Made in the waning days of both World War 2 and the first great Hollywood horror movie wave, The Soul of a Monster is a curious by-product of both. It was a collaboration between former film composer turned director Will Jason, and Edward Dein, who had co-scripted Jacques Torneur and Val Lewton’s brilliant The Leopard Man (1943), and would go on to make a clutch of odd but interesting films himself, like Shack Out On 101 (1955) and Curse of the Undead (1958).
The Soul of a Monster is often described as operating strongly under the influence of Lewton’s famous series of horror movies, and that’s not to be denied, although it also belongs to a longer tradition of Faustian parable-like tales stretching back to the likes of D.W. Griffiths’ The Sorrows of Satan (1922), whilst also channelling aspects of magic-realist oddities like Ben Hecht’s films as director like, or Albert Lewin’s take on The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1944).
At the outset a flurry of newspaper headlines report on the imminent death of beloved humanitarian surgeon Dr George Winson (George Macready), who, after a career of saving people, is himself incurably sick. His distraught wife Ann (Jeanne Bates) rounds on his surgeon partner Dr Roger Vance (Jim Bannon) and his metaphysically inclined friend Fred Stevens (Erik Rolf) for their inability to help in the face of death, and instead begs any force from beyond that might be able to help. A cosmic fever-dream sets in, with Winson writhing in his bed as satanic fires and heavenly clouds whirl, and a mysterious woman comes to the Winson apartment. Calling herself Lilyan Gregg (Rose Hobart), she agrees to meet Ann’s request to save her husband through an act of faith healing, restoring George to life.
As the weeks pass and George returns to full health, Ann soon begins to realise he’s not the same person she loved, as he now has a dark and sadistic streak, and a sour sense of humour, matched to a total loss of interest in his former profession. Stevens is shocked when he realises Winson killed his own dog in a fate of inchoate rage. Winson comes to prefer Lilyan’s company, giving into her prompts to live a life of ego gratification and base indulgence, to further her plan to irrevocably claim his soul for the dark powers. Winson hovers in his netherworld, almost giving into vicious and violent impulses repeatedly, becoming suspicious of his friends as they try to bring him to his senses.
Part of The Soul of a Monster’s intriguing and original aura is its conceptualisation of a basic morality play through a kind of ritzy Manhattan bohemian sensibility, taking up that idea from The Seventh Victim (1943). Hobart’s Lilyan is a modernist dowager manifestation of the infernal beyond, with pompadour curled up in faintly devilish licks, pushing George towards self-damnation not with sublime assurance but a neurotic need for validation as she represents the war between idealism and embrace of the nihilistic. Her opponent, nominated as down-market, homiletic Van Helsing, is Stevens, who begins to probe the enigmatic bond between Lilyan and George.
George obeys her siren-like call that echoes through the city, even at one point distracting him so acutely he doesn’t notice when Vance accidentally slices his arm open with a pair of surgical scissors without drawing any blood. Scared by his friends’ attempt to break her hold over him, Lilyan begins pushing George to kill them.
Jason’s direction successfully creates a rarefied mood, a sequestered sense of reality where mid-‘40s New York seems like an appropriate place to stage a Manichaean battle for the essence of humanity. Dein’s dialogue apes the same literary, anti-realistic style Lewton favoured, but pushes further into a zone that seems at once otherworldly and more than a shade pretentious.
Jason stages a handful of striking sequences, starting with the early shots of Hobart’s Lilyan when she first marches out of the New York night under the full moon glow, appearing in the headlights of a heavily breaking car, apparently struck down but seen walking away unperturbed, and skirting a snapped power line that flashes and sizzles with infernal brilliance behind her, shot in nausea-inducing canted angles. Jason reveals his musical background as he stages a peculiarly intense scene during a piano recital, studying the interplay of feelings and transfer of allegiances and the sensation of cosmic forces gathering without words as thunder weaves in with the pounding piano to mesmerise Winson as prelude to Lilyan’s mystical call.
