EDITOR’S NOTE: The Devil Commands was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 2, 1967 at 11:20 p.m.

Director Edward Dmytryk is best known for his film noir movies, winning Oscars for directing Crossfire and The Caine Mutiny and being named as one of the Hollywood Ten. This group of blacklisted film industry professionals refused to testify to the McCarthy-led House Un-American Activities Committee and, as a result, served time in prison for contempt of Congress. In 1951, however, Dmytryk testified to the HUAC and named Arnold Manoff, Frank Tuttle, Herbert Biberman, Jack Berry, Bernard Verhous, Jules Dassin, Michael Gordon and 15 others. He claimed that the Alger Hiss case, which found Communist spies in the U.S. and Canada, and the invasion of South Korea changed his mind. That said, he probably also wanted to improve his own career.

The screenplay was written by Robert Hardy Andrews and Milton Gunzburg, the inventor of the Natural Vision stereoscopic 3-D system, based on a story by William Sloane, who also wrote To Walk the Night.

Boris Karloff plays Dr. Julian Blair, a brain wave researcher, who loses his wife Helen (Shirley Warde) when she dies in a car crash. He becomes obsessed with communicating with her in the world beyond death. He is assisted by his butler, Karl (Ralph Penney), and a Spiritualist medium named Mrs. Walters (Anne Revere), whose influence over the once logical man worries his research assistant, Richard (Richard Fiske), and his daughter, Anne (Amanda Duff).

I enjoy how, in these Columbia films, Karloff is the villain, yet there are reasons why he has gone wrong. It’s an intriguing way of approaching an antagonist, and Karloff makes each of them their own unique version of an archetype.