Recently discovered horror film made in Seattle is being shown for the first time in nearly 90 years

By the time he was 20 years old, Seattle amateur filmmaker Richard Lyford had already made nine films, including “The Scalpel.” Lyford wrote, directed, starred in and made the silent horror movie in 1936 when he was still in his teens.

The film also showcased Lyford’s skills with makeup and early cinematic special effects, which he used to transform himself into a Dr. Jekyll-like scientist who experiments on himself with gruesome and tragic results.

According to Seattle composer and producer Ed Hartman, “The Scalpel” was never publicly shown, apart from a handful of screenings to friends and family and an amateur film club. But thanks to Hartman, who led the restoration of the film and composed a new soundtrack for it, “The Scalpel” is now being released for the first time in nearly 90 years. Since last August, it’s been accepted at more than 150 film festivals, including the Portland Horror Film Festival where it will have its local premiere at the Clinton Street Theater on Saturday. Hartman joins us to talk about Lyford’s legacy, restoring this hidden gem of the horror genre and what lessons it offers to budding filmmakers.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. By the time he was 20 years old, the amateur Seattle filmmaker Richard Lyford had already made nine films. One of them was a silent horror movie called “The Scalpel.” Lyford wrote, directed, and starred in it while he was still in his teens. That was in 1936. The film was impressive for its technical wizardry, but almost nobody saw it at the time and it could have fully disappeared. But not too long ago, Seattle composer and producer Ed Hartman tracked it down, got it restored, and wrote a soundtrack for it.

“The Scalpel” has now been accepted at more than 150 film festivals, including the Portland Horror Film Festival. It’ll have its local premiere at the Clinton Street Theater as part of that festival tomorrow, and Ed Hartman joins us now to talk about it. It’s great to have you on the show.

Hartman: Thank you very much. I’m happy to be here.

Miller: How did Richard Lyford get into movie making in the 1930s?

Hartman: Well, I think he acquired a camera fairly early on. My theory is it might have come from Boeing because the family did know the Boeings. It’s just a theory. But he was fascinated by graphics. He could draw with both hands at the same time. He was a good photographer, his dad was in the timber industry, he was taking pictures, so I think they had a dark room in their house and photography in general was there.

But I can also say that Lyford was interested in stage and screen. He saw movies, but he also saw stage and in fact produced 58 stage and screenplays – or I should say wrote – before he was 20 as well. He wrote about all this in American Cinematographer, so we have a good record of all this sort of thing. In fact, he started by producing plays in his basement theater that eventually had 50 seats set up.

Miller: He built a 50-seat theater in his basement?

Hartman: Yes, and I’ve been in this house. It’s a beautiful house. The folks that live there are great. I think what made it work was that it’s a three story house, but the basement is a daylight and it has an entrance coming out the back into an alley, and I think that way you could have family and friends come in the back and screen the films down there. It’s amazing what it was, that he was able to put that on, but it gave him a place to actually show these things and really experiment with film quite a bit.

Miller: What did it mean to be an amateur filmmaker in the 1930s?

Hartman: Well you’d think, “how many were there?” But he was a member of the Amateur Cinema League. So across the country, there were a lot of people that were making [and] liking home movies, just like people do with phones or I did with Super 8 as a kid. He just took it to the nth degree, and in fact, “The Scalpel” won an award with at least one of those. He submitted them and actually made some cash with this stuff, which inevitably paid for the next film. But he had no money to do any of this sort of thing aside from what he did and with his graphics and that sort of thing, he probably worked for Nordstroms and stuff like that in his teens doing pictures and signage for people, and that would always pay for another project.

Miller: How did you first hear about Richard Lyford?

Hartman: Well, I found out through my contact with the family’s great niece of Richard Lyford, Kim Lyford. She was a student of mine. I’m a percussion teacher. But back in 2013 on the classic horror film chatboard, people found this video called “Monsters Crashed the Pajama Party” by Something Weird distributors in Seattle. Through his articles, Lyford, they figured out – these are very bright folks on there – they figured out there were two clips on there: “Ritual of the Dead” and “The Scalpel,” and they figured out it was Lyford who was involved in those because these were just anonymously part of this Halloween video. Eventually they contacted Kim in Seattle. She took over the Lyford film estate from Chris, his son, on the East Coast, and everything got digitized.

