Villain(s)  Mad doctor

Actor(s):  Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, Betta St. John, Finlay Currie

Brief Description  Corridors of Blood is a 1958 British period drama/horror film (released in the US in 1962/1963) directed by Robert Day, starring Boris Karloff as a compassionate 1840s surgeon who becomes addicted to his own experimental anesthetic and falls into a grim underworld of body snatching and murder alongside Christopher Lee.

Plot:
Set in 1840s Victorian London, eminent surgeon Dr. Thomas Bolton (Boris Karloff) is tormented by the agonizing screams of patients undergoing primitive, pre-anesthesia surgeries. Desperate to find a reliable gas anesthetic, he begins testing volatile chemical mixtures and nitrous oxide on himself. During a public demonstration before his medical colleagues—including his skeptical son Jonathan—a patient wakes up mid-operation in a horrific mishap. Humiliated and disgraced, Bolton is dismissed from his hospital post.

As Bolton continues self-experimentation, he develops a severe addiction to the inhalation gases and opium-based components. Seeking refuge or working in the squalid Seven Dials district, he crosses paths with a gang of brutal resurrectionists (grave robbers and killers) led by the tavern keeper Black Ben and the cold, menacing enforcer Resurrection Joe (Christopher Lee). Black Ben exploits Bolton's compromised, drug-addled state by withholding his vital research notebook. In exchange for the return of his notes and a steady supply to feed his addiction, Bolton unwittingly signs off on falsified death certificates for healthy people murdered by Resurrection Joe to supply fresh cadavers to the medical college.

Bolton loses his grip on sanity as his life spirals into moral decay and professional ruin. When he tries to break free from the criminal arrangement or secure further access to the hospital's dispensary illegally, the blackmail tightens. Ultimately, Bolton's descent culminates in his own entrapment and tragic death at the hands of the very monsters he was forced to shield, serving as a cautionary tale of scientific ambition subverted by addiction and Victorian squalor.