Early Franco gothic horror

The Awful Dr. Orloff (AKA Screams in the Night, AKA The Demon Doctor ~ 1962)

Spanish-French horror film written and directed by Jess Franco, starring Howard Vernon, Conrado San Martín, and Diana Lorys. In the early 1900s a string of beautiful women are abducted from Paris nightclubs. As police investigate they become suspicious of one Dr Orloff, a former police surgeon. It transpires that Orloff has a daughter who was hideously disfigured in a fire, and he is abducting women in order to use their skin from various bodyparts to repair his daughter's appearance.

Regular Franco collaborator Vernon plays Dr Orloff, San Martín plays Police Inspector Tanner, and Lorys plays Tanner's fiancee, Wanda - a beautiful ballet dancer, who decides to do some amateur sleuthing to help her husband-to-be, whilst offering herself as bait. The three stars are very good - but the biggest impression is made by Ricardo Valle as Morpho, Orloff's lumbering, bug-eyed, blind, mute assistant (where the heck do these mad doctors find them?)

Filmed in black and white it has a real gothic feel; the story goes that Franco showed potential backers a copy of Hammer's The Brides of Dracula, saying he could make a similar film "in the same vein, but with a different style". Some influence shows; although this isn't a vampire pic, Morpho strides around in a full-length cape, biting women on the neck and carrying them off, whilst Diana Lorys has a real look of BoD's Yvonne Monlaur. The plot is also very like that of Eyes Without a Face, made just two years earlier (the same year as The Brides of Dracula). Franco produced two versions of this; one with some shots of female (topless) nudity (the common version today), and one without, for places with stricter censorship.

As Jess Franco's first horror film (also often cited as the earliest Spanish horror film), and proof that he could actually be a good storyteller when he wanted to, this is well-worth a look. 7/10