian… It’s hard to say. She can go into trances and see the future, which is very upsetting to Degar for no reason that’s ever explained. Degar is also constantly acting mysteriously, I suppose because that’s what South-Asian Hungarians do. The Maniac drops by while Richard is sneaking around in the lab, and kills him. Unfortunately, the Maniac doesn’t kill either the somewhat annoying police, or the too annoying to live, and yet he does, reporter. Enter John Rinehart (Bryant Washburn), Richard’s greedy slimeball of a brother, and his bigoted wife, Sarah (Gertrude Michael). And there’s also a Black stereotype chauffer named Martin, who is only around to act cowardly. All of these folks stay in, or hang around, the old house, when four scientists show up to observe Arthur’s experiment.
At the end of the film, the Maniac addresses the audience, telling them not to reveal the identity of the killer. Yeah… I don’t think anyone was going to bother. Granted, the actual mystery isn’t bad, but there’s less time spent with the mystery than with the cops acting like idiots and Tom doing the fast-talking, pushy reporter routine. While the rest of the cast, minus the chauffer, are in a horror mystery, they are in a comedy. And that’s where I get confused. Clearly they are intended to be funny, but they’ve never been given jokes. The police/reporter dialog is constructed from the leftovers of a weak comedy, after you’ve yanked the jokes. They seem to be setting up something…and then…nothing. It’s a cheap movie in every way, so expecting jokes was expecting too much.
The only reason to watch is Lugosi, who is charismatic, though his character seems to be randomly designed. Why does he violently want to stop the séance? Who knows. Lugosi was given top billing, but he’s not the star. It’s one of several butler roles for which he was never suited. His name was put high on the poster to sell a few tickets, although if they considered him a draw, why not make him the lead? I can’t believe this script took more than an afternoon to write, so just write a new one.
Like for all Old Dark House films, the house is one of the characters, and in this one it isn’t very interesting. Maybe some rain would have helped. It’s got a secret passageway and tunnels, but as those don’t show up till the last 5 minutes, we’re left with a few reasonably ornate sets, shot from a limited number of angles. It isn’t interesting enough to make up for any of the film’s myriad flaws.
There’s no harm in watching Night of Terror, but there’s not much reason to either. It wasn’t available anywhere for 60+ years, so you can feel like you’re uncovering some lost treasure chest filled with wooden nickels. I give it a weak thumbs down. There are better Old Dark House mysteries, better mad doctor movies, and better Lugosi films.
Lugosi’s other horror films of the 1930s are Dracula (1931), Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), White Zombie (1932), Island of Lost Souls (1932), The Black Cat (1934), Mark of the Vampire (1935), The Raven (1935), Phantom Ship (1935), The Invisible Ray (1936), The Gorilla (1939), The Dark Eyes of London (1939), Son of Frankenstein (1939).