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Ruth Rogen (Vivienne Osborne) is sent to the gallows for strangling a
bunch of men, but she dies swearing to avenge herself on the man who
betrayed her, Paul Bavian (Alan Dinehart). After her death, a prominent
psychiatrist, Doctor Houston (H.B. Warner), claims Ruth's body, basically
because he wants to prove Ruth was possessed by some evil spirit that is
still with us, somewhere. He starts performing weird experiments on the
corpse. Roma Courtney (Carole Lombard) just can't get over the death of
her brother John (Lyman Williams), this is why she decides to visit a
spiritist, much against the advice of her fiancé Grant (Randolph Scott)
and the executor of her family's fortune Nick Hammond (William Farnum).
The spiritist, by the way, is Paul Bavian, and he's a fraud and murderer,
yet during the séance, Hammond is fingered as John's mruderer. Totally
worked up, Roma goes to visit her psychiatrist, who just happens to be Doc
Houston, and who suggests to invite Bavian for another séance. During
that séance, Hammond is accused of killing John yet again, and he dies
soon afterwards. In the confusion that ensues, Roma escapes with Bavian -
but she's not Roma anymore, somehow the spirit of Ruth Rogen has taken
possession of her. Eventually, possessed Roma and Bavian end up on
Roma's yacht, where she tries to strangle Bavian ... but then her
boyfriend Clint interferes, everything leads to a brawl, and at the end,
Bavian falls overboard, but gets caught up in the ropes and thus hangs
himself. Ruth Rogen dispossesses Roma, she falls into Clint's arms, and
the spirit of John approves ... Ok, storywise this film is a
complete disaster, even for a low budget 1930's genre film, but just like
the Halperins' better known masterpiece White
Zombie, Supernatural relies more on atmosphere than
narrative, and it creates this atmosphere by reviving many techniques from
silent cinema, experimental films and the like. In other words, the film
is not as slickly (and boringly) shot and edited as most films of the time
but used camera movements, detail shots and the like to heighten its
effect. However, Supernatural is no White
Zombie and is marred by quite a few narrative as well as
directorial bumps - but it's still a pretty impressive and rather unusual
horror movie ...
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