Crimson Stain Mystery, The
Entry updated 21 September 2026. Tagged: Film.
US silent Serial Film (1916). Erbograph Co. Directed by T Hayes Hunter. Written by Albert Payson Terhune. Cast includes William Cavanaugh, Maurice Costello, Ethel Grandin, Thomas J McGrane, John Milton, Olga Olonova and N J Thompson. 16 chapters; 355 minutes in total. Black and white.
Eleven reels of this serial survive (discovered in 1978); a novelization, "The Crimson Stain Mystery" by its scriptwriter Albert Payson Terhune (1872-1942), was serialized in local papers of towns where the film was being shown (a common practice), with that from the Richmond Times-Dispatch (17 September-21 December 1916) held at the Internet Archive. Also, Moving Picture World's weekly plot summaries are available at IMDb [see links below for both]. These, plus the 9 minutes of chapter 2 on YouTube, are the main sources for this entry. Quotes are from the newspaper serial unless otherwise stated.
Scientist and widower Dr Montrose (McGrane) and assistant the "smugly servile" Felix (Cavanaugh) have recently been joined by the former's daughter Florence (Grandin); we see her walking with her beau Harold Stanley (Costello). As a journalist at the Examiner, a newspaper owned by his father, Harold explains he is investigating "The Crimson Stain Mystery", where a New York banker had been robbed and choked to death by long and slender hands of great strength, using a grip favoured by the "jiu-jitsu experts of Japan and the Apaches of Paris". Thirteen more such murders followed, with one victim surviving just long enough to utter the words "crimson stain". Florence now sees a man being throttled in a nearby house and Harold rushes to intervene: the strangler turns on him, but Florence arrives with a policeman in time and the killer flees. In the darkness Harold could not make out the attacker's face, but reports their eyes were a "fiery crimson. As if ... stained with blood." Parrish (Milton), the "great international detective" assigned to the case, is dismissive. Later, we see a gang of five ne'er-do-wells gather in a room, all male save for Vanya Tosca (Olonova), "for very obvious reasons" nicknamed "the Vampire"; others present include Tanner (Thompson), a masked figure and the bearded "Pierre La Rue", who is the group's leader and the strangler.
Next day Vanya and Tanner visit Dr Montrose, and after some protest – he knows they are connected to the murders – they are taken to his laboratory where he attaches bracelets wired to an electrical, "intricate looking machine" (see Inventions) into which he pours a liquid, then pulls a lever. They are revitalized by the experience (at one point in the serial Vanya says "I need a charge from your machine which has made me what I am and keeps me alive"). We read an entry from the doctor's diary for 3 December 1914 (the current date is 22 June 1916) where he boasts of having devised a compound that turns "a mediocre Intelligence into a sublime genius". He used four people as guinea pigs, with the results initially favourable: "they seemed like members of a new and vastly superior race of men" (see Superman); he later notes that one, Pierre La Rue, has developed a dominating personality. Further entries paint a darker picture: the Drug has "intensified a hundredfold the crime instincts of these four people", and Montrose has become subservient to La Rue. The group regularly comes to him demanding further doses.
Because of the Examiner's crusade to capture the serial murderer, Harold's father is killed by La Rue;the son responds by stepping up the campaign, so La Rue decides to kill him. The first attempt is botched and Florence sees La Rue's face. He puts her into a hypnotic trance (see Hypnosis): when this fails to wipe her memory of him, he tries unsuccessfully to blow her up. At one point Harold discovers Vanya hypnotized by La Rue, and sees that man's face caught in her eyes (presumably a variation of Optography). Photographing the image, he intends to print it in The Examiner and circulate it to police stations; but Parrish clumsily drops the photographic plate and it shatters (later to be pieced together).
Montrose refuses to provide any more treatments for his former experimental subjects; La Rue decides to steal the machine and kill the doctor, and tries to hypnotize Harold into performing the latter act; but a stalwart fellow such as Harold is immune. The apparatus and drug are eventually stolen. In chapter 16 Harold learns Felix's story: a promising but penniless chemist whom Montrose compassionately employed as servant and laboratory assistant, he reveals Montrose was his own first test subject and the drug's beneficial effects led the doctor to try it on four others of good repute. These were Tanner, Vanya, a man called Morrison (a minor character in the story) and Parrish (the masked man at their meetings): "They became brilliant in conversation, deep and logical thinkers, splendidly intellectual ... It meant a race of wise and illustrious men and women." However, Montrose had angrily refused Felix's request to propose to his daughter, so in revenge the latter had poisoned all future batches of the drug, intending to counteract its benefits. Instead the effect was warped, turning the noble geniuses into criminal geniuses. As for La Rue, he falls off an embankment during a pursuit by Harold and dies: behind the false beard and wig is Dr Montrose. To protect Florence, whom he marries, Harold tells everyone that Montrose was killed by an automobile and La Rue drowned.
The serial includes a poisonous snake in a box of orchids, disguises, secret passages, cliffhangers, a cipher and coincidences, but – between the explanation of Dr Montrose's experiments and Felix's account – little in the way of genre elements save for hypnosis and the preservation of images by the eyes. Dr Montrose is presumably suffering from schizophrenia (see Psychology), with scenes where he is in dispute with La Rue being hallucinations reflecting his inner conflict, and La Rue's plans to kill Montrose arguably a Suicidal impulse.
One problem is that of five supposed geniuses, only La Rue and Vanya are shown to be reasonably if not exceptionally intelligent; Parrish might be excused as he is being deliberately incompetent to hinder the investigation. (Whether this is intentional Parody of the crime story Cliché of bungling detectives is unclear.) In the newspaper version Florence seems a competent and active participant (see Women in SF), though in the portion of the film seen Grandin's performance seems childlike: "I wish you wouldn't work so hard with these old drugs, daddy, you never smile any more." The Crimson Stain Mystery's theme of raising Intelligence is interesting but not developed, being irrelevant to most of the actual story, which consists of the usual back and forth of serial films. As the first such US serial (What Happened to Mary) had been released only in 1912, what now strikes contemporary viewers as clichéd may then have seemed reasonably fresh. [SP]
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