Margaret: “Knock again, louder.”
Phillip: “I should have thought that was loud enough to wake the dead! …That’s an idea.”
Penderell: “What is?”
Phillip: “Wouldn’t it be dramatic? Supposing the people inside were dead. All stretched out, with the lights quietly burning about them.”
Margaret: “I’m sure it would be very amusing.”
Phillip: “I’m sure I could do with a drink.”
Imagine if in October of 2018, director Andy Muschietti and star Bill Skarsgård followed up their smash success, It, with another horror movie–this one a light, kidding parody of the genre. Imagine audiences being so unused to Skarsgard as an actor beyond the Pennywise makeup that their follow up opened with a producer’s note reading:
Skarsgård, the crazed ringmaster in this production, is the same Skarsgård who created the part of the murderous clown in “It”. We explain this to settle all disputes in advance, even though such disputes are a tribute to his great versatility.
This is the situation audiences found themselves in 86 years ago, in October of 1932, when director James Whale and Boris Karloff followed up the previous year’s seminal Frankenstein with The Old Dark House.
The joke here, I think, is that Karloff’s “mad butler” is not so different from his Frankenstein at all–a mumbling mute with angry, sullen glares and a striking beard (“I think he could use a shave,” someone says at one point). Karloff was an excellent actor who would go on to have, you know, speaking roles. But at this point his “great versatility” was all in the makeup.
The Old Dark House is like that. You’re never quite sure how much the film is really serious or not. In some ways, it’s a midpoint between the essentially serious Frankenstein and the mostly campy Bride of Frankenstein in Whale’s filmography. The tonal ambiguity is significant in what is otherwise a traditional Hollywood production for the era.
The film begins, in true Bulwer-Lytton fashion, with a literal dark and stormy night. Phillip Waverton (Raymond Massey), his wife Margaret (Gloria Stuart), and their sardonic friend Penderel (Melvyn Douglas) are on holiday, introduced driving through the Welsh countryside in a torrential rain so bad it’s causing rock slides in the hills around them. Desperate, soaked and lost, they stop at a nearby old house, hammering at the door. They are greeted by the scarred, bearded, mumbling countenance of Morgan, the manservant (Karloff), and then by his masters, siblings Horace and Rebecca Femm (Ernest Thesiger and Eva Moore). Later on, another couple will arrive in from the storm, Sir William Porterhouse (Charles Laughton) and his companion, Gladys (Lilian Bond). The structure of the film soon becomes apparent: the group of young people will joke, drink, and warm themselves by the fire, the house’s occupants will reveal increasingly disturbing eccentricities, and outside the storm will rage and howl, lending an omnipresent tension to the proceedings.
“A good cast is worth repeating,” The Old Dark House points out when it takes the then-unusual step of displaying the acting credits a second time at the end, and it’s also worth exploring a little now. Besides Karloff, the members of the (old dark) household were older actors with more of a career behind them; Thesiger and Moore got their start in silent film, back in the 1910s and ’20s. Of the younger set, Melvyn Douglas, who emerges from the ensemble as something of a heroic lead, had had five feature credits prior to The Old Dark House and was probably the most well-known of that group. (He would go on to have a long and varied career, with one of his last roles being the Nixonian politician in the eerie George C. Scott movie The Changeling.) Massey had played Sherlock Holmes before this but that was about it; his most famous roles would come in the 1940s and ’50s–Arsenic and Old Lace, East of Eden. Lilian Bond had mostly bit parts before this, and Gloria Stuart was a virtual unknown, although now she’s most famous for being the old woman in the frame story in Titanic. Laughton immediately followed up his interesting turn here as Sir William, a wealthy but lonely entrepreneur, by playing the sinister Dr. Moreau in Island of Lost Souls, a film I reviewed for the very first Killtoberfest; it was released just two months after The Old Dark House, in December 1932. Laughton, of course, had a long and interesting acting career and a short and even more interesting directing career; the only film he ever made, The Night of the Hunter, featuring Robert Mitchum as the murderous preacher with “love” and “hate” tattooed on his knuckles, is one of the best and strangest directorial one-offs in history. The Old Dark House is steeped in Hollywood history on both sides of the camera, but it’s also easy to imagine this formulation today–in terms of casting it’s not dissimilar from, say, The Cabin in the Woods, or Get Out. There is a certain kind of horror movie that pits a cast of lesser-known, younger actors against ominous characters played by familiar or genre performers, and that kind of film often has the same feeling that The Old Dark House generates, a sense that the filmmakers know exactly what they are doing and are playing expertly with audience expectations.
