Dr. Orloff
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Dr. Orloff is a fictional villain who most frequently appears in horror films written and directed by Jesús Franco. The Swiss actor Howard Vernon played the character – or characters with the same name – several times between 1962 and 1988, starting with The Awful Dr. Orloff.[1] Discussing the latter film's popularity in domestic and international markets, academic Danny Shipka wrote that, "The success of the Dr. Orlof character meant that Spain could now enjoy its own home-grown villain whom to exploit in a series of films for worldwide distribution. These films were directed by a handful of different directors as well as Franco himself, and became increasingly more lurid throughout the decade."[2]
Precursors[edit]
The evil or mad scientist has long been a popular trope in cinema. Filmmakers almost immediately brought literary examples to the screen: Faust in 1900, Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein in 1910, H. G. Wells’s Dr. Moreau in 1913, Hanns Heinz Ewers's Professor Jakob ten Brinken twice in 1918, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Henry Jekyll in 1920, and Wells’s Dr. Griffin in 1933.[3] They didn’t take long to invent their own, too, including Dr. Caligari in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and C. A. Rotwang in Metropolis (1927).
Jesús Franco is often credited with inventing Dr. Orloff, partly because he made that claim himself.[4] Béla Lugosi, however, acted as a Dr. Orloff twice in the 1930s, over two decades prior to Franco's first use of the name. In 1932, he played a Dr. Orloff in Murdered Alive, a stage play also titled The Black Tower.[5] Variety described it at the time as an, "Unusually unpleasant variation on 'Dracula' and 'Frankenstein,' employing embalming fluid upon living persons". This Orloff is a "demented medico" turned sculptor whose modus operandi is to "mummify living people into artistic statues".[6]
Seven years later, Lugosi was Dr. Feodor Orloff in the British horror film, The Dark Eyes of London (1939).[7] Based on a 1924 Edgar Wallace novel of the same name, this film introduced elements of horror that were not in the source material, including the villain's name. The novel used "Dr. Stephen Judd" for the murderous doctor and insurance agent.[8] In the United States, the film went under the name The Human Monster. Still popular in the 1960s, Lázaro-Reboll and Shipka say it was an influence on Franco. (An unrelated Dr. Feodor Orloff appears in the 1960 science fiction film 12 to the Moon. As a Soviet cosmonaut, his is a rare instance of a "good Russian” in Cold War American popular film.)
Dr. Orloff in the films of Jesús Franco[edit]
Dr. Orloff first makes an appearance in Jesús Franco’s filmography in The Awful Dr. Orloff (1962), a tale set in the early nineteenth century. Owing much to George Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, the film’s titular doctor, a former prison doctor played by Howard Vernon, hopes to restore his daughter's disfigured face with skin grafts taken from young women he has had abducted from local cabaret clubs.[9][10] (By contrast, in The Dark Eyes of London, Dr. Feodor Orloff’s motivation is money and his victims are all men.)
A sequel of sorts, Dr. Jekyll's Mistresses (1964) has a contemporary setting. There is a mad doctor, Austrian Dr. Conrad Jekyll (Dr. Fisherman in the original), played by Marcelo Arroita-Jáuregui, who uses a reanimated corpse to murder female nightclub performers. There is, however, no Dr. Orloff. The original release title, El secreto del Dr. Orloff (The Secret of Dr. Orloff), references the fact that Dr. Jeckyll has studied Orloff's techniques.[11] In a similar vein, Dr. Orloff does not appear in The Diabolical Dr. Z (1965), but he is named as the mentor of unethical Dr. Zimmer (Vernon), whose premature death his daughter seeks to avenge with the aid of a zombified female nightclub performer. Antonio Lázaro-Reboll has pointed out that Orloff died at the end of the original film and says, "The invocation of Dr. Orloff in El secreto del Dr. Orloff and Miss Muerte was more a production, marketing and distribution ploy than a return to the original storyline."[12] Orloff likewise doesn't make an appearance in The Portrait of Doriana Grey (1976), but he is given as owning the asylum where Lady Grey's sister is incarcerated.
William Berger took a turn playing Dr. Orloff in The Sinister Eyes of Dr. Orloff (1973). The character Berger plays, a malevolent psychiatrist, is not related to any previous version. Another unrelated Dr. Orloff, a forensic scientist, briefly appears in Female Vampire and is played by Jean-Pierre Bouyxou.
Over a decade later, Vernon reprised his original role in the similarly titled The Sinister Dr. Orloff (1984). This time however, it is his son, Dr. Alfred Orloff, played by Antonio Mayans, who stalks and dismembers prostitutes for body parts that he hopes will revive his terminally comatose mother. Somewhat mellowed, Dr. Orloff Sr disapproves.
Four years later, Vernon's last turn as Dr. Orloff was in a supporting role as a surgeon in Faceless (1988). Although classified as a slasher film, Faceless has a similar premise to The Awful Dr. Orloff.