In 2017, I was invited to score as “As the Earth Turns,” which was one of these films that I eventually helped edit as well. That went to a lot of film festivals. It’s on Amazon and Tubi and stuff like that. That started this whole thing. She eventually gave me the film collection in the state. A lot of them were commercial and educational, military sort of stuff. But I eventually did follow up with Something Weird, and they had the two fragments, including “The Scalpel,” the actual footage, which I still have. The amazing [thing]… their office was only a couple of miles from my house in Seattle. I picked it up and we scanned it. Now that was the second half of the film, and that’s actually part of an ‘As the Earth Turns” DVD and I had scored that as well.

Miller: Wait, let me just… sorry. Let me see if I can get a word in here for a second. You had in your possession just half of this film?

Hartman: Yes, originally the fragment that was on this video, this DVD, was just this eight or nine minutes from the film. I knew it was 20 minutes from his writing about it as well. So what was freakish about this, is this year – last year I should say, 2024, – I was going to transfer these films to Periscope, which is a LA stock and film archive company, and I thought we’d been through all the films and knew what everything was there. I literally had the film stock and I found a can I hadn’t seen and it was amazingly the first half of the film!

Miller: Did they cut together?

Hartman: They perfectly united together! It was a little more washed out, so we had to color correct and do a few other things. What’s really crazy about this is that “The Scalpel” footage we had initially was from his son, which was on the East Coast. This was from Something Weird on the West Coast. Somehow these were able to come together. It was mysterious and perfectly edited together into a 20 minute film, which is what it was. You can’t make this up.

Miller: What is “The Scalpel” about?

Hartman: Well, it’s medical mayhem in a medical institute. It’s a Jekyll and Hyde type of a story where the scientist, he wants to experiment with kind of weird drugs and stuff like that. Basically they turn him into a monster. I think what makes this film so amazing is the transitions, the transformations that Lyford did are involved. I know that the transformation in this film took six hours to film. What was freakish about it is that it not only uses the more typical transitions you might see – I can’t remember what you call it, when one film bleeds into another – but he also used a different technique that he was able to figure out that was in 1931’s “Jekyll and Hyde,” which had won Academy Awards and [was] nominated for cinematography by Karl Struss. Lyford five years later – four, whatever, – was able to duplicate that same effect that actually uses lighting as well to kind of play with the makeup.

So when you watch this movie… Because when we first saw it, I was working with an editor in Seattle and we’re looking at this transition and we were going “how did he do it?” And the gal I was working with was like, “I think that was through lighting,” and she was dead on. This is a famous effect. I didn’t even figure this out until in the last six months, when that particular film came on – I was watching YouTube or something – and there it was, from the “Jekyll and Hyde” [movie]. There happened to be some articles about it. I thought, “I’ve seen this before!” and this is what Lyford did. That tells you about his genius that he was skilled enough in filmmaking that he could figure this stuff out when he was 19 years old and duplicate an effect that was Academy Award winning by nature. That’s astounding when you think about it.

Miller: Let’s listen to the beginning of the movie, the score that you wrote. This is the film’s opening credits,

[Orchestral music playing]

Ed, how did you decide what the music should sound like? What was your starting point?

Hartman: Well, my starting point was the second half of the movie. Because that’s all opening credits. I created my own theme based on the second half. That’s what makes this score uniqu. I created that chord progression from where the movie picked up, because I didn’t even know what happened in the first half of the movie. When you’re scoring a silent film, the film is everything. It is the dialogue. I mean, there’s intertitles in this and they’re very well done, but it becomes the emotion and sound effects as well.

