Dark Intruder

Dark Intruder
Theatrical poster to Dark Intruder
Directed by	Harvey Hart
Produced by	Jack Laird
Written by	Barré Lyndon
Starring	Leslie Nielsen Gilbert Green Charles Bolender Mark Richman Judi Meredith
Music by	Lalo Schifrin
Cinematography	John F. Warren
Edited by	Edward W. Williams
Release date	1965 (1965)
Running time	59 minutes
Country	United States

Dark Intruder is a 1965 horror film made for TV that was released theatrically, and starring Leslie Nielsen, Mark Richman and Judi Meredith. The film is set in San Francisco in 1890 concerning playboy sleuth and occult expert Brett Kingsford (Nielsen). This atmospheric black-and-white film is only 59 minutes long, was directed by Harvey Hart, and was the pilot for a failed television series called The Black Cloak and was written by Barré Lyndon.

The Black Cloak was to be produced by Alfred Hitchcock's television company, Shamley Productions, which also produced The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and Thriller. When the show was deemed too scary and violent for mid-sixties television, NBC sold it to Universal, who sold it to drive-in theaters as the second feature on a double bill that also included William Castle’s I Saw What You Did (1965).

In plot and character it greatly resembles Chamber of Horrors (1966), which was made the next year and had a similar fate. Critic Leonard Maltin wrote that Dark intruder featured: "Intricate plot and exceptional use of the time period blending with suspense" and that this made it "a one-of-a-kind movie." Dark Intruder showed up from time to time on late night TV throughout the 1970s.

The film opens, after the murder of a woman in dark alley by a mysterious caped figure, on a scene between Kingsford and his fiance Eveleyn Lang (Meredith). Kingsford is an expert on the supernatural and along with his dwarf assistant Nikola (Charles Boldender) he is called in by police to uncover the scheme of a Sumerian demon to return to earth and take over a human body. A series of murders of women (similar to those committed in 1888 London by Jack the Ripper has taken place in San Francisco; in the San Francisco killings, however, a series of statuettes carved of ivory and depicting a repulsive reptilian head is left beside each body. In each statue found at a victim’s feet, the demon in the little figurines emerges from the back of a man, budding out farther with each crime. It as though with each killing, the demon is freeing itself from its host a little bit more. There also seem to be connections between the various four victims.