When it came to sex and violence, Paramount Pictures always had a perverse streak that went back to their 30s Pre-Code and horror films (THE STORY OF TEMPLE DRAKE, MURDER AT THE VANITIES, DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE, ISLAND OF LOST SOULDS, MURDERS IN THE ZOO, TERROR ABOARD, and MURDER BY THE CLOCK to name only a few) so it was only (un)natural that their groundbreaking adaptation of James M. Cain's DOUBLE INDEMNITY in 1944 would be instrumental in kicking off a cycle of dark films that would later come to be known as the Film Noir. But between the mid-30s and the mid-40s, the studio's unwholesome tendencies lay dormant for the most part with the exception of two 1941 films by Stuart Heisler that combined adult-themed scares with a "noir" sensibility. THE MONSTER AND THE GIRL (narrated by a prostitute coming out of the fog to tell her tale) mixed courtroom melodrama, murder, revenge, and the underworld with brain transplants and was the more outré of the two but the Southern Gothic AMONG THE LIVING's blend of murder and madness contained many visual elements that would soon appear in the burgeoning Film Noir. New Yorker John Raden (Albert Dekker) returns to the Southern mill town his father founded for the patriarch's funeral and long-buried family secrets soon threaten to rock his world. John learns from the family doctor (Harry Carey) that his twin, Paul (Albert Dekker), didn't die as a child but went insane (after their abusive father threw him against a wall for trying to protect his mother from another beating) and had been locked away in the cellar of the decaying family mansion for the past twenty-five years. Paul kills the old black servant that had been his keeper and, exhilarated by freedom, the child-like lunatic rents a room in town. He becomes involved with his landlady's gold-digging daughter (Susan Hayward) but another murder occurs and, with the townspeople in a grip of panic, mistaken identity erupts into vigilante violence...

Character actor Albert Dekker got a rare chance to show his versatility in a dual role and he's given good support by veterans Harry Carey and Maude Eburne but it's Susan Hayward's dimestore vixen who walks away with the picture. Whether she's wheedling money out of Paul for a new dress or egging on a mob to rip a man apart, Susan's vivacious beauty and potent sex appeal is positively radiant and she steals every scene she's in. On the other hand, troubled Frances Farmer plays John's wife and has little to do other than to look beautiful and scream, both of which she does in a very sedated way. Albert Dekker effectively delineates the doppelgangers and there's no confusing the sane, urbane New Yorker with the scruffy lunatic who's method of murder is quite eerie. He strangles his victims and then places their hands over their ears because he can still hear his long-dead mother screaming. The atmospherics are appropriately dark for a social problem horror movie and there are many tableaux that predict the coming Film Noir. After Paul escapes from the dilapidated plantation house during a violent thunderstorm, he wanders through streets of tenements and cheap rooming houses amid newsboys and legless vagrants selling puppies until he stumbles into a nightmarish bistro where b-girls, brawny brawlers, and some furious jitterbugging bring on another bout of murderous madness in a vivid montage of sights and sounds. Besides the child abuse, there's also some social commentary going on in that the townspeople are clamoring for John to re-open the mill and desperate enough to do anything to get their hands on the $5,000 reward for the killer, turning ugly at the end in a way reminiscent of Fritz Lang's FURY five years before. A young and handsome Rod Cameron has an unbilled bit as a bar patron.