House of Horrors (1946)

For the sake of completeness, this is the trailer for House of Horrors (1946), the Universal B-movie that preceded The Brute Man (1946), which I looked at a while ago.  Although released first, thereby providing 'The Creeper' with his debut appearance, (although Rondo Hatton had played similar characters in other B-movies, most notably the 'Hoxton Creeper' in the 1944 Sherlock Holmes film Pearl of Death), there is nothing in either film to indicate which is meant to occur, chronologically, first.  The Brute Man is sometimes cited as being a prequel to House of Horrors, as it includes an origin story for 'The Creeper'.  This, however, is presented as a flashback, so the main action of the film could still occur after the previous film.  Moreover, the second film ends with 'The Creeper' being arrested, whereas the first opens with him crawling out the river.  Likewise, the first film ends with him being shot, yet at the beginning of the second, he is still at large.

Of course, Universal B-movie series were never big on continuity between entries.  Just look at the way the location for the events of the mummy movies shift around - they start in New England, but by the last film we're down in the Louisiana bayou, with the locals recounting the earlier events as if they had always happened down there.  Timelines also become confused in these series - both the mummy and the Frankenstein films sometimes like to ascribe the events of their immediate predecessors as having taken place several decades earlier, despite the fact that they had clearly taken place in what was then the present day.  But back to House of Horrors, despite being made on a shoestring budget, it still contrives to look slicker than its successor.  It also boasts the presence of Martin Kosleck, a character actor who specialised in playing creeps, here portraying a crazy sculptor who tries to use 'The Creeper' for his own nefarious purposes.  That said, it's still bargain basement stuff from the dying days of Universal's B-movie unit, (it was resurrected in the fifties, as the studio found that focusing on 'upmarket' pictures wasn't necessarily a guarantee of financial success).  It's exploitation of Rondo Hatton's acromegaly is also just as exploitative and tasteless as it was in The Brute Man.