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Known For

Roy William Neill is known for:

  • The House of Fear
    The Good Comrades are a collection of varied gentlemen who crave one thing - solitude. They reside at Drearcliff House, ancestral home of their eldest member. All seems serene and convivial until one by one the members begin to perish in the most grisly of manners. Foul play is suspected by the Good Comrades' insurance agent, who turns to Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson for guidance.
  • Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man
    Graverobbers open the grave of the Wolfman and awake him. He doesn't like the idea of being immortal and killing people when the moon is full, so he tries to find Dr. Frankenstein, in the hopes that the Dr. can cure him, but Frankenstein is dead and only his Monster is alive and this one wants to live, not to die like the Wolfman.
  • Terror by Night
    Holmes and Watson board a passenger train bound from London to Edinburgh, to guard the Star of Rhodesia, an enormous diamond worth a fortune belonging to an elderly woman of wealth; but within the first hour of the trip, the woman's son is murdered and the diamond stolen and any of the passengers in their car could be the killer thief.

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Biography

Roy William Neill (4 September 1887 – 14 December 1946) was a film director best known today for directing several of the Sherlock Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, made between 1943 and 1946 and released by Universal Studios. With his father as the captain, Neill was born on a ship off the coast of Ireland named Roland de Gostrie. He began directing silent movies in 1917 and went on to helm 107 films, 40 of them silent. Although most of Neill's films were for the most part low-budget B-movies, he was known for directing films with meticulously lit scenes with carefully layered shadows that would become the style of film noir in the late 1940s. In fact, his last film, Black Angel (1946), is considered a film noir. He was also credited in some works as R. William Neill, Roy W. Neill, and Roy Neill. Neill lived in the United States for most of his career and was a U.S. citizen. He did go to London from 1935 until 1940 where better opportunities existed for American directors. During this period, British film producer Edward Black hired Neill to direct The Lady Vanishes. However, due to delays in production, Black hired Alfred Hitchcock to direct instead. Neill died in London, England from a heart attack.