Later he offers a scene in which Steven conducts a gang of street urchins he’s formed into a choir in a performance of “Ave Maria,” sparing time to simply absorb the performance. The most definitely Lewton-esque sequence sees George, encouraged to chase down by Lilyan with a scalpel in hand, follows him through a near-deserted Manhattan midnight, with Jason staging false “bus” scares and relishing the use of the eerie, cavernous city lanes, shadows and mechanisms turning the scenery animate, encountering timorous cops and newsboys in pools of light, islets of humanity in the midst of omnipresent darkness.
Jason also evinces flashes of curious mood-building in the interpersonal scenes, often catching his characters conversing in lonely Edward Hopper-esque greasy spoons, the black night beyond the glass like sucking voids they’re trying to avoid a few moments longer. He also spares a moment for when Stevens enjoys a flower’s perfection, leaping in for a close shot that turns the flower into his own, perfect universe.
Hobart had briefly been a star in the early sound era, and her beauty famously fired Joseph Cornell’s fetishist-experimental remix of her vehicle East of Borneo (1931) as. Here, the dramatic, arcing planes of her jawline sweeping down from her calculated hairstyle seem to personify art-deco chic, and she clearly fascinates Jason, pulling him in for epic close-ups where her visage becomes a mask-like relic, or else immersing her in total silhouette.
Although most often glimpsed smoking and lounging, she radiates the quality of a cobra coiling up to strike. Something about her performance and part reminded me oddly of Joan Crawford in Humoresque (1946), another secretly anxious but seemingly imperious grande dame hovering high above Manhattan’s shoals enticing the prodigious into nets of sinful self-realisation. Macready, in one of his relatively few roles as protagonist, has a similarly charged presence, with his fanatical eyes, later to be so well-exploited by the likes of Stanley Kubrick, fitting the part of a man switching helplessly between the humane and the monstrous.
Both are obviously well out of their ideal environs, as they’re surrounded by routine contract players. The obsession with mortality, subsistence of the soul and body, and questions of moral exigency apparent in The Soul of a Monster fits in with a run of such film released during the war, ranging from Lewton’s films to breezy comedies and fantasies like Here Comes Mr Jordan (1943) and A Matter of Life and Death (1945). Winson’s reputation as a heroic, selfless social and medical swashbuckler is subverted by his wife’s desperate refusal to lose him, leaving him trapped without a soul and at the mercy of the not-so-tender mercies of Lilyan, an idea that mimics the quandary of home front concerns of war time, counselling acceptance of the sacrifices that must be made for victory over evil.
The quizzical thing about The Soul of a Monster is that, in spite of all these eye-catching moments and qualities, I came to the end of it still not sure whether it’s a good film or not, and instead I’m forced to take refuge in that evasive word “interesting.” Considering its often derisory reputation, I’d call it under-regarded, but it’s also clearly not a class with the films it reminded me of. There’s something undigested about Dein’s script, as if he had only watched Lewton’s film rather than had actually been involved in making one, and misunderstood them on vital levels.
Jason’s direction is the real draw here, but he also manages to meander in quiet talk scenes. The result becomes increasingly awkward as it unfolds, as its religiose message gets heavy-handed, spurning the psychological approach of Lewton and his Christian-humanist lilt in favour of more overt preaching. Another problem is that although the film constantly teases the possibility of menace and perversity, nothing eventuates, and instead we’re stuck with half-hearted verbal stoushes between Hobart and Rolf’s hero, a man so boring he could make steel go floppy.
The fight for Winson’s soul, which drives the plot, precludes him really doing anything properly evil. Eventually the narrative stumbles, much like its bullet-riddled antihero, towards a resolution, with Winson shoving his dark lady out the window and reawakening back on his death bed, suggesting it might have all been a dream, a trick that betrays another of the film’s likenesses, to proto-film noir like The Woman in the Window (1944). The Soul of a Monster is ultimately a contradiction, a bit of a drag studded with great moments, enough to make it one of those weird and wayward excursions that make the hunt for such flotsam worthwhile. Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Exorcist(1973) might be spiritual descendants; The Simpsons episode “Bart Sells His Soul” a waggish recapitulation.
