This is my favorite One Step Beyond episode.Doris Dowling could play ruthless, calculating, and sarcastic women perfectly and she was possessed of a cool and even cruel beauty that made her a natural for film noir roles.She portrays Charlotte, the nurse who poisons the first marquise for whom she was hired to care for. She desires the position of marquise and all the privilege that goes with it for herself but she holds her new husband in contempt and has no affection for him at all. Classically trained Max Adrian plays the weak willed marquis who is so dominated by Charlotte that he becomes her accomplice in the murder of his first wife.A police detective suspicious of the first wife's death, starts dogging the couple. The village priest who presided at the funeral and then married the pair is also convinced of their guilt.
Charlotte has a a portrait of the first wife removed from a prominent spot but a stain appears on the wall where it hung and seems to be growing into something much more eerie and vengeful. Could it be a physical manifestation of the marquis's guilt? Charlotte watches her husband become more and more unstable and erratic. When the marquis claims that the stain on the wall is actually becoming his dead wife's haunting image appearing to accuse and torment him, she believes him to have become insane and she decides to take action that keep him from making a public confession of the crime and will save her from imprisonment and perhaps even the guillotine.She doesn't reckon with meeting a justice from beyond the grave.
As with many of the One Step Beyond episode's, The Image of Death is a morality play condemning greed, betrayal, and murder. Whether or not this story actually happened in the way it was portrayed is not as important as the ideas that it expresses. In the end it is a very taught thirty minute ghost story that makes it's point with a few delightful chills.