But the cameraman’s lurid fantasies of stardom were rebuffed again.
A sleepy little horror movie may be the most accurate description of The Black Sleep (1956). In 1872 a medical doctor, falsely accused and convicted of murder, is rescued from the impending gallows by another doctor who possesses the Black Sleep, a drug that causes a user to appear to be dead. When he awakens, having been spirited away by a voluble gypsy, he is recruited into helping his savior perform research on corpses.
He thinks.
We’re treated to the instructive horrors that occur when the rules of society are broken, as one man pursues a cure for that which is destroying what he loves the most, regardless of the cost in broken lives.
And when these lives are broken, they are quite dramatic, eventually redounding to evil consequence upon the progenitor of their foreshortened lives. Thus do we know that such laws of society are not mere arbitrary rules, but the bulwarks against disaster for us and our fellows.
And, for all that, it’s a bit boring.
