THE CREEPER

US, 1948, 64 minutes, Black-and-white.
Eduardo Cianelli, Onslow Stevens, Gene Vincent, Ralph Morgan, Janis Wilson, Richard Lane, Philip Ahn.
Directed by Jean Yarbrough

The Creeper is a very slight supporting feature. It is very reminiscent in plot and style to the rather cult-status films produced by Val Lewton at RKO in the early 1940s. With the emphasis here on black cats, there are allusions to The Cat People and Curse of The Cat People, references to islands in the Caribbean.

The film focuses on a young woman, Janis Wilson, who sleeps walks with a gun, woken by a sympathetic father, Ralph Morgan, with revelations that they have been in the Caribbean, that she has been mentally disturbed, has a phobia about black cats. They have returned to the US, the father working on a serum with an unscrupulous doctor which is intended to illuminate the organs during surgery.

There is a sympathetic doctor who provide some romance, his former girlfriend who seems to been affected by the work but is murdered, a foreign gentleman, working in the surgery, immediately stereotyped as a mad doctor or villain, Eduardo Ciannelli. But, with a twist, he is not villainous at all. The villain is the obsessed doctor, determined to get the serum despite his friend destroying the files, the cat phobia daughter getting into all kinds of situations (even in a fashionable Chinese restaurant), the father being killed…

Before the final confrontation and shootout, the doctor, the bad doctor, injects himself with the serum and his hand begins to transform into a cat’s paw. However, he is dead before any other experiments can take place.