The Boogie Man Will Get You

The Boogie Man Will Get You (1942)

IT'S A CHILLER-DILLER OF A MAYHEM-AND-MERRIMENT SHOW!

A young divorcee tries to convert a historic house into a hotel despite its oddball inhabitants and dead bodies in the cellar.

Date of release
1942-10-22
TMDB
6.2 / 10 (31)
Runtime
1h 7m
Genres
Comedy, Horror
Director
Lew Landers

Casting

Interesting facts

The Boogie Man Will Get You is a 1942 American comedy horror film directed by Lew Landers and starring Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre. It was the final film Karloff made under his contract with Columbia Pictures, and it was filmed in the wake of his success in the 1941 Broadway production Arsenic and Old Lace. As he had done several times previously, Karloff played the part of a "mad scientist", Professor Billings, who is using the basement of his inn to conduct experiments using electricity to create a race of superhumans. The inn is bought by a new owner, who is initially unaware of the work Billings is conducting.

Production

The Boogie Man Will Get You was the final film that Boris Karloff made under his contract with Columbia, and the studio were hoping to build on the success of the Broadway play Arsenic and Old Lace, which Karloff was appearing in at the time. Production of the film took place while the play was on hiatus in summer 1942.

The screenplay was written by Edwin Blum in four weeks, based on a story by Hal Fimberg and Robert B. Hunt, adapted by Paul Gangelin. Although the film is a comedy-horror, Blum described the studio's aims as creating a "goose pimple" film; Blum explained that he "was and still [is] incapable of writing a straight horror film". Before filming began, Jack Fier had been named as the producer, but Colbert Clark took over from him.

The set for the laboratory and its exotic scientific equipment initially was to include a visible woman, a clear live-sized plastic figure "with lights denoting various nerve-centers", but this was dropped after the Production Code Administration, which enforced the "no nudity in fact or in silhouette" prohibition of the Motion Picture Production Code, raised questions regarding this transparent unclothed model.

Columbia planned a publicity campaign to promote the film, polling film critics to compile a list of the ten best on-screen villains. The studio assumed that Karloff and Lorre would come high on the list, but the top three were all Disney characters: the witch from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the wolf from Three Little Pigs, and the cat from Pinocchio. The studio consequently abandoned this publicity idea.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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