Expectation drives both humor, which must be surprising, and horror, which often relies on foreshadowing and dread. Both genres use anticipation in different, sometimes contradictory ways, which is one reason why horror/comedy hybrids are so difficult to get right. If we don’t know a scare is coming, horror is reduced to a series of cheap attempts to startle. But if we’re given full warning of what’s about to happen, how can it be funny? The tonal blending demands a more complex approach. In The Old Dark House, the tension of the story is that the young heroes are unprepared for the lunatic secrets that dwell in the house, and the joke of the film is how extended and overwrought the drawing out of that tension becomes. The storm isn’t just a storm, it’s the apotheosis of all storms, a furious downpouring that must have used every rain tower at Universal, plus half the stage hands emptying buckets–a storm that never misses an opportunity to blow violently in through the windows, scattering papers and sending Gloria Stuart screaming across the room, a storm which remains an almost constant presence on the soundtrack, even in interior scenes. But the exterior weather’s hammer meets the anvil of a really bizarre interior household. Rebecca, a crabby older woman, reveals herself as a religious nut, muttering about “the sins of the father” and launching into weird monologues about her dead sister. Horace, with a thin, drawn face and nervous disposition, wheedles and prevaricates his way out of going to the top floor of the house to retrieve a lamp, because something up there terrifies him. And Karloff as the manservant, Morgan, roams around, mute and crazy-eyed, while Horace and Rebecca confess that he’s a violent, brutish drunk, and wouldn’t you know it, tonight’s just the kind of night to get him drinking. The sense as the film rolls forward is of a piling on of warning, sign, and portent until the accumulation of creepy cliche begins to seem like a knowing wink, a halfway parodic lark shading toward camp. The “haunted house” style set, all cobwebs and shadows, seems to promise a scare around every corner–but just when the hapless travelers round that corner, all they find is another long, eerie hallway.
That sense of doom, comically enhanced or frustrated by delay, suffuses most of the film. Though short at 72 minutes it feels as though much of the screen time is devoted to increasingly inane minutiae–the Femm siblings squabbling over grace at dinner, the constant discussions of the lights (the temperamental, homemade electric lights, the candles, the lamp at the top of the stairs) and the rain (coming down in buckets, they agree), the many times when a line must be repeated for the benefit of the mostly deaf Rebecca. That last leads to this classic bit, as Rebecca leads the way to her bedroom so that Margaret can change out of her wet clothes:
Margaret: “It’s a dreadful night.”
Rebecca: “What?”
Margaret: “I say, it’s a dreadful night.”
Rebecca: “Yes, it’s a very old house, very old.”
Margaret: “Very kind of you to let me stay.”
Rebecca: “What?”
Margaret: “I say, you are very kind.”
Rebecca: “Yes, it is a dreadful night. I’m very deaf.”
Margaret: “I understand.”
Rebecca: “Yes. No beds!”
The inanity perhaps reaches its height during dinner (roast beef, bread, pickled onions, boiled potatoes), when the group mostly eats in silence, except for Horace entreating each of them one after another to have a potato. “Thank you, I should love a potato,” replies Penderel chipperly. When exactly are frightening things actually going to occur? There’s even an elaborate fake-out where Penderel and Gladys head out into the storm after a bottle of whiskey left behind in the Waverton’s car–surely a move no self-respecting character in the Scream franchise would recommend to anyone who doesn’t want to be murdered in the night–especially after someone slams the front door shut behind them (or maybe it was just the wind). Yet this leads not to terror but to a rather sweet scene where Penderel, an ambitionless, penniless idler and Gladys, a chorus girl traveling under a false name and in an arrangement with her wealthy companion, talk and reveal themselves and fall in love. Whale has constructed a movie comprised almost entirely of overbearing atmosphere, and then, having thoroughly established our expectations, confounds them at every turn.
There are moments of real horror in the film; perhaps the best of these takes place in Rebecca’s bedroom, where the old woman, having led Margaret there to change, now delivers a strident monologue on sin and death. It’s a remarkable scene between the two women, layered and uncomfortable. Margaret tells Rebecca thanks, expecting her to leave the room so she can change out of her wet clothes, and instead Rebecca responds with the following: “My sister Rachel had this room once. She died when she was twenty-one. She was a wicked one.” The whole story spills out of her like poison–how Rachel was the more beautiful of the two, how the men chased her, how she fell off her horse and hurt her spine and lay for months on this very bed, screaming and begging to die. “But I told her to turn to the Lord. But she didn’t. She was Godless to the last.” Margaret keeps hinting for Rebecca to leave, but the old woman continues her rant. Margaret inspires memories of Rebecca’s sister and brings up the bitter jealousy of the less pretty, less popular sister, jealousy that now shades into that of the older woman for the other’s youth and beauty. Finally Margaret changes anyway, visibly uncomfortable, as Rebecca turns on her directly: “You revel in the joys of fleshly love, don’t you?” Rebecca rubs the cloth of Margaret’s new dress, telling her, “That’s fine stuff. And it’ll rot. That’s finer stuff too,” she says, reaching for Margaret’s fair skin. “But it’ll rot too, in time.” Margaret is horrified. Throughout the scene, Whale has shot Rebecca’s reflection in the warped, broken mirrors around the room, and now as she exits, Rebecca checks her hair in one of them–a quick, macabre final touch. After she leaves, Margaret, totally unnerved, looks at her own reflection in the warped mirror, remembering Rebecca’s hideous outpouring of emotion and religious judgement, and screams, covering her face with her hands.
