The Diabolical Dr. Z

The Diabolical Dr. Z (AKA Miss Muerte), from 1966, was a Spanish and French co-production directed by Jesús Franco. Its blend of black and white expressionist style, atonal Jazz score, avant garde burlesque, and new wave science fiction aesthetics put this film in a special place within European arthouse horror.

Somewhere in western Europe - the language is French but the locations are Germanic - there is a violent prison break. The Strangler, Hans Bergen (Guy Mairesse), sentenced to death, escapes his fate but is gravely wounded in the process. The camera is close in, over the shoulder third person. It's immersive, feeling like a computer game, Splinter Cell and its ilk. He collapses at Dr. Zimmer's (Antonio Jiménez Escribano) front gate to be carried in by Zimmer's assistant Barbara Albert (Lucía Prado) and daughter Irma (Mabel Karr). Irma's name seems to be a reference to Musidora's Irma Vep in Les Vampires.

The wheelchair-using, Nazi coded, [1] Dr. Zimmer performs a mind control operation on the killer. Zimmer theorises that there are two areas of the brain that control a person's morality, one for good and one for evil. Uninvited he, Irma at his side, attends a conference of his former peers to present his theory. They deprecate him and his crackpot pseudoscience. [2] When he proposes human testing on prisoners they refuse, stating that they are not Nazis. [3] From the stress of the confrontation Dr. Zimmer collapses in front of them, dead.

Before leaving for home, Irma meets with a former acquaintance from medical school, Dr. Phillippe Brighthouse (Fernando Montes), and visits a cabaret. On seeing a surreal erotic performance by Nadia (Estella Blain), stage name Miss Death, Irma decides to seeks revenge against those she holds responsible for her father's death.

On her journey home she picks up and murders a female hitchhiker. The lesbian allusions in these scenes will end up being full frontal in Franco's later movies. Irma, while using the body to fake her own death, suffers burns to her face. What happens next takes a lot of inspiration from Georges Franju's Eyes Without A Face. Returning to the club with Hans Bergen, now her mind-controlled henchman, she abducts Miss Death to use as her instrument of vengeance. As Death, Blain gives the audience seductive athletics, zombie-like blankness as a killer, the desolation of a prisoner, all played perfectly.

At 90 odd minutes in length, The Diabolical Dr. Z contains a lot of plot and a lot of detail. Inspector Green (Daniel White, the film's composer) and Inspector Tanner (Jesús Franco) from Scotland Yard (police from London adds to the ambiguity of the films location) come across small clues that are only briefly shown on camera, or imply what they know with a question. The ending may seem a little like a deus ex machina but if you watch closely it makes sense - the pieces add up.

The film also contains quite a few references to other films and filmmakers. In the shots chosen and the names of places and characters. It is easy to spot La Jetée, Fritz Lang (film and eyepach), Jean-Luc Godard, and to Franco himself with Inspector Tanner and Dr. Orloff. Numerous horror films show the influence of this film, and others by Franco. It's part of the canon of European horror. But it goes further. The mechanised operating table in Zimmer's laboratory ends up with the ripper docs of post-mirrorshades cyberpunk.

In The Diabolical Dr. Z the nudity, sex and violence that Franco's films are known for isn't on full display, as it is in his later films. It is almost safe for work. A blend of horror, science fiction, noir and police procedural along with stylistic innovations and a brilliant score by Daniel White makes for an interesting watch.

[1] Dr. Strangelove was released in 1964 two years before The Diabolical Dr. Z.

[2] The countries of Spain and France were at the time strongly Catholic so the theory would be epistemologically controversial.

[3] The free world was already back at this with MKULTRA.

Reviewed on: 19 Oct 2025