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THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1932) (****)

James Whale was a director who was always assigned to direct horror films, which he infused with his own sense of campy humor. This is probably the funniest of all of Whale’s films that I have seen thus far.

Lazy playboy Roger Penderel (Melvyn Douglas, NINOTCHKA) is driving through the English countryside with his bickering friends Philip and Margaret Waverton (Raymond Massey, ABE LINCOLN IN ILLINOIS & Gloria Stuart, 1997’s TITANIC). It’s pouring outside, which causes a landslide. To get out of the weather, they arrive at an old dark house where the sibling owners, Horace and Rebecca Femm (Ernest Thesiger, BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN & Eva Moore, 1946’s OF HUMAN BONDAGE), allow them to stay the night. The Femms have a hulking and scary looking butler named Morgan (Boris Karloff, FRANKENSTEIN) — think hairy Lurch. Rebecca keeps yammering on about the evils of the family and the cursed house, scarring the wits out of Margaret.

Then during a strange dinner, talkative Sir William Porterhouse (Charles Laughton, MUTINY OF THE BOUNTY) and flamboyant chorus girl Gladys DuCane (Lilian Bond, THE WOMEN) arrive. Soon enough Roger falls for Gladys, but will they survive the night? The 100 plus year old patriarch Sir Roderick Femm (Elspeth Dudgeon, NOW, VOYAGER) and the crazed brother Saul (Brember Wills, 1934’s THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL) still haven’t made an appearance yet.

Like a Douglas Sirk film, when you’re “with it,” the picture takes on greater proportions. Putting the loaf-about playboy as the hero is funny, but making him fall in love in a matter of hours with a chorus girl he just meet is hilarious. Whale has a grand ole time with the Femms. Rebecca is a satire of the evil crone one sees in many films. Horace is very cheeky about his strangeness. We know things aren’t 100% serious when we see what Horace does with the flowers once the unexpected guests arrive. Even Morgan is an over-exaggeration as the monstrous drunken butler.

Whale is also going for quirky humor with the insane Saul and especially with casting a woman as the elderly Sir Roderick. While the Femms are clearly played over the top for laughs, Whale knows to play the guests straight. Roger and Gladys are slightly skewed while the Wavertons and Sir Porterhouse are played fairly straight. It’s the straight characters that ground the campiness and make the film even better. For the Wavertons, they’re typical heroines stuck in a horror movie, but they aren’t in on the joke.

Whale is even able to develop some creepy and tense sequences involving those characters. But what really makes the film a horror movie is the strangeness of the Femms. They’re creepy. The shadowy black and white photography really heightens the story’s uneasiness and helps build tension. The picture’s look has clearly influenced many haunted house films both scary and funny. This film is really the hallmark of comedic horror done with subtlety and flare.

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Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks