Bowery at Midnight

Infobox Film
name = Bowery at Midnight


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director = Wallace Fox
producer = Sam Katzman
Jack Dietz
writer = Gerald Schnitzer
narrator =
starring = Béla Lugosi
John Archer
music =
cinematography =
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distributor = Monogram Pictures
released = 1942
runtime = 61 min.
country = United States
language = English
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amg_id = 1:6809
imdb_id = 0034546

Bowery at Midnight (1942) is a horror film starring Béla Lugosi. Lugosi plays a psychology professor by day who, secretly and under an assumed name, runs a Bowery soup kitchen by night called the Bowery Friendly Mission. Lugosi's character uses his soup kitchen as a means to recruit members of a criminal gang, of which he is also secretly the head.

A 'Zombie Film?'

"Bowery at Midnight" is sometimes referred to as a zombie-film, but many find this inaccurate and misleading. [http://www.horrorwatch.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=1131] Throughout the film, one of Lugosi's henchmen, a doctor who seems to be an alcoholic drug-addict, alludes to having plans for the corpses of henchmen Lugosi has had killed. Then, at the end of the film, these corpses are revealed to have been restored to life by the doctor. Lugosi's character meets his demise when the doctor leads the unwitting Lugosi into a basement room where the reanimated corpses are waiting for him.

It is not clear, however, that the doctor has made these men into zombies. All of the men who are reanimated have reasons for wanting to kill the Lugosi character, above and apart from any zombie-induced lust for the flesh of the living.

Near the end of the film, the male lead, played by John Archer, appears to be killed and mysteriously reanimated. Then, in the film's final scene, he appears restored to his former health, and not like a zombie at all.