The Last Warning is a 1928 sound part-talkie American mystery film directed by Paul Leni, and starring Laura La Plante, Montagu Love, and Margaret Livingston.

Conceived as a followup to Leni's wildly successful 1927 production The Cat and the Canary (also starring La Plante), the film was produced by Universal Pictures under Carl Laemmle.

In 2016, Universal Pictures selected it for film restoration, using elements from two different prints owned by the Packard Humanities Institute and the Cinémathèque Française.

In a Broadway theatre production of a play entitled The Snare, one of the actors, John Woodford, inexplicably dies during a stage performance, and his body disappears.

Five years after the theater's closure, producer Arthur McHugh decides to solve the mystery by again staging the play with the remaining cast and re-enacting Woodford's murder.

During rehearsals in the abandoned theater, strange occurrences plague the cast, including ominous noises, falling scenery, and an unexplained fire.

During the performance, an electrical wire charged to 400 volts is discovered connected to a candlestick onstage, and Arthur lunges at Richard to prevent him from touching it during the final scene.

The unseen masked assailant is discovered hiding inside a grandfather clock onstage, but he drops through a trap door in the floor just after shooting one of the police officers.

[7] Laura La Plante, a former-teenage actress who had previously starred in Leni's The Cat and the Canary, was given top-billing in her role as Doris Terry, though her part in the film is considerably less involved than in the former.

[8] Film historian John Soister characterizes La Plante's role as that of an ingénue,[9] consisting primarily of reactions to "assorted assaults, visions, and set-ups.

[13] This was Daumery's only film credit from the early sound era, and her role is likened by Soister and others to that of Flora Finch in The Cat and the Canary, but stripped of any comedic tone.

[15] The theater set used in the film had originally been used in the 1925 The Phantom of the Opera starring Lon Chaney,[3][16] and was located in Universal City, California.

"[25] A critic from the Los Angeles Times similarly found the cinematography "highly interesting" and the plot "lost in a maze of double and triple exposures," adding that there "is a decided lack of spontaneity in the sound sequences.

"[29] Hall also criticized the film's utilization of sound, writing: "There are too many outbursts of shrieking, merely to prove the effect of the audible screen, to cause any spine-chilling among those watching this production.

Along the way, Leni revels in the shadows, cobwebs, tilted angles, subtly distorted perspectives, ominously confined spaces, and clutching hands that had by now become his trademark.