The Old Dark House (1932)

James Whale's 1932 masterpiece is one of the most enjoyable films of its kind ever made; even when it's terrible it's still glorious. "The Old Dark House" set the bar for all spooky old house movies, (even if it wasn't the first), and it's never been surpassed, (there was a dreadful remake in 1963 which should be avoided). It was based on J. B. Priestley's novel "Benighted" and takes place over the course of one stormy night when a group of travellers, (Raymond Massey, Gloria Stuart, Melvyn Douglas Charles Laughton and Lilian Bond), are stranded in the crumbling old house of the title with its very weird inhabitants, the Femms, (Ernest Thesiger, Eva Moore, Brember Wills and their 102 year old father played by Elspeth Dudgeon, but credited as John Dudgeon, as well as their mute brute of a butler played by Boris Karloff, sans the Boris in the credits). The Femms are all mad as hatters and they are superbly played; once seen, and heard, they are unlikely to be forgotten. On the other hand, both Massey and Douglas are very hammy indeed, though Laughton shows all the promise of a great actor in an early role. It's also superbly designed and photographed and although clocking in at only 72 minutes it was obviously a prestige production following hot on the heels of "Frankenstein". This old, dark house may creak in places but it has also stood the test of time and, newly restored, looks as good today as when it was first released.

Fmovies: First one carload of normal people who can't go on due to flash flooding stop in a Gothic horror house for food and shelter and then another. Strange doings are happening at the house occupied by the Femm family and their mute servant Morgan.

You can't really say there is any kind of coherent plot to the unfolding events and plot for me is usually the one indispensable part of any film. But in this case I make an exception because obviously Director James Whale was having a little fun with the audience by now used to Universal Studios horror film products. Whale creates a film of dark moods and light banter among the guests who can't quite figure out what's with this family of weirdos.

The Old Dark House marked the American film debut of Charles Laughton and Laughton overacts outrageously as does the whole cast in the role a bluff, overbearing, but essentially good hearted Manchester businessman who's got himself a Sir before his name and is right proud of it. This was also early work for Melvyn Douglas and Raymond Massey as another two of the guests.

Boris Karloff plays the sinister and mute servant Morgan. Karloff had one of the great speaking voices ever in films and interesting that this and his break through role as the Frankenstein monster required no dialog.

The Old Dark House is one great Halloween movie and listen close to the campy dialog that will tickle your funny bone if you don't miss it.

It is fully to James Whale's credit that he didn't lunge automatically for the horror genre's jugular after the lurch-away success of Frankenstein. Following his cynical romantic drama Impatient Maiden the urbane Brit next adapted JB Priestly's 1927 novel "Benighted' (or 'Cursed') for the screen.

Though Priestly felt Whale had jettisoned the novel's psychological aspects along with the title, The Old Dark House does in fact adhere closely to the source material, with verbatim dialogue and even lighting effects ripped directly from the text. It must be said that the film, stark and stagey and suffused with dread, is extremely odd; it's also very funny. (Whale even sends up his own back catalogue with one character shrieking "He's alive!"); while its influence on the likes of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Thundercrack, for example, is clear - another instance of one cult film paying dues to another.

The plot is simplicity itself: on a dark and stormy night in the wilds of Wales, five rain-lashed travellers, including bluff industrialist Sir William Porterhouse (Laughton, in his first US film), his 'escort' Gladys DuCane (Bond), and playboy Roger Penderel (Douglas), seek refuge at the Femm family mansion.

The Femms make the Addams' look like the Waltons. There's wry, effeminate Horace (Thesiger), who diffuses any sticky situation with the repeated exhortation "Have a potato." While his shrewish sister Rebecca (Moore, wonderful) is a deaf religious maniac who takes particular exception to Gladys. "You're silly and wicked. You think of nothing but your long straight legs and your white body and how to please your man. You revel in the joys of fleshly love, don't you?" Then there's the wizened, androgynous family patriarch, the 102-year-old Roderick (played, bizarrely, by Elspeth Dudgeon), and assisting, their mute alcoholic butler, Morgan (Karloff), given to random acts of violence and sworn to on no account unlock the Femm's dirty little secret from the attic - a cackling pyromaniac basketcase called Saul. As with Chekov's "hanging gun" dictum, we can be sure we'll meet Saul (Wills) by the third act.

