Doctor Blood's Coffin is a 1961 British horror film directed by Sidney J. Furie from a screenplay co-written by Nathan Juran, and starring Kieron Moore, Hazel Court, and Ian Hunter.
No one knows it yet, but the stolen medical supplies have been used to set up a laboratory in the disused Porthcarron Tin Mine, and the missing people have been taken there after being immobilised with a drug.
Into this situation comes young Dr. Peter Blood, fresh off a biochemistry research grant in Vienna.
Peter eagerly volunteers to help search the tin mines for the latest missing man, George Beale.
As Beale mumbles incoherently, Peter injects him with something and pronounces him dead, then offers to do the post mortem.
Meanwhile, Robert is unable to analyse the contents of a broken syringe stolen from his office and found in Beale's room.
Peter calls him rule-bound, superstitious, and ignorant and arrogantly tells Linda that "no one's going to hold me back now."
Inside, he tells her a weird story that, as a boy, he played there, pretending he was dead and then coming back to life.
His early features A Dangerous Age and A Cool Sound from Hell had made little impact in his native country, but were well-received in England, which led Furie to move there in 1960 to direct the film During One Night.
Nathan Juran wrote the script, originally titled Face of Evil,[8] under the pseudonym 'Jerry Juran' and sold it to Sidney J. Furie, who had it rewritten by James Kelly and Peter Martin in order to better fit England, as the original story took place in a gold-mining town 'out west' in America.
[10] The Cornish locations include the town of Zennor, which was used as the fictional village of Porthcarron, and the Carn Galver tin mine near St Just.
[11] One source states that scenes set inside the tin mine were shot on a studio sound stage.
[10] But Hazel Court said in an interview that those scenes were filmed inside 'the real thing' – a 'very wet' cave in Cornwall.
[10] Doctor Blood's Coffin opened in the UK in January 1961[15] and had its US premiere in Los Angeles on 26 April 1961.
It also played in theatres in Finland, Belgium, Italy, Greece, Brazil, Portugal, and Spain, but all at unspecified dates.
[19] Contemporary reviews of Doctor Blood's Coffin tended to be less than favourable, despite United Artists being 'happy enough' with the film.
On the other hand, Warren notes that Limelight critic Jack Moffitt wrote that "The more discriminating horror fans ... may find merit in this intelligently directed and well-written British recapitulation of the Frankenstein formula".
[8] British film historian Phil Hardy is equally unimpressed with Doctor Blood's Coffin, calling it 'a crude shocker ... with an inane plot' and noting that it 'simply piles up shots of bloody surgery and decayed flesh on the assumption that vivisection or a heart transplant performed in a disused Cornish tin-mine is sufficient to tap into audiences' unconscious fears or taboo fantasies'.
[6] With its removal of hearts from living bodies, the film also taps into modern fears of illegal organ harvesting.
Steve is 'horribly decomposed, with greenish cracked skin, and some sort of unappetising bright green moss growing all over his face in thin strips'.
He also writes that 'Zombie fans in particular will no doubt be displeased by the distinct lack of zombie activity', concluding that 'It's all pretty lame stuff'.
[6] Scream Factory released the film on Blu-ray on May 15, 2018 with English subtitles, the original theatrical trailer and a still gallery.