While Robert Louis Stevenson is best known for Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, his lesser-known work inspired lesser-known films, like The Body Snatcher. Celebrating its venerable 80th birthday today, The Body Snatcher was the seventh in a series of nine horror movies released by RKO Pictures and produced by Val Lewton. Known for their moody, atmospheric tone, suggestive terrors — and, ironically, for inventing the jump scare — Lewton’s horror output included seminal films like Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), The Seventh Victim (1943), and, in 1945, The Body Snatcher, directed by Robert Wise.
Based on an 1884 Stevenson short story, The Body Snatcher starred Boris Karloff as John Gray, a depraved carriage driver who also works as a grave robber for a well-known Edinburgh doctor named Wolfe MacFarlane (Henry Daniell). The film was also loosely inspired by the notorious real-life Burke and Hare killings, in which two Edinburgh men circa 1828 took to murdering people to procure bodies for a Dr. Robert Knox to use in anatomical studies.
