[1] Victorian era scientist Professor Emmanuel Hildern meets a young doctor in what appears to be a laboratory.

Hildern claims to need help, having discovered a form of evil that is real, a living being, and which he has unwittingly unleashed thousands of years too soon.

While visiting the asylum, James tells Emmanuel that he made a psychiatric study of her and plans to publish the findings in the hope of winning the Richter Prize.

[citation needed] The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "After the crudities of Tales from the Crypt, The Creeping Flesh comes as a welcome surprise.

The film is hampered by an obtrusively contrived narrative and by the fact that the parallels between the brothers and their experiments are somewhat schematic; but the theme of the different attempts to locate and hence control evil  ... is interestingly and sensitively worked out.

The preponderance of long-shots ensures that, despite the presence of Britain's two most prominent horror stars, The Creeping Flesh is above all an ensemble film, concerned with the interconnection of actions and drives.

The effect on Penelope of discovering the truth about her mother is quietly expressed in the toppling over of the paper marionette in the miniature theatre with which she has been playing; and the climactic sequences, right up to the final attack on Emmanuel, gain particularly from the reticent treatment of the resurrected embodiment of Evil – a black-hooded, monk-like figure moving in longshot slowly, silently and relentlessly through the darkness.

Paul Ferris' score, less striking than his Witchfinder General music, is also used with restraint to establish the pervasive tone of melancholy and desolation rather than of simple horror.

The film suffers from the somewhat squalid bourgeois morality which afflicts so much British popular art  ...; but in this case, the intelligence and vivacity of Lorne Heilbron's performance arouse so much sympathy for Penelope's release from Victorian repression that the total effect is more ambiguous.

[6] Gary Susman, writing for Time, concludes that "you can read the whole thing as a satire, on Victorian sexual expression, outdated science, and imperialism, but it's easier just to sit back and scream at the elegant creepiness of Cushing and Lee or the awful spectacle of that wriggling finger.

"[7] In his review for the online film journal Offscreen, Donato Totaro opines: "Although The Creeping Flesh is unevenly paced in moments and contains a sometimes maligned plot, a close analysis reveals a film marked by an interesting use of parallel montage, subtle thematic meaning imparted in the mise en scène, and a possible social message submerged within the slightly ludicrous apocalyptic scenario, dealing with the suppression of women in Victorian England (it would be too much of a stretch to read this as feminist).

[citation needed] On 4 April 2017, in the US, Mill Creek Entertainment released the film, along with The Brotherhood of Satan (1971) and Torture Garden (1967), in a Blu-ray set titled Psycho Circus.