The Boogie Man Will Get You

Faced with mortgage debts, Professor Nathaniel Billings sells his 18th-century tavern to Winnie Layden, who plans to turn it into a hotel. Billings stipulates as a condition of sale that he is able to continue working in a laboratory in the basement. His housekeeper Amelia Jones and hired hand Ebenezer also continue to work in the inn. Layden is initially unaware of the nature of Billings's experiments in the basement laboratory: he is attempting to use electricity to create a race of superhumans to help the war effort. Layden's ex-husband Bill is against the sale, but is too late to stop it, and decides to stay on at the inn for a few days.

One night at dinner, the residents hear the sounds of a ghost. Bill suspects that this is part of a plan to scare the new owner away. While investigating, Bill discovers in the basement the dead body of travelling salesman Johnson, an experiment subject who died shortly after the sale. He reports this discovery to the local sheriff Dr. Arthur Lorencz. After making inquiries, Lorencz realises the potential for profit and decides to work with Billings on a subsequent experiment. Their initial plan is to use Bill as a test subject, but this proves unsuccessful, so they turn their attention to Maxie, a visiting powder puff salesman.

Before the experiments can begin, one of the inn's guests is murdered. Billings and Lorencz see the primary suspect as another guest, J. Gilbert Brampton, but the police officers who set out to investigate are intercepted on the way. Maxie scares away an intruder known as "Jo-Jo", who is intending to steal Billings's equipment. Billings and Lorencz decide to begin their experiment on Maxie so that they can use him to stop "Jo-Jo" from blowing up a nearby munitions plant. Meanwhile, Brampton informs Winnie and Bill that he is visiting as a representative of the Historical Society of America, who are interested in buying the inn.

When the police officers eventually arrive, they arrest the housekeeper and Ebenezer for the murders. The dead bodies come back to life, having apparently been in a state of suspended animation. The police officers decide to send the rest of the house's inhabitants to the Idlewild Sanatorium, a local psychiatric institution. However, Lorencz reveals himself to be the Chair of the institution's Board of Directors, thereby almost assuring their freedom.

• Boris Karloff as Prof. Nathaniel Billings
• Peter Lorre as Dr. Arthur Lorencz
• Max Rosenbloom as Maxie – the Powder Puff Salesman
• Larry Parks as Bill Layden
• Miss Jeff Donnell as Winnie Slade

The Boogie Man Will Get You was the final film that Boris Karloff made under his contract with Columbia, and the studio were hoping to build on the success of the Broadway play Arsenic and Old Lace, which Karloff was appearing in at the time.Pitts, Columbia Pictures, p. 24.Mank, Bela Lugos, p. 445.Buehrer, Boris Karloff, pp. 157-158. Production of the film took place while the play was on hiatus in summer 1942. There are many similarities between the film and Arsenic and Old Lace, including the presence of eccentric characters and the premise of dead bodies in the basement.Hallenbeck, Comedy-Horror Films, p. 38. As previously with the films he made with Columbia, Karloff was cast in the role of a "mad scientist", as he had been in films such as The Man They Could Not Hang (1939), Before I Hang (1940), The Man with Nine Lives (1940), and The Devil Commands (1941).Pitts, Columbia Pictures, p. 55.

The screenplay was written by Edwin Blum in four weeks,Youngkin, The Lost One, p. 206. based on a story by Hal Fimberg and Robert B. Hunt, adapted by Paul Gangelin.Youngkin, The Lost One, p. 450. Although the film is a comedy-horror, Blum described the studio's aims as creating a "goose pimple" film; Blum explained that he "was and still [is] incapable of writing a straight horror film". Before filming began, Jack Fier had been named as the producer, but Colbert Clark took over from him.{{cite news|last=Schallert|first=Edwin|title=Karloff, Lorre to star in Columbia thriller|newspaper=Los Angeles Times|date=28 February 1941}}

