Lewton exhumes a grisly episode in medical history—the notorious case of corpsemongers Burke and Hare, who supplied anatomist Robert Knox with fresh specimens for dissection—by way of Robert Louis Stevenson's fictionalized account. Carefully designed details and haunting folk ballads evoke the melancholy mood of 1830s Edinburgh, where famed Dr. MacFarlane (the wonderfully offputting Henry Daniell) runs his medical school with subterranean help from the Burkelike cabman Gray, played by Boris Karloff with lugubrious wit. (Bela Lugosi also puts in an appearance as a skulking, dimwitted assistant.) Remarking “That's the soul of the business, the pay,” the hideously shrewd Gray indicates a more honest view of medical ethics than the medical men; like that other famous Karloff monster, in Frankenstein, Gray is a cautionary embodiment of the distinctions between success and virtue, knowledge and understanding, anatomy and life.
—Juliet Clark