Bela Lugosi gives his looniest, most unhinged and cackling performance here as an insane surgeon with an Edgar Allan Poe fixation. He collects Poe knick-knacks and, naturally, has a hidden room with a fully functioning torture chamber made up of devices described in The Pit and the Pendulum. Dr. Bela saves a young woman’s life in surgery and then falls madly and jealously in love with her. She has a fiancee, but Bela has that torture chamber. With the help of sad sack escaped convict Boris Karloff, he finally puts his swinging pendulum blade death device to good use.
The violence here is surprisingly harsh for a film released during the era of the Hays Code and some territories demanded a variety of cuts. The film was also the last straw for critics who already took moral issue with horror movies. Several reviews attacked the film’s depravity and Great Britain even banned all horror movies for a short time after its release. Today, The Raven survives as a fast-paced good time and a must for fans of Karloff and Lugosi. It’s also notable as the only Karloff-Lugosi film in which Lugosi clearly has the more dominant and important role (as Karloff was considered the bigger star and, indeed, gets top billing here).