The years 1948-1952 saw a surprising surge in the production of horror films; the anxieties about the years ahead were palpable, it seems, while the memory of the terrors survived—and too often participated in—remained vivid. One of the most staggering works of this brief-but-rich cycle is Viktor Turžanskij‘s rarely-screened Jekyll-and-Hyde version Vom Teufel gejagt, featuring one of the era’s most beloved male idols, Hans Albers, as the doctor losing control of his dark side. For added depth and relevance, a colleague who, years before, had assumed the doctor’s guilt when an experiment went badly returns to continue their earlier research—besides, his name is tarnished anyway, where else could he go? It’s difficult to not see this very elegantly dispassionate piece (a curious predecessor to the soon rising Arztfilm-wave) as an attempt to discuss its star’s and auteur’s involvement with the Nazi-era film industry: Albers starred in Herbert Selpin’s world-weary anti-British epopee Carl Peters (1941), and Turžanskij directed (and co-wrote) the edgy anti-Polish, anti-labor drama Feinde (1940).