Spooky stories. Without them sites like this one wouldn’t exist and Halloween, if it also still existed, would be significantly less interesting. For folks like myself, nothing compliments Halloween quite like a spooky story. We all have our preferences, but a good old-fashion tale full of ghouls and ghosts and witches in flight just never seems to go too out of style, especially on Halloween.

Brian Schuck returns to the Halloween Horrors series today to present us such a tale. For those that might be unaware, Brian runs one of my favorite movie review sites, Films From Beyond The Time Barrier, which tends to cover horror and sci-fi films of yesteryear, but occasionally dabbles in newer releases. He’s become a great friend and more than occasional motivator, so I’m thrilled to welcome him back to the series for a second year.

FILMS FROM BEYOND: LINK

 

Halloween Witchery: Woman Who Came Back (1945)

Starring Nancy Kelly, John Loder, Otto Kruger, and Ruth Ford

Written by Dennis J. Cooper and Lee Willis; based on a story by John H. Kafka and Philip Yordan

Produced and directed by Walter Comes

Distributed by Republic Pictures

Witches go with Halloween like Uncle Sam with the 4th of July and Old Saint Nick with Christmas. After all, what better time is there to practice the dark arts than October 31, when the barriers between our world and the spirit world break down, and there are so many people in costumes running around that it’s hard to tell the real witches from the fake ones?

In Woman Who Came Back (am I the only one who is bothered by the lack of ‘The’ in the title?), an accused witch burned at the stake 300 years previously chooses the Halloween season to possess a descendant of the judge who condemned her in order to wreak vengeance on her hometown. Or does she?

This modest B programmer from Walter Comes Productions and Republic Pictures wants to have its bat-wing and eye-of-newt cake and eat it too.

The film starts out with a brief narrated history lesson of the “peaceful and quiet” community of Eben Rock, Massachusetts, that “300 years ago was the scene of the Black Terror, the branding of innocent people as witches, with the penalty — death by burning at the stake.”

The narrator goes on to introduce Rev. Jim Stevens (Otto Kruger), who is examining one of the many old documents stored in a crypt under his church that “bears mute witness to the narrow bigotry of those settlers that brought to the new world the dark traditions they tried to escape… nor can the townspeople forget, because still standing is the home of judge Elijah Webster, who was responsible for condemning 18 women to their fiery death.”

So, after taking great pains to establish that it was only bigotry, superstition, and fear behind the colonists’ witch-hunting, the film immediately sets up a scene suggesting that witches are real after all.

The narrator also informs us that by the shores of Shadow Lake stands a monument to Jezebel Trister, who, accompanied by her dog, died at the stake screaming that she would come back to take her revenge.

Cut to a bus rattling along a lonely country road. The driver stops for an old crone in an antique black dress and veil, accompanied by a wolfish-looking dog. The driver refuses to let the dog aboard, but the old woman is undeterred, and offers to pay her fare with a pound note from the original Massachusetts Bay colony.

The crone plops down in a seat next to Lorna Webster (Nancy Kelly), a young woman who, we soon find out, is traveling back to her hometown of Eben Rock after a long absence.

Inexplicably, the old woman knows a lot about Lorna, including that she is the great-great granddaughter of Elijah Webster, When Lorna asks what her name is, she responds “Jezebel Trister” as she lifts her veil and cackles maniacally. At that moment, the lights in the bus flicker rapidly. Distracted, the bus driver fails to make a treacherous curve and the bus takes a spectacular dive over a steep embankment into the lake.

At the nearby inn, proprietor Ruth Gibson (Ruth Ford) is helping her daughter, Peggy, and friends prepare for Halloween when Lorna, soaked to the skin, stumbles in the door. It’s as if Lorna is a benighted spirit who’s come back on All Hallow’s Eve to aimlessly wander the realm of the living.

Seemingly the only survivor of the crash, Lorna is taken to the old Webster mansion to recuperate, attended to by her doting former fiancé, Dr. Matt Adams (John Loder). She insists that an old woman claiming to be Jezebel Trister was on the bus when it crashed, but no body has been found matching the description.

