They don't even look quite human, and I kept being reminded of nothing so much as Peter Lorre in the disguise that covers his fire-scarred visage in The Face Behind the Mask.
It seems more likely that this is merely recycling the kind of growing obsession of the hero we’ve seen for years in movies like Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943).
This brought him to America at the dawn of the sound era, where he shot Tod Browning's Dracula (1931) and Robert Florey's Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) before embarking on The Mummy.