Running for over a decade from 1941 to 1952 and originally inspired by a series of books published in the States by Simon & Schuster, Inner Sanctum, or Inner Sanctum Mystery was a radio hit, running to over 500 episodes. Hosted by Raymond Edward Johnson whose sign off line “Pleasant dreeeeaams, hmmmmm?” was beloved of thousands (Paul McGrath replaced him in 1945 when Johnson joined the army), the show was a huge hit across America. In June 1943, Universal Pictures, looking for a new line of horror films to supplement their established stable of classic monsters, bought the rights to Inner Sanctum (the name only, not the books or the radio scripts) from Simon & Schuster and set about making a series of thrillers starring Lon Chaney Jr and with Johnson replaced in all but one of the films by David Hoffman’s distorted head in a crystal ball talking nonsense that only vaguely relates to what we’re about to see.

Producer Ben Pivar had high hopes for the series, initially casting Gale Sondergaard alongside Chaney though she was dropped before the first film went into production and announcing two films a year. He managed to make six of them in all, few of them being overtly horror films but all having some note of the macabre that just about earns them their place here. First out of the gate came Reginald LeBorg’s Calling Dr Death, released in December 1943.

In this debut outing, Chaney plays neurologist Dr Mark Steele (he’d play a different character in each film) who is enjoying professional success using hypnotism to treat his patients, but suffering privately, his marriage to Maria (Ramsay Ames) falling apart as regularly cheats on him. Maria is content to live the comfortable life of a doctor’s wife and refuses to divorce him. With Maria away for the weekend, he has a nightmare of strangling her to death and the next day drives off in his car, waking in his office on Monday morning with no memory of where he’s been or what he’s been doing. It won’t take a genius to guess that Maria has been murdered and that Steele is the prime suspect. But did he really do it? And if he didn’t, who could it have been?

There’s a not a great deal of horror or fantasy here beyond a nightmare sequence, the revelation that Maria had been murdered by having acid thrown in her face, and Steele – and the killer’s – use of hypnotism, that brand of “super-hypnotism” that more resembles magic than anything used in the real world by the medical profession. For the most part it’s a middle-of-the-road mystery that bumps along quite nicely, never becoming very exciting but rarely being dull either. It’s just sort of “there”, doing what it does with no pretensions and as such, for the most part, it’s passable enough.

Where it falls down is where all six of the Inner Sanctums suffer – the casting on Chaney. He was never an actor of any great range or subtlety and throughout the series he trades on that tormented soul persona that had served him well enough in The Wolf Man (1941) but which gets very repetitious here. He’s badly miscast and out of his depth, not at all helped by writer Edward Dein (who had previously helped to write Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942) for Val Lewton at RKO) whose script insists on verbalising all his tortured inner monologues which Chaney records in an irritating whisper. Chaney had hopes as high as Pivar for Inner Sanctum, hoping that it would break him out of the monster roles that he’d been doing for Universal. All they did was confirm that he was an actor of limited range. Luckily J. Carrol Naish and Patricia Morison are very good in their supporting roles, he playing the dogged flatfoot on the case and channelling his inner Edward G. Robinson, and she, presumably in the role originally intended for Sondergaard, as his Steele’s overly devoted nurse Stella.

Calling Dr Death is an odd film, feeling not unlike an episode of a television series, or perhaps more pertinently, a radio show. Like a lot of what was to follow it, the film relies too heavily on contrived plotting (we have to accept that characters are not as bright as they appear and that everyone is willing to overlook the very obvious for it all to hang together) and it’s all a bit ho-hum really, though it’s nicely done and should keep most viewers guessing until the twist ending – there’s little doubt that Steele is innocent but playing along with the mystery is all part of the fun.

LeBorg’s direction becomes livelier in the final act, with dramatic canted camera angles, moody lighting courtesy of cinematographer Virgil Miller) and a tense hypnosis scene giving the proceedings a much neede kick up the metaphorical butt. Like all the films, it could have been a lot more than it ended up being, but by this stage, Universal were too busy cranking out cheap horrors, mysteries and thrillers almost on a conveyor belt and had no particular concern for making things better than they needed to be.

Calling Dr Death is no great shakes but its was just entertaining enough to please audiences to encourage Universal and Pivar to keep going. It would eventually be followed by Weird Woman (1944), Dead Man’s Eyes (1944), The Frozen Ghost (1945), Strange Confession (1945) and Pillow of Death (1945) which was so terrible, it marked the end of the line for the series. But given that Universal’s other 40s attempts to start new “franchises” (the Creeper, Paula the Ape Woman and Spider-Woman films) running to six films was no mean feat.