The Search for Bridey Murphy

In 1956, The She-Creature took one of the decade's stranger popular fascinations and turned it into a monster movie.

A best-selling book called The Search for Bridie Murphy, a book about a woman who was able to remember an ancient version of herself under hypnosis, had gotten people talking about hypnosis and the possibility of past lives, and AIP saw a premise there The film features Dr. Carlo Lombardi, a carnival hypnotist, and Andrea, the young woman who performs with him.

Lombardi claims he can send her back through her previous lives.

What he discovers is that he can reach much further back than anyone expected, all the way to a primordial creature that emerges from the ocean when Andrea is under his control.

Wolger was part of a larger wave that had been building for decades.

By the time Carroll had found his book, hypnosis had gained more acceptance as a clinical tool, and past-life regression had already exploded into the American psyche through the famous Bridie Murphy case.

There erupted a storm of controversy, while in a hypnotic trance, Bridie Murphy recreated intimate details of the life of a young girl who was born in County Cork, Ireland in 1798.

Do you

know what year it is?

He cracks me up.

I mean, I'll tell you one cute little personal story.

Well, let's get into EVP first.

Yes.

No one's going to put it in an obituary.

And he loved coffee.

These are personal things.

And another guy kept saying, apparently the wife that I just read for has a friend named Jay.

This is a 1956 American black and white science fiction-ish horror film released by American International Pictures, one of my favorite, favorite distribution companies, from a script by Lou Rosoff, brother of AIP exec Sam Arcoff.

Its premise was tied directly to the 1950s Bridie Murphy phenomenon.

Big, big deal.

I mean, that led to, you know, disparate things like On a Clear Day You Can See Forever and several movies about the Bridie Murphy phenomenon.

But in this case, they were like, let's make a monster movie about that.

The Bridie Murphy phenomenon was basically one of the first times that the whole concept of past live regression came into mass consciousness.

And it was a big, big deal.

And the book about Bridie Murphy came out in January of 1956.