At the helm is director Reginald Le Borg, a B director from the 1940s who made the likes of Destiny (1944), The Mummy’s Ghost (1944) and Jungle Woman (1944), among others. Corman’s films were often heavy-handed in atmosphere and Diary is a good deal more pedestrian. But it does have an interesting story – taken from an 1886 short story by 19th Century French literary writer Guy de Maupassant. The Horla is certainly a different and unusual monster. Even though the film predated The Exorcist (1973) and the like, it has an interesting view of possession with Price actually conversing with the creature possessing him. What also makes the story interesting is the level of moral ambiguity – Nancy Kovack’s romantic interest is actually a married woman who is keeping her wed state a secret from Price and intending to leave her husband for a better prospect; and at one point Price, though the hero, as magistrate condemns a man he knows to be innocent to hang for the very crime he himself committed.

The film is made with reasonable Technicolor lavishness, something that allows Le Borg to transcend the pedestrianness of his own hand. There are some occasionally effective shock images – like the discovery of Kovack’s severed head under the clay sculpture in Price’s studio and a scene where the possessed Price is driven back from killing a man at the last moment by the reflection of a cross from the church across the street on his knife blade. Modestly effective.