Horror Comic Review - John DAgostino – The Living-Dead

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Dark Mysteries 1954 Spoiler alerts A quite ghastly attempt at shock horror that really piles in everything it can until it tastes like a cake with too many ingredients. A middle aged German tourist finds himself in a remote detached guest house of the kind only found in horror and ghost stories. He finds the atmosphere and strange noises too horrible to contemplate but stays because there is a beautiful woman there. He discovers a room full of sleeping people and no matter what he does, he can’t wake them, but they are not dead. When he reveals his name to the girl running the house she realizes her destiny is fulfilled. She tells him that he is the son of a Concentration Camp doctor who has trapped victims in an endless sleep from which only the family blood is an antidote. He is the last carrier of that blood. She draws the young man’s blood which awakens the patients and kills them off at the same time while she herself ages and uglifies on it. The man dies from blood loss as the ghouls do, and the zombified girl gloats over him. This tries very hard but it is too congested and such an absurd coincidence that the man arrives at just that house. To suggest he is to blame or punish for his father’s evils is also rather prejudicial. Arthur Chappell