This being a Whale film, those searching for subversive undercurrents will be sure to find them. One character refuses to come out of a closet, Gladys reveals that "Bill likes people to think he's gay" and the line "My feet were wet - among other things" is her none-too-subtle remark following Penderel's romantic overtures. However, the most obvious reading of the film is as a wry indictment of British manners, and of starched-upper lips in the face of adversity.

Each party (a cross-section of post-war Britain) has something to hide, and nobody is being straight with one other: as Porterhouse observes, "We've been sitting around for two hours talking, and what have we learned about each other? Nothing." There's genuine pathos in Laughton's performance as a lower-class businessman gone to seed ("When you've started making money, it's hard to stop") and in his peculiar relationship with his paid-for companion Gladys, the failed chorus-girl. ("If I were better at my job, I probably wouldn't be weekending with you.") In the Femms and in their visitors we might deduce the insanity of recent history manifested in a fractured, isolated nation still suffering the psychic fall-out from the Great War.

The Old Dark House fmovies. It's a funny experience when a film evokes déjà vu, only to realize the source of the déjà vu is, itself, intended to itself incite déjà vu. Picture this: a miserable storm sweeps a carload of normal people, as earnest as they are bedraggled, into taking refuge at a spooky old manor, only to be besieged and coveted by the prurient, camp Gothic inmates. But don't do the Time Warp again just yet: at the core of this Russian Doll of horror, pastiche, and dark humour lurks James Whale's oft-overlooked but seldom forgotten mini- masterpiece – The Old Dark House. As Poe-faced as if the script had been quoth by the Raven itself, Whale's film is, if not the granddaddy of most horror clichés, then at least the wry, drunken great-uncle. And, weathered as it is, time has been kind to this one, making The Old Dark House a creepy, clever, and sordidly amusing addition to the pantheon of horror classics. Singing not included; pelvic thrusting barely omitted.

If nothing else, The Old Dark House makes for a fascinating transitional tonal touch-point for Whale, one of the defining masters of classical horror. The film isn't as overtly satirical and camp as Whale's later monster mash-terpieces, The Invisible Man and, especially, Bride of Frankenstein, but it certainly shows him creeping in that direction, with a persistent snicker of irreverent naughtiness under its raspy breath. This isn't to say the film is an outright farce - indeed, Whale runs the gamut of thematic leitmotifs that would proceed to become preoccupations for decades of horror to follow: dogmatic religion, lurid sexuality, class discrepancies, and shunned, disabled family members. Yet, his film crackles with an invigorating, nervy energy, and his characters banter with zingy, pre-screwball fury, with several double-entendres pushing the boundaries of Hays Code knuckle-rapping with cheeky aplomb (maybe Whale assumed American censors wouldn't understand them through the Welsh accents?).

His setup is certainly foreboding enough, with the harried car ride prelude across flooding, lightning-scarred Welsh countryside a perfectly ominous amuse-bouche for the sinister, Gothic castle theatrics to come. Whale's flair for atmospheric mise-en-scène is superb, peppering the film with marvelously spooky flourishes and Expressionist lighting keeping the audience biting their nails throughout (one bit, where a woman makes shadow puppets on the wall with her hands, only to have a dark figure emerge from the shadow, is a jump scare for the ages). But Whale bides his time, keeping his pacing cunningly slow and allowing his film to froth at the mouth with looming tension.

Whale's film is also remarkable for the unprecedented access the audience is given to his cabal of characters. Too many horror films introduce characters as disposable (and disposed of) props, but Whale treats the first half of his potboiler like a theatre piece, as the growing crowd of storm refugees and reluctant hosts meet, and poke hopes, dreams, prejudices, and – mostly – fears out of each other. Whale's ensemble rises to the challenge, delivering genuinely well-crafted and compelling characters, particularly the suave, sharp-tongued Melvyn Douglas, the tough but chipper Lilian Bond, and, especially, Charles Laughton, who gives a remarkably heartfelt performance, his effete bluster whisking away to reveal a man plagued by terrible loneliness underneath. His monologue, revealing his bitter turn to capitalism as a means of finding purpose and escap

