The Silent Command

• Watchlist

Unable to pay for the operation that cured his daughter, a man promises to surrender her to the doctor on her eighteenth birthday. Knowing that the physician wishes to make her the subject of his experiments with hypnotism, the distressed father ultimately reneges on his promise, whereupon the doctor attempts to hypnotize the girl from afar. Under his power, she descends the stairs, where, holding a dagger, she stands over her sleeping father. The next day, the girl is accused of murdering her father, but her sweetheart, a lawyer with an interest in hypnotism, believes that she is innocent and sets out to prove it. After finding a button belonging to the doctor's butler, the lawyer places the servant under his own power, learning thereby that the doctor sent his hypnotized butler to murder the old man. Her name cleared, the girl takes her sweetheart's book on hypnotism and throws it into the fire.