The set for the laboratory and its exotic scientific equipment initially was to include a visible woman, a clear live-sized plastic figure "with lights denoting various nerve-centers," but this was dropped after the Production Code Administration, which enforced the "no nudity in fact or in silhouette" prohibition of the Motion Picture Production Code, raised questions regarding this transparent unclothed model.{{Citation |first=Kirby |last=David |author-link=David A. Kirby |editor-last=Nelson |editor-first=Donna J. |editor-link=Donna Nelson |editor2-last=Grazier |editor2-first=Robert |editor3-last=Paglia |editor3-first=Jaime |editor3-link=Jaime Paglia |editor4-last=Perkowitz |editor4-first=Sidney |editor4-link=Sidney Perkowitz |contribution =Censoring Science in 1930s and 1940s Hollywood Cinema |contribution-url=https://www.academia.edu/34595133/Censoring_Science_in_1930s_and_1940s_Hollywood_Cinema |contribution-url-access=registration |title=Hollywood Chemistry: When Science Met Entertainment |year=2013 |pages=229–240 |publisher=American Chemical Society |isbn=978-0-8412-2824-5}}

Columbia planned a publicity campaign to promote the film, polling film critics to compile a list of the ten best on-screen villains. The studio assumed that Karloff and Lorre would come high on the list, but the top three were all Disney characters: the witch from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the wolf from Three Little Pigs, and the cat from Pinocchio. The studio consequently abandoned this publicity idea.Youngkin, The Lost One, p. 207.

The Boogie Man Will Get You was released in October 1942Pitts, Columbia Pictures, p. 359. to a mixed critical reception. A Variety reviewer commented positively on the film, describing it as a "screwball comedy" offering "hearty laughs".Pitts, Columbia Pictures, p. 25. According to a reviewer in Kinematograph Weekly, however, the madness of the characters was "a little too studio to promote spontaneous thrills or laughter". Writing in the New York Daily News, Kate Cameron stated that "frightening people in theatres takes more ingenuity and adroitness than the authors of this screenplay put into it".Pitts, Columbia Pictures, pp. 24-25. The Monthly Film Bulletin found the film was "ably produced and directed" and that Karloff and Lorre "manage to sustain the appearance of mental unbalance well" while stating that the film was "a lot of nonsense with a certain amount of humor, but rather too long-drawn-out."{{cite magazine|title=Boogie Man Will Get You, The|volume=10|issue=111|page=27|year=1943|publisher=British Film Institute|magazine=Monthly Film Bulletin}}

;Citations

;Bibliography

• {{cite book|last=Buehrer|first=Beverly Bare|title=Boris Karloff: A Bio-Bibliography|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=nmd77kTyX_oC|year=1993|publisher=Greenwood Publishing Group|isbn=978-0-313-27715-3}}
• {{cite book|last=Hallenbeck|first=Bruce G.|title=Comedy-Horror Films: A Chronological History, 1914–2008|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=2AIgAef-bAcC|year=2009|publisher=McFarland|isbn=978-0-7864-3332-2|pages=38–39}}
• {{cite book|last=Mank|first=Gregory William|title=Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff: The Expanded Story of a Haunting Collaboration, With a Complete Filmography of Their Films Together|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=hNtqmyR-MNMC|year=2009|publisher=McFarland|isbn=978-0-7864-3480-0}}
• {{cite book|last=Pitts|first=Michael R.|title=Columbia Pictures: Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy Films, 1928–1982|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=PKxN1as8XOMC&pg=PR4|year=2010|publisher=McFarland|isbn=978-0-7864-4447-2}}
• {{cite book|last=Youngkin|first=Stephen D.|title=The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=TgmVH7aaOtEC|year=2005|publisher=University Press of Kentucky|isbn=978-0-8131-2360-8}}

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• {{IMDb title|0034540|The Boogie Man Will Get You}}
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{{Lew Landers}}

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Category:1942 films

Category:1942 comedy horror films

Category:American black-and-white films

Category:American comedy horror films

Category:Films directed by Lew Landers

Category:American science fiction comedy films

Category:Columbia Pictures films

Category:1940s English-language films

Category:1940s American films

Category:American mad scientist films

Category:English-language comedy horror films