The Black Sleep

The Black Sleep 1956 is an American blackandwhite horror film, scripted by John C. Higgins from a story by Gerald Drayson Adams developed for producers Aubrey Schenck and Howard W. Koch, who had a fourpicture financefordistribution arrangement with United Artists. The film was rereleased in 1962 as Dr. Cadmans Secret.

Set in England in 1872, the story concerned a prominent, knighted surgeon whose wife has fallen into a coma caused by a deepseated brain tumor. Due to medicines state of the art at the time, he does not know how to reach the tumor without risking brain damage or death to the woman he loves, so he undertakes to secretly experiment on the brains of living, but involuntary, human subjects who are under the influence of a powerful Indian anesthetic, Nind Andhera, which he calls the Black Sleep. Once he has finished his experiment, surviving subjects are revived and placed, in seriously degenerated and mutilated states, in a hidden cellar in the gloomy, abandoned country abbey where he conducts his experiments.Produced during 1955, the film went into theaters in the early summer of 1956, just ahead of the TV syndication by Universal Pictures of its two decades of monster movies through Screen Gems, under the package title of Shock Theater. Writer Higgins, director LeBorg, and stars Rathbone, Chaney, Carradine, and Lugosi had all been significantly associated with Universal horror films or related B movies. It is similar to the two houseful of monster films of Universal in the mid40s, House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula, only relying on a completely new cadre of human monsters. ........

Source: Wikipedia