The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957)

There is one bit in this little programmer that scared the hell out of me when I was eight years old. The picture opens and closes with a close-up of actor Arthur Shields in werewolf makeup. He turns to the camera and says . . . Well, it won’t make any sense unless you know what he’s responding to, so I’ll save the punch line for later.

1950s B movie goddess Gloria Talbott stars in the title role. She’s Janet Smith, returning on her 21^st birthday to the home she left long ago. Accompanying her is fiancé George Hastings (John Agar); greeting her is her guardian and old family friend Dr. Lomas (Shields), who has for her some good news and some bad news. The good news is that Janet is an heiress; the bad news is something she never knew about her father—that he was the infamous Dr. Jekyll. Fearing that she may have inherited the gene that made him turn into a monster, she now refuses to marry George.

Complicating matters even more is the fact that the villagers, led by handyman Jacob (John Dierkes), want to kill her to prevent any more of those Jekylly murders. And, of course, the killings do recommence.

I guess we’re not supposed to know that Lomas is the guilty party—in true weird menace form, he wants to claim the money and property—but his appearance in werewolf drag at the beginning pretty much gives the game away.

The true villain attacks Janet, but to maintain the picture’s last secret I will not reveal whether or not she is rescued. So there.

With the demise of the monster we are informed, quite seriously, that nevermore will a creature so vile and deadly roam the countryside—and at this point we get that close-up of Shields as the werewolf turning to look us directly in the eye and saying, “Are you sure?”

Director Edgar G. Ulmer’s daughter thinks that Shields and her dad tossed the bit in as a joke, but for some reason I cannot explain it shot down my spine like a bolt of electricity hitting a wet golfer. I never carried the fear that monster movies engendered back home from the theater, but that night visions of a wolfman laughing at me because he and I knew he was real, and no one else believed it, kept me awake and tossing. My step-dad said that was it, no more horror movies for me—an admonition that was forgotten by the time the next one hit town. To this day, the question “Are you sure?” makes me nervous and sets me to looking for a gun with a silver bullet, or a mallet and stake.

Working from a script by Jack Pollexfen, Ulmer does his usual wondrous job of fashioning a respectable house out of moldy crumbs of gingerbread. There’s no way he could hide the non-budget entirely—every exterior shot of the house exposes an obvious miniature. Fog is used as much to hide cheapness as it is to create atmosphere. We see from these exteriors that the house is isolated—it’s a low rent Baskerville Hall—but during one interior scene, Hastings and Lomas are seated at a lamp table in front of a window, and through the curtains outside automobile traffic can clearly be seen zipping past.

I doubt that even an eight-year old, seeing the movie for the first time today, would be frightened by it. It’s purely a nostalgic pleasure with little to recommend it despite Ulmer’s direction and good efforts from the cast. It is, though, a good example of the kind of picture kids ate up during the late 1950s, and then chuckled over when it landed on late night TV a few years later.

Am I sure?

Hell. I just scared myself.