The Undead is a 1957 horror film directed by Roger Corman and starring Pamela Duncan, Allison Hayes, Richard Garland and Val Dufour.

It also features Corman regulars Richard Devon, Dick Miller, Mel Welles and Bruno VeSota.

The film follows the story of a prostitute, Diana Love (Duncan), who is put into a hypnotic trance by psychic Quintus (Dufour), thus causing her to regress to a previous life.

[3] Quintus, a psychic researcher who has spent seven years in Tibet, wants to send someone back in time into a past life via hypnosis.

He hires (for $500) a prostitute, Diana Love, and plans to send her into a trance over 48 hours so she can access her past life.

Quintus puts Diana into a trance and sends her back into the Middle Ages, where she shares the body of her past self, Helene, who is in prison, sentenced to die at dawn under suspicion of being a witch.

That night is the witches' Sabbath and, as tradition dictates, the townsfolk must kill any woman suspected of witchcraft to be safe for the rest of the year.

However, this creates a new complication, because if Helene evades execution, her future selves, including Diana, will never come into existence.

Meanwhile, Helene tries to survive through the night, knowing that if she succeeds, she will have a whole year to prove her innocence, as the witches' Sabbath occurs once every twelve months.

[4] The Undead was inspired by an interest in reincarnation during the 1950s (as was the film The She-Creature) prompted by the success of the book The Search for Bridey Murphy by Morey Bernstein.

But either Roger or someone at American International Pictures didn't think it was commercially viable to do it that way and at the last minute a decision was made to rewrite the script without that.

I played him kind of insane and what was wonderful was the one of my reviews compared me to Stanley Holloway in one of his Shakespearean gravedigger roles.

"[8] AIP's special effects artist Paul Blaisdell was drafted to play the corpse in the coffin in the graveyard scene, which he said was a lot of fun.

His eyes however were supposed to remain open and staring throughout the scene, and he said it was difficult because little particles of the coffin lid kept falling into them like dust.

Griffith says the film was "a fun picture to shoot... We filled it [the supermarket] with palm trees and fog, and it was the first time Roger had used any of that stuff.

You could see the zipper on the witch's dress and all the gimmicks were very obvious and phony—Roger deliberately played to skid row, a degenerate audience.

Lensing by William Sickner, special effects, background score and other technical aids are okay for the budget and quick shooting schedule.

Filmink called it "another wild, imaginative, well structured script from Griffith, some of it is downright silly on screen (dancing little people, the costumes) but the story has integrity and the ending is emotionally powerful.

"[19] Joe Dante called it "very odd and ambitious... one of my favorites... there's a nice cast of Corman stalwarts... it really manages to somehow stand out from the crowd because it's got a tone that is very unusual for this kind of picture...