So for me, I kind of used a gothic sort of a score, orchestral, a little bit of organ. Organ adds really just a chilling sort of thing. It just underlines everything you’re doing. It adds true bass and that sort of thing. I love that sort of thing. And I’ve loved Bach and Baroque music, and this definitely has aspects of it. Although as you listen further into the score, it can deteriorate into all sorts of contemporary styles as well. So, again, it was a matter of coming up with main themes that permeate the score.

It’s a short film, so you’re not going to have a whole lot of character themes of different people like “Star Wars,” but it is going to have some things that are going to make it throughout the whole film. Then I went back and scored the second half years later – the first half – and luckily I had the same session and I had the music from that and I was able to draw from the themes I had created and that theme was the most prominent that I thought would work best for the first half and it’s definitely kind of a “Phantom of the Opera” sort of a thing or what you would imagine from a 1930s period piece of music.

Miller: How much do you know about how many people would have seen this?

Hartman: Well, he had a lot of friends! So, he could have put it on for a couple of weeks or something. Maybe ‘x’ amount of hundreds of people. He may have played it at the local high school, at the Franklin High School, or something like that. Again, it did make it to a few amateur screenings out there which he had to get to to show it. You couldn’t send a file. You’d have to carry the film and getting from Seattle to New York or LA was not an easy thing to do.

So I don’t really know. But when he eventually moved to L.A. to work with Disney on “Fantasia” and “Pinocchio” and “Dumbo.” I think films like this, and especially “As the Earth Turns,” are one reason why Disney was fascinated with hiring Lyford eventually as an assistant director as well. And then there’s another story, and I have a documentary called “It Gets in Your Blood,” a short one that goes into his whole life as well, and that’s on the DVD.

Miller: Speaking of blood. The movie is pretty bloody. I mean, there’s some elements of graphic violence. What was it like for this 18, 19 year old to make these and to show them in high schools?

Hartman: Yeah, it surprised me when I got the first half and I saw more of that sort of thing because the second half wasn’t as much. And his other movies like “As the Earth Turns” were much more adventure sort of a thing. They didn’t have that same element. It definitely adds a level of horror to it. One thing is, I think that horror films – and this is really something that’s still going on – are great for film festivals. I think they’re also an easier type of a film for an early filmmaker to do than a comedy or a drama. Those are very tough to do, especially silent. So horror is something… you can actually do it kind of cheesy and it’ll still be very entertaining. And certainly this film, as great as it is, does have some cheesy elements to it for sure. But his films in general, and I only have really two and a half out of the nine that I’ve been able to locate, All are equal to ‘30s filmmaking coming out of Hollywood. “As the Earth Turns” is similar to “Flash Gordon” stuff. So you really can’t say, “oh, that looks like Ed Wood,” or something like that. It might have some elements of cheesiness, but he does a pretty good job. It is black and white so that blood doesn’t have the same impact as it might in a color film. But I think he just liked great storytelling.

The one quick story I can tell you is that when he was in third grade, he was doing a lot with Dracula and they were doing stage plays in the basement. And they eventually… The school wanted them to produce their little “Dracula” at the school. Well so he said, “yeah, sure,” but he’s going to have to up the ante. And they did a fairly graphic version of “Dracula” – probably stabbing in the heart with the stake and all that. There was a lot of blood used and the cast got thrown out of school for three days, which is straight out of Adamms’ family in the camp, which is why I’m writing a screenplay about his first 20 years in Seattle, because I want to see that! I think that that gives you an idea of how really interesting this guy was as a young guy.

Miller: Ed Hartman, thanks so much. We’re going to go out on a little bit more of your soundtrack from this movie, from “The Scalpel,” but thanks very much for joining us.

Hartman: You bet. Thank you so much and I hope everybody gets a chance to see it. edhartmanmusic.com is my website. [It has] tons of information about where this film is playing in the future.

Miller: That is Ed Hartman, producer and composer of “The Scalpel,” a 1936 horror movie made by a then 19-year-old amateur filmmaker who was living in Seattle.

[Orchestral music playing.]

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