I begin my Shock-BOO-ber this year in a place that’s always a fun place to start when exploring the history of the horror genre. I’m of course talking about the Universal monster movies cooked up by studio head Carl Laemmle, Jr. in the 1930s that gave us some of film’s most iconic horror villains. One of those, of course, was Frankenstein, brought to life in 1931 by director James Whale, who would later bring to the screen other iconic characters in this loose “universe” with 1933’s The Invisible Man and 1935’s The Bride of Frankenstein. However, the horror movie he would follow up Frankenstein with didn’t really have any iconic characters in it and was fairly forgotten for many years. And yet, I would put The Old Dark House right up there with any of the great Universal horror movies and a great example of Whale’s knack for dark intrigue with a dash of camp.
Based on J.B. Priestley’s 1927 novel Benighted, The Old Dark House revolves around a premise that I’m sure will become all too familiar this Shocktober: a group of strangers find themselves in a foreboding house (some might even say dark and old), and haunted hijinks ensue. What brings our houseguests to these circumstances is an unrelenting storm, which a married couple, Philip and Margaret (Raymond Massey and Gloria Suart, respectively) and their roguish friend Roger (Melvyn Douglas) find themselves in when their car gets caught in a mudslide. The nearest shelter is an old Victorian mansion in the Welsh countryside, which they knock on the door of and get a rude welcome from the scraggly, scar-faced Morgan Femm (Boris Karloff). However, they’re then let in by Morgan’s older brother Horace (Ernest Thesiger), who’s happy to host them for the night, though his ornery sister Rebecca (Eva Moore) is less hospitable.
While this odd crew is in the middle of dinner, some more guests arrive seeking shelter from the storm, the moneyed Sir William Porterhouse (a characteristically jaunty Charles Laughton) and his chorus girl girlfriend, Gladys (Lilian Bond). After dinner, the guests start to notice strange things around the house, as our married couple hears high-pitched wails coming from upstairs. Meanwhile, Gladys and Roger begin to bond over a bottle of whiskey in the house’s stable, and find themselves smitten with each other (you can tell this is a pre-Code movie when the parameters of these characters’ romantic relationships are a little more loose).
Back in the house, Morgan becomes increasingly violent, and when Philip and Margaret try to go upstairs, he attacks them, which leads to Philip knocking him out with a lamp. Things then get weirder when we meet the two members of the Femm family who have been locked upstairs the whole time: the bedridden, ancient-looking Roderick and the pyromaniac Saul, who is rumored to have killed his sister. This leads to one final bout between Saul and Roger as Saul tries to burn the house down, while Morgan is also kept at bay.
As you might expect from a Universal horror movie made at this particular point in time, the stark, German Expressionist-inspired visuals are great, with multiple scenes involving either shadows or reflections in mirrors. What I think makes the film unique is that it applies this gothic aesthetic to a really memorable cast of characters played by some great actors who clearly don’t think themselves above the material. Karloff and Laughton are magnetic as you’d expect, but Ernest Thesiger (probably most famous for playing Dr. Pretorius in Bride of Frankenstein) is a delight as the family’s patriarch of sorts, as is Eva Moore, a prolific stage actress who tried her hand at “talkies” in the later part of her career.
The Old Dark House overall has a nice mix of lighter elements, with a screwball-esque romance that feels charming enough despite being a little bit of an afterthought, and a number of scenes that are legitimately scary. Perhaps there’s something a bit modern about seeing one of these movies with villains that are a little more believable, since instead of the villain being a mummy or an invisible man, it’s just a really fucked up family. The film was taken out of circulation for many years due to Universal losing the rights to Priestley’s novel, which resulted in it being remade in 1963 by our friend William Castle. Then at one point, it was even considered a lost film, but luckily was restored by the George Eastman House (which I got to visit this summer!). Anyways, I will say that I’m not sure that this quite qualifies as a ghost movie, but I don’t really care. It’s a haunted house movie, and a good one. It’s also one in which you can see a lot of subsequent haunted house movies, whether the film was widely seen enough to be influential or not.