In 1956, businessman and amateur hypnotist Morey Bernstein published the book The Search for Bridey Murphy, the supposedly true story of housewife Virginia Tighe who claimed to be able to remember incidents from her past life as the 19th century Irish woman Bridey Murphy when put in a trance by Bernstein. The book was a best seller, sparking a brief interest in past life regression and the book was adapted into a drama film by Noel Langley later the same year. The craze didn‘t last very long, and the public’s initial interest waned very quickly. Roger Corman and AIP, ever on the search for something to exploit, tried to jump the bandwagon with a film mainly shot in July 1956 under the title The Trance of Diana Love but by the time it was actually released just a year later, reincarnation was already yesterday’s fad and the title was changed to the completely misleading and meaningless The Undead.

You certainly can‘t argue that The Undead isn‘t unique – there’s nothing quite like it in Corman’s extensive filmography nor anywhere else come to that. It starts with Richard Devon as Satan himself addressing the audience before we switch to the modest and unassuming offices of Professor Ulbrecht Olinger (Maurice Manson) where he’s being persuaded by his former student Quintus Ratcliff (Val Dufour) of the power of hypnosis, especially a technique he learned in Tibet that can allow patients to regress to their past lives. To demonstrate, he hires prostitute Diana Love (Pamela Duncan) and hypnotises her. She travels back to the Middle Ages where she was once Helene who has been imprisoned and awaiting execution as a witch.

Diana retains some control over Helene’s body and helps her to escape prison with Satan and the witch Livia (future 50 Foot Woman Allison Hayes who’s a lot of fun, relishing lines like “Forgive me if this chill brings out the wildness in my blood”), whose crimes Helene has been framed for. Aided by Smolkin the gravedigger (Mel Welles) who has a penchant for reciting badly mangled nursery rhymes, the chivalrous Pendragon (Richard Garland) and good witch Meg Maude (Dorothy Neumann, playing a pantomime witch, complete with comically exaggerated pointy nose and chin and the standard issue facial warts), Helene evades Livia and Ratcliff, using a combination of hypnosis and what looks like a reel-to-reel tape recorder, manages to travel back in time to help her. But fate has a twist in store for him and Diana/Helene…

As you’d expect, Corman keeps things on the boil throughout its meagre 71 minutes though it sometimes feels a lot longer thanks to writers Charles B. Griffith and Mark Hanna insistence on giving all the characters in the past cod-Shakespearean dialogue, a gimmick that grows very tiring, very quickly. Inevitably, it all ends up rather silly, like some third-rate amateur production of the Bard which has completely failed to understand the tempo and rhythm of Shakespeare’s dialogue.

But despite that and a miserable budget that means all of the sets are tiny and cramped, the “locations” being nothing more than a sound stage wreathed in dry ice, The Undead certainly doesn‘t lack ambition. There’s always something going on, something unexpected and often quite ludicrous. The third act time travel twist comes out of nowhere and makes less than zero sense, though it does set up the rather nice final twist. The finale even poses a moral question of sorts, putting Diana in a quandary, is unexpectedly gripping and features a nice line in time paradox musings.

Intriguing ideas and wild plot twists and turns abound, but there’s really neither the enough plot nor enough money to make much of any of them. Though Griffiths was disappointed that his original plan to have the medieval dialogue in iambic pentameter (Roger… handed the script around for everybody to read,” he told Dennis Fischer in Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 60s, “but nobody understood the dialogue, so he told me to translate it into English.”) he had fond memories of the film, again telling Fischer that it “was a fun picture to shoot, because it was done in ten days at the Sunset Stage, which was a supermarket on Sunset Boulevard.”

The Undead marked Corman’s first foray into the Gothic horror that would become his forte in the 1960s with his string of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. It’s clearly far from his best, but the wildness of the storyline partly overcomes its other shortcomings, and it remains something of an oddity in Corman’s career, a failed experiment but one that still entertains for the most part. If only they’d knocked that annoying dialogue on the head…