Movies Made Here: The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962)

The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, for starters, is a misnomer. (The movie was alternately called The Head that Wouldn’t Die but that’s wrong too.) Not far into this film, the viewer realizes it should more accurately be called The brain/head that actually really wants to die, so much so that it gets angry at the person keeping it alive and seeks bodiless revenge. Or something like that.

Ah, these innocently evil movies from the ‘60s, gotta love ‘em. Imagine my delight when I realized in compiling my list of , that this so-bad-it’s-good horror debacle that lives in dollar store DVD on my home bookshelf was exactly filmed, in its entirety, in Tarrytown!

Location facts more specific than this are fuzzy and impossible to track down. The film took all of two weeks to film, on a skimpy stripper-outfit budget of $125K. Beyond the façade of some mansion, a car speeding through country roads, and a walk down a TTown-esque looking lane of houses, the rest comes from some “sound stage in a hotel basement.”  Which hotel, I know not, but it hardly matters. The interior sets of this movie are as barebones as can be, with little more than a chair and a table within their blank walls.

The movie begins in an operating room, father and son doctors debating their next move on the supposed deceased. The son wants to massage the man’s heart and zap his brain a bit to revive him (Frankenstein anyone?). The father quite tediously and bad-actingly disapproves of this mad science. Bizarrely bloodless, these procedures are done nonetheless; the dead man of course survives.

Enter the gorgeous nurse, Dr. Bill Cortner’s fiancé, and the real fun begins. The young doctor gets summoned to his “country cottage” where something is amiss. Doctor and dame race in their car to get there, the engine roaring and tires rattling in a way that reminded me of .

Sure enough, the car crashes and Doctor is, again bloodlessly, hurled from the vehicle while his lady doesn’t fare so well. She’s been decapitated, we’ll find out soon enough, and he’s staggering to his cottage with her head in his arms. How serendipitous for the man whose secret hobby is reconstituting dead people from limbs and organs he steals from the hospital: he can save his love!

The cottage is ridiculously not a cottage, but rather Lyndhurstian (though not quite Lyndhurst). I ran this by my local historian contact, Jim Logan of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery Historic Fund and he surmised the façade we see for a moment to be the Edgemont Estate, a 22-room mansion on Benedict and Prospect once owned by the Detmer family. Like so many grand mansions of the time, it burned down in 1971.

Inside (or rather in the bland rooms so clearly not filmed in any such mansion), our Doctor Strangelove hooks the head up to some apparatus, juices it with the special serum, and leaves it percolating there on a tray. The head belongs to Jan and thus was born the "Jan in a Pan" joke for those punsters in the know. Jan is now conscious and not happy with this treatment; neither is the blob monstermashing in the closet, the sum total of all these connected stolen parts that the good doctor’s been experimenting with for years. Via telepathy, head and body team up. 

Meanwhile, doctor is on a lascivious tour of local hotspots (the street, a model’s studio, a burlesque club, a stage with a bikini contest) on the hunt for his own perfect union: a beautiful body for his lover's head. The dream of the ideal woman: smart brain, pretty face, perfect proportions. This is all great fun for the viewer (and for our horny hero), as we get to see scantily clad strippers catfighting (“hold your g-string” one says to another) and hear other unsubtle innuendo galore as he tries to lure lone women home with him for murderous good times.

For the era, it’s pretty racy, as are the final blood smears and gross wounds (finally some gore!). For these reasons, the movie almost never came to be. Banned and censored, it was finished in 1959 but only allowed to release in 1962.

At last, we get to see the monster in the closet, a moment that imprinted many a young kid, including Tim Burton, who cites this as a influence on his work (and included it in the film series accompanying his recent MoMA show).

The monster, interestingly enough, was played by a real seven-foot-giant, none other than the “Jewish Giant” dwarfing his parents in the famous photograph by Diane Arbus. Eddie Carmel made his living as a circus act but this movie was his first foray into cinema. If you want to call it that.

The Brain That Wouldn’t Die is available to watch, for free, and in its entirety on YouTube; click here. You have nothing to lose but your head!