When the Real Horror Is Medical Malpractice

In this episode of The Introverted Obelisk, we peel back the fur suit on The Ape (1940), a Poverty Row shocker where Boris Karloff proves that even brilliant actors aren’t immune to scripts about monkey costumes and spinal fluid theft. Karloff plays Dr. Bernard Adrian, a kindly small-town physician with a big dream: curing a young woman of paralysis. Admirable, except his method involves breaking the Hippocratic oath in half, stitching it back together with ape hair, and prowling the night in disguise to jab townsfolk with a syringe.

I guide you through this tragic tale of good intentions gone catastrophically wrong: the circus fire that conveniently provides a gorilla corpse, the fashioning of an ape suit that wouldn’t fool a child but somehow terrifies the town, and Adrian’s descent into nightly hunts for “donors.” What could have been schlock is elevated by Karloff, who loads every scene with guilt, tenderness, and the crushing awareness that miracles bought with murder aren’t miracles at all.