The Old Dark House is the least well known of James Whale's four horror pictures, but don't let that fool you, as this one is just as good as anything else Whale ever made. Despite being over seventy years old, The Old Dark House still holds the power to feel like it could have been released yesterday; much like the rest of Whale's horror movies, which are as fresh today as they were the day they were made. The plot follows three people that get caught in a storm and are forced to take refuge in the only place nearby - an old dark house. There, they encounter the house's strange inhabitants - a nearly deaf woman and a cowardly old man, along with their creepy butler (played by Boris Karloff), a scar faced drunk. More travellers turn up, and the film only gets more fun; introducing us to more strange characters, including a very weird old lady...with a beard, and something else, which is so horrible that the inhabitants are forced to keep it under lock and keyÂ…

The Old Dark House is one of the first haunted house films ever made, and it works, primarily, for two reasons; the house itself and the cast of characters. Both of these entities are intriguing elements in their own right, and they combine to great effect. The house is, as you might expect, old and dark; and it's a sublime horror setting because of that. It creates a constant sense of malice and through it's dark corridors and many rooms, Whale is able to make the house into a labyrinth where we can believe that anything can happen. This coupled with the fact that the 'normal' people in the house are stranded there, thus creating claustrophobia along with the raging storm outside makes for an atmosphere that is as dark and morbid as anything that cinema has ever given us. The characters inside the house are enigma's themselves; each one is as frightening and inventive as the other, and they have all been imitated several times by later horror films. Even the travellers that are stranded in the house are given unique to each other. Whale also uses a few of these characters to implement his own brand of black humour (which can be felt strongly in his other three films as well). Many horror films don't work character-wise because they're all so similar to each other; but this film certainly doesn't suffer from that.

Overall, The Old Dark House is another feather in Whale's already feather filled cap. It's as genius as any of his other horror films and overall it's a crying shame that Whale didn't do more work in that genre, as that is the genre that is so rightfully his. If I haven't made it clear enough already: this film comes with the highest recommendation from me.

Tales about sinister, creepy mansions were already clichéd by the time director James Whale directed THE OLD DARK HOUSE--and instead of presenting the piece as a straight-forward thriller he mixed the film's very atmospheric cinematography with a wild strain of parody. The result is a movie with a bizarre camp humor that foreshadows Whale's slightly later and even more bizarrely camp THE BRIDE OF FRANKESTEIN.

The plot, very based loosely on a J.B. Priestly novel, is perfunctory, existing only to throw together an ensemble cast of already-famous and soon-to-be-famous stars. Five motorists are trapped in the wilds of Wales during a horrific storm and are forced to seek shelter at, of course, an old dark house... but their unwilling hosts are a neurotic Ernest Thesiger, his religious fanatic sister Eva Moore, and their hulking, deformed, and mute butler Boris Karloff. Before the night is over the storm-weary travelers experience everything from a hellish meal to religious lectures--not to mention assault, attempted rape, mysterious cackling, a bit of arson, and a touch of homosexual hysteria (courtesy of Thesiger, Moore, and a surprise male character who is actually played by a woman) thrown in for good measure.

The cast is exceptional; in addition to Karloff, Thesiger, and Moore, we have Melvyn Douglas, Raymond Massey, Charles Laughton, Gloria Stuart, and Lilian Bond, and they wring the most from the covertly wicked script, with Eva Moore ranting about "laughter and sin," Thesiger inviting Raymond Massey into his room "to see a few things," and one of the most socially awkward meals ever put to film. But the film's real power is its cinematography: when they say old DARK house, they really mean it, and the look of the film is just as disorienting for viewers as for the characters; particularly noteworthy is the scene in which Moore lectures Gloria Stuart, with their faces distorted by the bedroom mirror, and the sequence in which Karloff pursues the white-clad and wind-whipped Gloria Stuart with mayhem in mind.

Viewers who expect "Universial Horror" fare will probably be disappointed by THE OLD DARK HOUSE, and director James Whale would create a still more memorable combination of horror and high-camp with THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTIEN. But THE OLD DARK HOUSE is an overlooked jewel of unusual quality: a sardonic parody of a famous theme, well played, filmed and scripted. Recommended.

Gary F. Taylor, aka GFT, Amazon Reviewer