A house in a horror movie is never just a house. Again and again, and here too, the creepy, rundown old house in movies like Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs and many more reflects a diseased and unhappy mind. There are no ghosts in The Old Dark House, but there is madness. Rebecca’s religious fervor and sardonic bitterness, Horace’s cowardice and high-strung anxiety, and Morgan’s unpredictable interior violence fill the house. So does their secret shame: upstairs, the Femm’s very old father in his cavernous bedroom tells the Wavertons about the other Femm brother, Saul, who has been locked up in a room at the top of the stairs for years. “This is an unlucky house,” the white haired patriarch says. “Two of my children died when they were 20. And then other things happened. Madness came. We are all touched with it a little, you see.” Dreadful things would happen if Saul were let out–and wouldn’t you know it, that’s just the sort of thing Morgan might do if he were drunk. And wouldn’t you know it, tonight is just the kind of night when… But you get the idea.
The creepiest moment in the movie is when Saul does end up being released, and sits down to talk with Penderel. He tells Penderel that there’s nothing wrong with him, that he’s been shut up because he knows his siblings killed their sister, Rachel–but Penderel soon realizes that Saul is deeply disturbed, obsessed with fire and interested in burning down the house. “So you thought you could cheat me, did you?” Saul says. “You thought you could leave me sitting here and I wouldn’t notice. But you see, I am a clever man also. That is why we understand one another. That is why you understood so quickly that I wanted to kill you.” The matter-of-fact psychosis is chilling. Of all the insanity here in the house, Saul’s is the deepest and most central: a secret, irrational desire for destruction which is mirrored in the brutish manservant, the hectoring old woman, and the dreadful, ceaseless storm.
Against these strange and eccentric elders and their dark, dangerous household is set the group of wayward young travelers. The Femms (and their manservant) are odd, secretive people who hide sin and madness. The travelers, in contrast, are pleasant, amused, open people. It takes little prodding before Gladys reveals her situation with Sir William to be more complex (and touching) than it at first appears. For his part, Charles Laughton delivers a remarkable monologue about his life and philosophy. His beloved wife died, he feels, of shame from a social snubbing at an upper class event; William responded by dedicated his life to making enough money to “smash” the ones who laughed at them. “Once you’ve started making money, it’s hard to stop,” he admits, “especially if you’re like me. There isn’t much else you’re good at.” Penderel mentions sardonically that he was one of those twisted by war, and tells the others that his own trouble is, “I don’t think enough things are worthwhile.” If there’s a critique here of their generation, it’s a gentle one. By the end of the film, most of them will be closer and more honest with one another, after bravely rising to the occasion, and Whale closes out his cheeky tale with a marriage proposal. I find this kind of old movie to have the comfort of the familiar. In the ’30s and ’40s, a Hollywood production meant getting the whole package: strong FX work, fabulous sets, a talented cast, and a crisp, well-written script that included drama, comedy, and romance.
With James Whale you got a little more: an English director who came to Hollywood in the late 1920s, Whale was openly gay, and his sensibility infused films like Bride of Frankenstein and this one with a layer of camp and sexuality which could only be hinted at in an era when the Studio Relations Committee included in its list of “Don’ts” for filmmakers an admonishment against films having “any inference of sex perversion,” no matter how it was treated. In The Old Dark House you have a family called the Femms; Horace, the very picture of an aging homosexual who lives unmarried with his sister; the lesbian undertones of Rebecca’s jealousy of Margaret as she changes clothes in front of the older woman; Morgan’s rape-tinged attitude toward Margaret, a drunken, brutish form of extreme heterosexuality; Saul’s fetishistic obsession with fire; and perhaps most strikingly, Whale’s casting of an actress named Elspeth Dudgeon, sporting a white beard and credited as John Dudgeon, in the role of the aged patriarch Sir Roderick Femm. This subtle and not-so-subtle gender and sexuality play, and its connection with secrets, tension, and madness, is the fuel that drives the unique blend of self-aware pseudo-parody and sincere horror which define The Old Dark House and its old, fun story. This is one movie that stands the test of the time and will no doubt continue to do so–a tribute to the horror genre’s great versatility.
Every year, Kyu attempts to watch and review 31 horror movies in 31 days. This year, it’s Killtoberfest 666, because needs must when the devil drives. Check out past Killtoberfests along with this year’s reviews, and be sure to follow us on Twitter @insidethekraken to track Kyu’s progress.