General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Walking Dead (1936 film)

Released in 1936 by Warner Bros., the American horror film The Walking Dead was helmed by Michael Curtiz and features Boris Karloff in the role of John Elman, an innocent man put to death who is brought back to life by a scientist portrayed by Edmund Gwenn.¹ The supporting cast includes Ricardo Cortez, Marguerite Churchill, and Barton MacLane.¹ It mixes the gangster picture, for which Warner Bros. was known, with supernatural horror, and it may be the first film to involve the use of an artificial heart.²

Key fact	Detail
Release	14 March 1936 (United States); copyright registered 29 February 1936, LP6176³
Director	Michael Curtiz, between Captain Blood (1935) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)⁴
Writers	Screenplay by Ewart Adamson, Peter Milne, Robert Andrews, and Lillie Hayward, from an original story by Adamson and Joseph Fields²
Cinematographer	Hal Mohr, the first Academy Award nominee ever to win by write-in vote, for A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)⁴
Runtime and format	66 minutes, black and white, 7 reels²^•³
Budget and gross	$217,000 budget; $300,000 box office¹
Production dates	Began 23 December 1935³

Spoilers

Plot

A corrupt organization led by Nolan (Ricardo Cortez) plans the murder of Judge Shaw and shifts the blame onto John Elman (Boris Karloff), a recently released ex-convict and down-on-his-luck pianist. Nolan acts as Elman's defense attorney, and although the murder was witnessed by two medical students, Jimmy (Warren Hull) and Nancy (Marguerite Churchill), Elman is convicted because the witnesses are afraid to come forward.³ Evidence of his innocence comes forth after conviction, but too late for a stay, and Elman is executed in the electric chair.⁵

The scientist Dr. Evan Beaumont (Edmund Gwenn) obtains Elman's body and successfully revives him using an artificial heart, wishing to obtain information on the afterlife. Elman, whose identities of his framers he now knows through ESP-like abilities gained upon revival, concerns himself only with vengeance. He stalks the gangsters, who each die ironically by their own hand while trying to escape him; although Elman does not actually kill them, something in his eyes drives the men to their death.²^•³ Before he can settle accounts with the remaining pair of mobsters, Nolan and his henchman Loder shoot Elman just before their car crashes, and he dies a second time, still unable to tell Beaumont anything about what awaits after death.³ Beaumont is warned not to repeat the experiment, with a Bible quotation reflecting the era's cliché that there are things man was not meant to know.²

Production

Production began on 23 December 1935 at Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc., with Irving Rapper as dialogue director and Russ Saunders as assistant director; Thomas Pratt edited and Hugh Reticker was the art director.³ Modern sources credit Perc Westmore with the film's makeup.³ The budget was $217,000 against a $300,000 box office return.¹

Karloff's involvement. Karloff stepped away from Universal, where he had long been based, for a 1936 break spent working at Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, the short-lived Grand National, and Britain's Gaumont; at Warners, Curtiz directed him in this story of revenge reaching out from beyond the grave.⁴ According to reports, Karloff requested script revisions because he thought his role, as first written, too closely resembled his famous Frankenstein Monster; an IMDb trivia note adds that the initial screenplay left Ellman unable to speak following his revival, and that Karloff returned it to the writers.²^•⁶ His post-resurrection makeup pays clear homage to Jack P. Pierce's monster makeup, and he is strapped to a stretcher as in Frankenstein (1931).⁶

Contemporary context

Reviews published at the time note actual experiments by Dr. Alexis Carrel and Dr. Robert E. Cornish, who tried to bring electrocution victims back to life. A Daily Variety news item reports that the movie shows the mechanical, man-made heart whose invention is credited to the aviator Charles Lindbergh working with Carrel.³

The Science Fiction Encyclopedia calls the film an early example of efforts to combine the science fiction, horror, and crime genres, and notes it may be the first to involve an artificial heart.² A study of the Production Code Administration's treatment of horror records that the plots of The Walking Dead, The Devil Doll, and Dracula's Daughter, all 1936 releases, were substantially remodelled after the PCA made it clear the original narratives were unacceptable, following a consistent policy of warning studios not to make horror films and then requesting comprehensive remodelling of plot and content.⁷ While it reached American audiences without any cuts, its graphic material led Finland, Switzerland, and Singapore to prohibit the film.⁸

Reception and legacy

Frank S. Nugent's New York Times review called it a horror picture "taken from one of the better shelves."⁹ The film holds a 60% Tomatometer rating on Rotten Tomatoes from five reviews, and 6.6/10 on IMDb from about 3.7K votes.⁹^•¹⁰ Dennis Schwartz rated it B-, a "creaky but entertaining supernatural thriller about bringing back the dead."⁹

Curtiz, working with a tight budget, drew every possible effect from Hal Mohr's shadowy cinematography, and the picture comes across as a forceful moral tale close to a religious sermon: Karloff plays a man unjustly sentenced to death who lives through his execution as a shambling, hollow-eyed agent of heaven's vengeance, bringing about the deaths of the men who framed him without ever touching them.⁴ A 2025 revival screening at the Wexner Center for the Arts used a new 35mm restoration from the Library of Congress collection, introduced by Heather Linville, head of the Library of Congress Moving Image Section.¹¹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026