A 1942 mystery-horror movie from Monogram Pictures (the old name for Allied Artists), Bowery at Midnight was another vehicle for Bela Lugosi toward the decline of his career in the 40s, where his starring roles were generally reduced to smaller, lower-budget films such as Bowery.
In this film Bela Lugosi plays the Villain Protagonist, a career criminal named Karl Wagner (alias Professor Brenner) who hides his evil actions behind the front of a soup kitchen, which culminates with a surprising supernatural twist.
The film exists in the public domain and can be watched here
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The film has the following tropes:
- Bad Boss: Karl Wagner kills many, many people either to cover up his crimes or merely in the act of committing them, but he kills more of his own men than anyone else in the film. He forces them to shoot each other, chucks them off buildings, and he's revealed to have slain so many over the course of his career that he has a literal graveyard in his basement filled with nothing but dead minions. Said minions don't stay dead for long.
- Genre Shift: Though it is built up in a sub-plot, the film takes a rather radical swerve into supernatural horror after a full hour of being a mostly straightforward murder-thriller. The Mad Scientist working for Wagner rather suddenly reveals he's raised the living dead, who swarm Wagner and rip him to pieces in revenge for having been killed in life.
- Karmic Death: Wagner's demise comes when all the many, many people he's murdered in the past are resurrected as zombies, who converge upon him and show no mercy.
- Mad Scientist: One of these works for Wagner. He's a somewhat anti-heroic example: although there's nothing particularly benevolent about him, he's the one to dispatch Wagner at the end, through the use of zombies he's raised by experimenting on the cadavers Wagner's victims.
- Psycho Psychologist: In the guise of "Professor Brenner," Wagner is a respected criminology professor. This only seems to highlight how comfortable Wagner is with his own criminal personality.
- The Sociopath: One of the most wicked roles Lugosi ever played (in a filmography that includes Dracula himself). Karl Wagner commits robbery, betrayal, and serial murder—including of his own innocent students and his loving wife—all while effortlessly pretending to be an upstanding citizen.
- Villain with Good Publicity: In his public guise, Wagner is a kindly, respected psychologist who runs a soup kitchen. In private, he's completely nuts.