Soon, a series of incidents has Lorna wondering if she’s been possessed by Jezebel’s vengeful spirit and is being forced to commit evil acts against her will. The incidents start out small, but increase in severity as Lorna struggles to keep it together;

  • The old woman’s dog (her familiar?) is seen on the lake shore after the crash, then later takes to skulking around the Webster mansion.
  • When Lorna pauses to look at herself in a mirror, she sees Jezebel’s cackling face instead of her own.
  • Lorna steals into the crypt beneath the church and finds Jezebel’s signed confession to being a witch.
  • Later, while staying with Matt’s widowed sister Ruth, Lorna absent-mindedly (?) feeds the pet goldfish rat poison.
  • Worst of all, when Ruth’s little girl, Peggy (Jeanne Gail) falls mysteriously ill, Matt finds Peggy’s mangled doll behind some books in the Webster mansion library. Lorna doesn’t remember putting it there. Medical science is stumped. Could a Voodoo-like curse be the cause?

All the townspeople except for kindly Dr. Adams and Rev. Stevens wonder too if Lorna isn’t possessed — and it eventually gets to a point where another burning at the stake is a distinct possibility.

Woman Who Came Back is something of an anomaly for its time period. Witches were not in very high demand during the war years. Exceptions were the fantasy-comedy I Married A Witch (1942) with Fredric March and Veronica Lake, and Weird Woman (1944), based on the Fritz Leiber story, with Lon Chaney, Jr., Anne Gwynne, and Evelyn Ankers.

The film was released at a time when audience genre preferences were shifting from Gothic and supernatural horror-thrillers to grittier, more down-to-earth psychological and crime dramas.

Woman Who Came Back bridges the eras with a cagey “is she truly possessed or is it all in her head?” approach, leaning into psychological thriller territory. In a team-up that would never make it into the popular culture of our current divided times, a man of science, Doc Adams, and a man of the cloth, Rev. Stevens, try to convince Lorna that it’s all in her head, while simultaneously trying to prevent the townspeople from stoning her to death.

Unfortunately, the forces of rationality are rather uninspiring (maybe by design?). John Loder as Matt Adams is as bland and stiff as stale white bread. He seems to be channeling the pasty, beta-male “romantic” leads that needed a lot of help saving their girlfriends in horror films of the ’30s. (Loder, who began his career at the dawn of Hollywood’s sound age, mostly played second-fiddle in a variety of A and B pictures leading up to Woman, but horror was a rarity on his resume.)

Adams is almost too forgiving and solicitous of Lorna, who broke off their engagement and left town for unexplained reasons, and is suddenly back, hauling around some big psychological baggage. If Woman had been made a couple of decades later, he’d be the prime suspect in a diabolical plot to drive the young heiress crazy.

Otto Kruger as the refreshingly progressive reverend has more personality, but his character is maddeningly tone-deaf at times, In one scene, Stevens, trying to talk Lorna down from her possession fixation, meets her at the lake that was the scene of her recent trauma, and then proceeds to philosophize in the worst way possible.

“The lake, look at it. Quiet and peaceful, the sun shining on it. You’d never dream that a dozen bodies had been pulled out of there only a week ago. Some people are like that, calm and peaceful on the surface, but underneath full of dark, little secrets…” (Okay, reverend, it’s back to sensitivity training for you…)

Like Loder, Kruger’s horror resume is sparse, with the notable exception of Universal’s underrated Dracula’s Daughter (1936), in which he plays a psychiatrist who treats the enigmatic Countess Zaleska (Gloria Holden).

Woman Who Came Back suffers from a particularly weak and convenient ending (and yes, the doctor and the reverend are both there in all their paternalistic glory), but the atmosphere and tension leading up to the tied-with-a-bow conclusion is well done and worth giving the film a look.

Certain shots — the apparition in the mirror, a huge shadow of Jezebel’s dog appearing on a wall, Lorna running from the darkened, spooky mansion — are as creepily effective as anything in Universal’s stable of horror films from the period.

In addition to Jezebel’s malign presence, the glowering portrait of old Elijah Webster at the mansion works its own evil influence. One scene, in which Lorna, nervous and afraid, keeps stealing glances at the portrait, is reminiscent of Charles Dexter Ward’s encounters with the sinister portrait of his ancestor in Roger Corman’s The Haunted Palace (1963).

Over a decade later, Nancy Kelly would channel that dramatic anxiety into a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her role as the mother of murderous “Rhoda” in The Bad Seed (1957).

If you’re like me and enjoy digging up an obscure title or two for Halloween season viewing, Woman Who Came Back is streaming on Amazon and YouTube (and there are some DVD copies floating around out there).