Peggy is being interviewed by Superintendent Graham and Inspector Lodge when journalist and crime writer Edmond Bancroft enters the room.

Ballan observes that Bancroft goes into a state of shock after the murders, noting that he needs psychiatric treatment and should be hospitalized.

At a cocktail party, Graham tells Bancroft that the police have captured Tom Rivers, who has confessed to the murders.

After signing copies of his books at an event, Bancroft returns to his basement museum to find Rick with Angela.

Producer Herman Cohen said he got the idea for the film after reading a series of newspaper articles about Scotland Yard's Black Museum.

"[5] A thirteen-minute prologue featuring hypnotist Emile Franchele and HypnoVista was added for the US release by James H. Nicholson of AIP, who felt the movie needed another gimmick.

[12][13] The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "For all its contemporary setting, the plot of this lurid melodrama relies almost entirely on hackneyed Gothic paraphernalia.

It makes the merest nod towards medical jargon, never attempts to penetrate Bancroft's obsession, and gains any persuasion it may have from the Eastman Colour-and-CinemaScope trappings rather than from Michael Gough's conventional portrait of menace.

At any rate, and given their brutalising intention, the scriptwriters have judged rightly in allowing their monster at least the appearance of a man.

The story and screenplay by Aben Kandel and Herman Cohen is as full of holes as a fishing net. ...

Michael Gough, as the murderer, sardonically ploughs through the screenplay while Geoffrey Keen makes as much of the cop as the role will allow.

June Cunningham, Shirley Ann Field and Dorinda Stevens are three of the femme victims who meet their fate with appropriate hysteria.

"[15] The Radio Times Guide to Films gave the film 3/5 stars, writing: "This infamously lurid horror begins with one of the most memorably vicious shocks of the 1950s fear-era a girl unwrapping a gift of binoculars, looking through and having her eyes gouged by two spring-loaded metal spikes.

Michael Gough stars as the arrogant crime book author who hypnotises his assistant into committing horrendous homicides to satisfy his readers' demands for gruesome detail.

"[18] In Offbeat: British Cinema's Curiosities, Obscurities and Forgotten Items, Julian Upton writes: "Barking at his vacuous assistant, Gough scales heights of shaking fury that are as alarming as the murders themselves: it looks like his head could explode at any moment.

But he counters this madness with the public persona of his celebrated crime writer: smooth but arrogant, aggravating the baffled police with his know-it-all theorising and dishing out snide comments to his fans with the scathing dryness of George Sanders in All About Eve (1950).