Dr. Orloff in other directors' films[edit]
Only a Coffin (1967) has a tangential relationship to the Dr. Orloff series, despite being released in France under the name Les orgies du docteur Orloff (The Orgies of Dr. Orloff) and featuring a cast of Jesús Franco regulars, including Howard Vernon. There is no Dr. Orloff in the dramatis personae and it is less a horror than a castle-set whodunnit. The director is Santos Alcocer, but Franco is often credited as adapting the screenplay from the 1966 novel, Solo un ataúd by Enrique Jarnés Bergua, and the film critic Carlos Aguilar claims Franco was set to direct but was replaced early in production after he clashed with producer Marius Lesoeur.[13][14]
The same is said by Aguilar to have happened with Orloff and the Invisible Man (1970), directed by Pierre Chevalier. Here, Vernon plays Professor Orloff, who, having invented an invisibility serum, plans on creating a super-race to take over the world.
Austin Pendleton played a Dr. Orloff in the Tales from the Crypt episode "Doctor of Horror" (1995). Orloff, in this case, works on stolen corpses in a quest to extract their souls.
In Return of the Bloodsucking Nazi Zombies, a 2010 web series directed by Alex Bakshaev, Dr. Orloff and Dr. Mabuse send androids to Earth to destroy Howard Vernon. The series was included as an extra on a Cameo Media DVD release of Franco's last completed film, Al Pereira vs. the Alligator Ladies (2012).[15]
Dr. Orloff's monsters[edit]
The Drs. Orloff played by Bela Lugosi in the 1930s both have brutish henchmen: the deformed and blind Jake in The Dark Eyes of London and Fangh in Murdered Alive, which publicity photographs suggest was a racist caricature played by Everett Brown.[16]
Franco's Orloff and his successors have all created monstrous automatons to do their bidding. In The Awful Dr. Orloff, the henchman is Morpho (sometimes "Morpho Lodner"), the reanimated corpse of an executed convict, now a hideous, blind, and sexually depraved killer. Morpho would reappear in Rote Lippen, Sadisterotica (1969), Vampyros Lesbos (1971), and The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein (1973).
In Dr. Jekyll's Mistresses, the monster is the electrically reanimated corpse of the titular character's murdered brother. This hulking entity, named "Andros", shares characteristics with Dr. Frankenstein's monster, perhaps especially Boris Karloff's version in James Whale's Frankenstein (1931). Both sport a squared-off black fringe and black clothes; their movements are robotic; they appear, together with Morpho, at certain points to have human-like feelings under their pallid, pockmarked surfaces.
The victims of Morpho and Andros are mostly young women. Not so Miss Muerte in The Diabolical Dr. Z, a mind controlled erotic dancer with poison-soaked finger nails. Her victims are mostly older men whom Irma Zimmer blames for her father's death.
References[edit]
- ↑ "Howard Vernon: Obituary", Richard Chatten, The Independent, 5 September 1996
- ↑ Perverse Titillation: The Exploitation Cinema of Italy, Spain and France, 1960–1980, Danny Shipka, 2011, page 177
- ↑ "Faust and Marguerite". Library of Congress. Retrieved June 1, 2022.
- ↑ Spanish Horror Film, Antonio Lázaro-Reboll, 2012, page 67
- ↑ Lugosi: His Life in Films, on Stage, and in the Hearts of Horror Lovers, Gary Don Rhodes, 1997, pages 172–173
- ↑ Variety, 12 April 1932, page 52
- ↑ Motion Picture Daily, 11 March 1940, page 7
- ↑ The Dark Eyes of London, Edgar Wallace, 1924. Antonio Lázaro-Reboll is mistaken in Spanish Horror Film when he says Wallace used the name.
- ↑ Fear Without Frontiers: Horror Cinema Across the Globe, Steven Jay Schneider, 2003, page 274
- ↑ Perverse Titillation: The Exploitation Cinema of Italy, Spain and France, 1960–1980, Danny Shipka, 2011, page 175
- ↑ Spanish Horror Film, Antonio Lázaro-Reboll, 2012, page 59. Lázaro-Reboll quotes publicity material of the time: "Dr Fisherman has succeed in bringing Andros back to life thanks to the secret entrusted to him by his friend and teacher Dr. Orloff."
- ↑ Spanish Horror Film, Antonio Lázaro-Reboll, 2012, page 54
- ↑ Jesús Franco, Carlos Aguilar, 2011
- ↑ "El enigma del ataúd", La abadía de Berzano, 20 June 2011 (Spanish)
- ↑ "Al Pereira vs. the Alligator Ladies Blu-ray", mubis, 10 July 2013 (Spanish)
- ↑ "1932: Murdered Alive", The Bela Lugosi Blog, August 2011
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