The Brain that Wouldn’t Die (1962)

The Brain that Wouldn’t Die centers around Dr. Bill Cortner (Herb Evers,) a man who’s been performing some unethical experiments involving human patients. He’s grafted body parts from corpses onto living bodies to various degrees of success. When he uses his techniques to revive a man who’s been pronounced dead, he believes he’s on the right track to revolutionizing science. Ethics be damned.

Plans to celebrate his success with his girlfriend, Jan (Virginia Leith,) are cut short by a car accident. Bill is thrown from the vehicle but Jan’s head is decapitated. Unable to save her, Bill does what any normal person would do. He takes her head, wraps it in his jacket, and stumbles to his laboratory. He plans to keep her head alive until he can find a suitable body for it.

So, for most of the movie, Bill prowls strip clubs and city streets for the right woman to abduct and kill for her body. Meanwhile, Jan discovers that the chemicals Bill uses to keep her brain alive also give her strange powers over one of Bill’s former experiments: a “thing” kept locked in a closet for safety.

I have to confess a soft spot in my heart for The Brain that Wouldn’t Die. When I was five years old, one of the local TV stations spent a week hyping an airing of the movie on a Saturday night. I thought it looked phenomenal and couldn’t wait to see it. When the time came to watch it, I settled in front of the large black-and-white console TV that I had in my bedroom at the time. I was so excited. But my five-year-old brain couldn’t comprehend the fright I received when the movie’s monster-in-the-closet revealed himself. I ran down the flight of stairs outside my bedroom door so fast I don’t think my feet touched a step on the way down. That was my first experience being scared out of my mind by a horror movie.

I never watched the movie again until about ten years ago and, predictably, it didn’t have quite the same effect. I decided to re-watch it this year because I remembered very little about it aside from “that scene.”

Viewed through adult eyes, The Brain that Wouldn’t Die is more sleazy than scary. Dr. Bill’s journey through swanky burlesque clubs and “body beautiful” contests provides an insight into director/co-writer Joseph Green’s warped sense of female objectification more than anything else. Even when viewed as a product of its time, it’s still rather repulsive. (Co-star Virginia Leith hated this film so much that she refused to return to overdub some of her dialogue. As a result, her character’s voice changes from scene-to-scene.)

This is a movie that was improved significantly by the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment it received in 1993. Even so, it’s still the film that introduced me to the joys of being scared out of my mind. I don’t recommend it but I’ll always love it for that reason alone.

(Just a bit of trivia: Because he was the first movie monster to scare the bejeezus out of me, the film’s creature-in-the-closet is used in this website’s logo and my YouTube channel’s title screens. It’s my little tribute to the movie’s effect on five-year-old me.)