For real film people, this film is a must, since it works as a perfect little allegory for the movies themselves. Janos Rukh/Boris Karloff's science has to do with capturing and projecting light from cosmic phenomena. This light can do harm, or it can be harnessed to do good. On the one hand it blinds his mother, on the other it is used to cure blindness ("I can see!" shouts a young girl on whose eyes this light is projected). When Rukh/Karloff is himself poisoned by the uncanny power of this light, we see him actually emitting a ghostly glow on his hands and face like a badly developed negative, drawing attention to the fact that the man we are watching is a projection, an entity viewed on film (only visible, as in a movie theater, when the lights are out).<br /><br />There is a wonderful passage near the beginning where Karloff/Rukh explains his research as being informed by the fact that everything that happens is captured in light which rolls through space for millions of years, as the light from Andromeda was emitted from that Galaxy at a time when the earth was still molten rock. <br /><br />There are passages in the film when this new science is juxtaposed to older cultural vehicles: that of the writer, in the persona of Beulah Bondi/Arabella Stevens; and religion, emblemized in the sculptural figures on the local cathedral Karloff blasts with his projector/ray gun. <br /><br />One has to wonder here if this film was meant to glance at what was going on in Germany at the time, and particularly at Riefenstall's use of film the year before to promote a regime that certainly would go on to do a lot of harm:Triumph of the Will. <br /><br />Happily in the end, Mother (Violet Kemble Cooper) intervenes, reminding Janos Rukh of the first rule of science. <br /><br />If only more movies made you want to stand up in the theater and shout: "I can see!"