Scared To Death

The only Bela Lugosi film to be made in color, SCARED TO DEATH is a truly bizarre little mystery that tells its story entirely in flashbacks from the point of view of a corpse (Lamont) without any identifiable marks of a killing. (A dead person as a narrator was later to be used in SUNSET BOULEVARD, where William Holden played the unfortunate victim.) Set in a sanitarium run by the macabre Dr. Van Ee (Zucco), the film parades secret panels, trap doors, red-herring villains (Lugosi and dwarf actor Angelo Rossitto), comedy relief (Pendleton and Blake), and a fluorescent green death mask that seems to float on its own. Claustrophobic, eccentric, and at times downright...