The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake

In 1959, Edward L. Cahn directed The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake, a dandy spookfest made better by the screenwriter obviously doing his research and a terrific performance by veteran character actor Henry Daniell as the villain.

The subject of horror in this film is head-shrinking. After seeing the film I read up on the topic on Wikipedia, and found that screenwriter Orville H. Hampton clearly knew his stuff. Head-shrinking was a ritual practiced by the Jivoroan Indians of Ecuador. The shrunken heads were called tsantsas, and the process involved removing the skull, suturing the lips together, and boiling the flesh, using hot sand and stones--all of this is in the film. At times, Daniell, who is the headshrinker expert here, goes about his business with a kind of calm efficiency that makes one recall Martha Stewart baking a bundt cake.

The Jonathan Drake of the title is a professor of occult sciences. His brother is murdered by a huge South American Indian who also has his lips sewn together. He uses curare poison, but the doctor thinks it's a heart attack. Only when the corpse's head goes missing does a policeman (Grant Richards) suspect something unusual is going on.

It seems that the Drake family wiped out an Indian village some 180 years prior, and since then there has been a curse on all male descendants. They die of heart attacks at age sixty, and their skulls mysteriously end up in the family vault.

Though there is little violence in this film, it is wonderfully spooky. Shrunken heads have always given me the willies; maybe it was from Gilligan's Island episodes in which the castaways talk of their fear of headhunters. The Indian, played by Paul Wexler, who is about as South American as I am, is nonetheless scary, and I'm sure young kids during the 50s got quite a fright from his appearance.