When Columbia Pictures dabbled with the supernatural during the 1940s, it came out with a movie involving the age-old conflict between good and evil that somehow managed to eschew the word of God. Mark Fraser looks at a work in which individual resolve outdoes devilish seduction. At first glance Will Jason’s 1944 short horror opus The Soul of a Monster appears to be – in the phrase famously used by Edgar Allan Poe – almost like a dream within a dream.