While producer Val Lewton labored at RKO Radio Pictures on a series of horror thrillers to compete with the output of the Universal monster factory, other producers at the studio were pressed into service crafting B-features to accompany Lewton's films in cinemas. The Lewton-produced The Body Snatcher (1945), directed by Robert Wise and starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in their last team-up, was intended to occupy the top slot in a proposed double bill with Max Nosseck's The Brighton Strangler (1945) commissioned as a like-minded "co-hit." The tale of an actor (John Loder) who suffers a war-related head injury while playing a serial killer and who comes to in the rubble of the theatre in character, The Brighton Strangler took its cues less from the Lewton school of suggestion than from Warner Brothers' The Lodger (1944) and Hangover Square (1945); Nosseck's screenwriter, Arnold Phillips, had also scripted Bluebeard (1944), starring John Carradine as a serial wife killer. Shot with an abundance of expressionistic shadows by J. Roy Hunt (who had lensed Lewton's I Walked With a Zombie), The Brighton Strangler was a rare opportunity for the London-born John Loder to play the leading man, having contributed solid support to such films as Sabotage (1936), How Green Was My Valley (1941) and Now, Voyager (1942). His inability to land quality roles in Hollywood eventually drove Loder back to England, where he turned up in The Story of Esther Costello (1957) with Joan Crawford and John Ford's Gideon of Scotland Yard (1958).

By Richard Harland Smith