Walter enters the room to find a cat has triggered the buzzer, but cannot explain how the animal accessed the room. Moments later, an alert buzzer sounds from the blue room. Walter reports Frank's murder to Commissioner Forster. Walter rushes to the blue room, where he finds Frank shot to death. Unable to sleep, Irene is comforted by Walter before a gunshot rings out, and the piano playing ceases. Frank begins playing a piano in the room shortly after midnight to signal to the others that he is still alive. Frank agrees to spend the night in the blue room after Robert retires for the evening. Irene explores the blue room alone the following day, but is attacked by an unseen assailant and loses consciousness, regaining it with no memory of her attacker's identity. Thomas sleeps there on the first night but disappears exactly at 1:00 a.m. The first victim was Robert's sister, followed by his best friend and, later, a detective who attempted to solve their deaths. Thomas challenges Walter and Frank to each spend a night in a mysterious locked blue room in which several murders had occurred years before, each at exactly one hour past midnight. Universal later remade the film as The Missing Guest (1938) and Murder in the Blue Room (1944).Īt her family's rural manor in Germany, Irene von Helldorf celebrates her twenty-first birthday with her father Robert, her suitor Thomas Brandt, and Thomas's two rivals, Walter Brink and Frank Faber.

It was released theatrically in July 1933, and was met by mixed reviews from critics, receiving praise for its performances, but criticism for its formulaic plot devices. Three people suggest a wager that each can survive a night in the blue room.įilmed over a six-day period in June 1933, The Secret of the Blue Room was Universal Pictures' least-expensive production that year. A remake of the German film Geheimnis des blauen Zimmers (1932), it concerns a group of wealthy people who stay at a European mansion that features a blue room that is said to be cursed, as everyone who has stayed there has died shortly after. The Secret of the Blue Room is a 1933 American pre-Code mystery horror film directed by Kurt Neumann and starring Lionel Atwill, Gloria Stuart, Paul Lukas, and Edward Arnold.

In a Blue Room by Jim Averbeck