Carole Lombard stars as pretty heiress Roma Courtney, whose twin brother (Lyman Williams) has recently died. In her grief, Roma makes an easy target for sham medium Paul Bavian (Alan Dinehart), who claims that her brother's restless spirit wants to speak to her. At the same time, Roma's family friend, Dr. Houston (H.B. Warner), has a theory about the malevolent souls of evil people remaining active after death, and to test it he conducts experiments with the body of executed strangler Ruth Rogen (Vivienne Osborne). Unfortunately for Roma, Ruth's spirit manages to possess her in order to get revenge on the former lover who ratted Ruth out to the police, who is none other than Paul Bavian.
Pre-Code status lets Supernatural engage in more death, sex, and violence than a later production could have dared to include, which makes it fascinating to watch even when it falls apart as a narrative. It revels in its lady strangler's crimes, trial, and execution, all of which open the picture as a montage accompanied by a chorus of marvelously eerie wails. Later scenes involve onscreen murders with actors really making the most of their death scenes; my favorite is the conniving landlady (Beryl Mercer), whose early demise tells us a lot about her tenant's true nature. We also get some startling scenes of Ruth's corpse in Dr. Houston's laboratory, which aren't gruesome or gory but still not the kind of thing you'd be likely to see after 1934. There's little romance to speak of, as Randolph Scott mostly stands around in a tux like a handsome statue, but the intimate encounter between the possessed Roma and the unsuspecting Bavian is both racy and unsettling.
Lombard draws attention as the most famous star with the biggest role, especially because horror is not her usual territory, but I'm more struck by Vivienne Osborne's performance as the murderess. She doesn't get as much screen time as Lombard, being dead and an invisible ghost through most of the movie, but when we do see her she really owns the role. She laughs, weeps, and rages with the abandon of the damned, as monstrous in her own way as Claude Rains' Invisible Man or Fredric March's Hyde. We don't often get female villains as unhinged as Ruth Rogen in classic movies, and we certainly don't see a lot of women who compulsively strangle their lovers with their bare hands. Although she started her career in silent films and successfully made the transition to talkies, I've only seen Osborne in one other picture, her swan song appearance in Dragonwyck (1946), and I thought she made the most of a small role there, as well.
Director Victor Halperin also made the 1932 Bela Lugosi chiller, White Zombie, and Revolt of the Zombies (1936). Lombard, of course, would go on to make comedy classics like Twentieth Century (1934), My Man Godfrey (1936), and To Be or Not to Be (1942). Although Randolph Scott is best remembered for Western roles, you can also catch him in the very weird thriller, Murders in the Zoo (1933) and the 1935 adaptation of H. Rider Haggard's She. Scott and Alan Dinehart both appear in the Shirley Temple picture, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938), while Beryl Mercer makes her own appearance with Temple as Queen Victoria in The Little Princess (1939), a role she repeats in The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939).
