Over 100 films, but he is remembered for 11 Sherlock Holmes mysteries

Roy William Neill was a Hollywood director and producer who made 11 of the 14 Sherlock Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone, the classically trained Shakespearean actor who played the detective. Critics credit Neill with what people remember about them: fog, long shadows and a sense of dread. A Splice Today critic, Matthew Surridge, wrote of "heavy shadows out of a Halloween story." Relay has all 11 of Neill's Holmes films.

The series began at 20th Century-Fox in 1939 with two films set in Victorian times. Universal Pictures made the other 12, updated the setting to the Second World War and made them as B pictures, the low-budget films that filled out a double bill. David Stuart Davies, author of the book Holmes of the Movies, said Rathbone came closest to the definitive screen Holmes. Surridge gave Neill credit for the quality of the films that followed.

Who was Roy William Neill?

Neill began directing silent films in 1917, and Columbia Pictures hired him in 1928. Counts of his output run from 107 to 111 films, so well over 100. They included The Black Room, a 1935 horror film in which Boris Karloff, the English actor best known for playing Frankenstein's monster, plays twin brothers, and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man in 1943.

At Universal he directed and produced the Holmes series from 1942. He died of a heart attack in London in December 1946, aged 59, the year his last two Holmes films came out.

Why do the Holmes films feel like horror?

Neill's films use the machinery of the gothic tale: a monster legend, a lonely village, a castle, a long night. TCM's article on Sherlock Holmes Faces Death says Neill's influence shows on the screen and praises a return to the rich atmosphere of Conan Doyle's tales. Critics have called the best of them a horror-mystery, in which the supernatural is raised and then explained away by Holmes.

Which Neill films are on Relay?

The Scarlet Claw (1944)

Holmes and Dr. Watson visit the Quebec village of La Morte Rouge, where people fear a glowing phantom in the marshes. A woman is found dead with her throat torn out, and Holmes suspects a human murderer. Time Out praised the fog machine working overtime and Neill's use of the old inn and the gloomy marshes. Critics rate it the best of the 12 Universal films.

Crime

The Spider Woman (1944)

Holmes fakes his death, then returns in disguise to look into suicides among wealthy gamblers. He believes the villain behind them is as cunning as Moriarty, his arch-enemy, and as venomous as a spider. Gale Sondergaard plays her.

Mystery

The Woman in Green (1945)

Young women around London are murdered, each with a finger cut off. Holmes suspects Moriarty, played by Henry Daniell, who uses hypnosis to make wealthy men believe they are the killers.

Crime

The House of Fear (1945) and The Pearl of Death (1944)

In The House of Fear, men at a remote castle in Scotland die one by one, each foretold by an envelope of orange pips. In The Pearl of Death, a pearl with a sinister reputation leads Holmes to a master criminal and his henchman, the Creeper.

The rest of the run

Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943) sets murders in a wartime convalescent home. Terror by Night (1946) runs on a London to Edinburgh train, where a diamond is stolen and its owner's son murdered. Dressed to Kill (1946) follows three music boxes that hide clues to stolen Bank of England engraving plates. The wartime thrillers are Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1942), Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943) and Pursuit to Algiers (1945).

Crime

What to watch first

Start with The Scarlet Claw for the fog and the phantom, then The Spider Woman and The Woman in Green for Holmes against two of his strangest enemies. For more of the era's shadows, see Film noir movies and Paul Leni, the set designer behind the haunted house film.