The success of German emigre Paul Leni's The Cat and the Canary in 1927 spawned a number of imitations in the haunted-house subgenre. During his speediest, most productive filmmaking phase, Christensen made four films for First National during 1928 and 1929-a Chinatown underworld film and three "comedy-mysteries." The Hawk's Nest, The Haunted House, and # all remain lost films, but Seven Footprints to Satan surfaced again in the 1960s. This second in Christensen's comedy-mystery trilogy suggests that he thrived in this genre, where his gifts for eroticized fantasy and horror, sudden narrative twists, surrealist comic irony, and mobile, expressionist camerawork (in collaboration with Sol Polito) were all given much freer imaginative rein than at MGM. Seven Footprints stars Creighton Hale and Thelma Todd as a couple mysteriously kidnapped and taken to the fantasy-nightmare mansion of a hooded cult leader known only as Satan. To give away any more of the plot would spoil too much of the thrill-ride fun and perverse pleasure.-Arne Lunde