The Old Dark House, or, Who Let the Saul Out?

The title of this post was stolen from my husband, who was maybe half paying attention to the movie while next to me on the sofa.

I first saw Young Frankenstein long before I saw The Bride of Frankenstein, so I always assumed that its amazing production design and cinematography were more modern inventions from Mel Brooks’s team. It would be years before I saw the original and realized that James Whale did it first. And that The Bride of Frankenstein wasn’t the quaint, dusty old relic that I’d expected from a Universal Monsters classic, but was actually a beautiful, surreal masterpiece.

The Old Dark House is from 1932, so in between the original Frankenstein and The Invisible Man. It’s not as big a production as Bride, but it does have a similar sense of a filmmaker who’s working from a predefined template and a well-established method of making movies, and then making it as batshit wacky as he possibly can without breaking it.

In addition to Boris Karloff as a “drunken brute” and Melvyn Douglas¹From Macon, Georgia, which surprised me! as a jovial wisecracker who ends up stealing the movie, it’s got Charles Laughton as a good-natured businessman. And it was really interesting to see him in this movie, since he went on to do something similar years later with The Night of the Hunter: what if we took a big studio Hollywood production and used it to make a bizarre masterpiece?

The premise of The Old Dark House is that a society couple played by Raymond Massey and Gloria Stuart²Who people now might know most from Titanic are driving through the Welsh countryside during a terrible storm, with their friend Penderel (Douglas) in the back seat cracking wise and singing nonsense the whole time. When their car is almost hit by a landslide, they’re forced to seek shelter in, well, an old dark house. The house’s butler is an imposing, bearded man with a scarred face (Karloff), and the residents are a fussy and frightened man (Ernest Thesiger, doing a kind of test-run of the character he’d perfect in Bride of Frankenstein as Doctor Pretorious), and his sister (Eva Moore), a judgmental religious fanatic.

“Normal people in a spooky old house filled with eccentric and possibly dangerous weirdos” sounds like a solid, old-fashioned horror movie. What makes The Old Dark House special is that nobody in this movie is “normal“. Massey and Stuart’s characters come the closest, but even they live comfortably in this alternate universe the movie takes place in, and they take all kinds of bizarre behavior perfectly in stride, and they join right in. Maybe all of this kind of stuff is considered completely normal in Wales?

The movie is extremely funny, although it was never entirely clear to me how much of it was intended to read as “light-hearted” vs whether they were going for outright comedy. An early example: brother Horace (Thesiger) clears a space on the sofa for his new guests by picking up a vase and a bouquet of flowers, explaining that his sister had been trying her hand at flower arrangements. He then promptly tosses the entire bouquet into the fire. No one comments on it.

Like most of the “horror” movies from around this period, especially “gothic” ones, I didn’t find anything in The Old Dark House scary in the least. But I was still transfixed the entire time. All of the characters are bizarre and just plain delightful. Every choice the actors made — from the heroes, to the house’s residents, to the other members of the family revealed later — was simultaneously the weirdest and the most perfect choice possible.

And while much of it is filmed like a stage play, there are lots of perfect cinematic flourishes throughout. A camera pushing through a doorway into an impossibly huge master bedroom. Shots down a long hallway with a storm raging outside. And one bizarre dinner sequence, with frequent close-ups of the characters with often inscrutable reactions.

I realize it’s easy to over-romanticize older movies, but it really does feel like this movie puts the modern fixation on rigid genre definitions to shame. How much of it is intentional vs inadvertent? Is it a horror? Or a thriller? Or a comedy? You get the sense that The Old Dark House would treat the whole question as absurd. “It’s a movie.”

• 1
  From Macon, Georgia, which surprised me! ↩︎
• 2
  Who people now might know most from Titanic ↩︎