Whale Sets Up Camp in House of Horror
(originally posted on IMDb 5 October 2018)

The first reuniting of director James Whale and newly-anointed-star Boris Karloff after the success of their "Frankenstein" (1931), "The Old Dark House" is quite a different piece of horror than their landmark 1931 production. There's not really a monster in this one, nor any supernatural or science-fiction elements, although there is, at least, one madman on the loose and a few otherwise eccentric characters haunting the house that is also beset by a storm outside. Although its title would lend itself to the horror subgenre, there had already been such old-dark-house pictures, although they tended to be murder mysteries, such as "One Exciting Night" (1922), "The Cat and the Canary" (1927), its lost remake "The Cat Creeps" (1930), and the also lost "London After Midnight" (1927). More important methinks is that this is also the first film where Whale introduced camp in his horror films--the kind of dark humor that would be expanded in his subsequent masterpieces "The Invisible Man" (1933) and "Bride of Frankenstein" (1935).

Although four of the five guests to the house would one day bring eight Oscar nominations and three awards with them, for Melvyn Douglas, Charles Laughton, Raymond Massey and Gloria Stuart, and everyone is the focus of the narrative at one time or another, it's the permanent residents that steal the show here. While Karloff's mute and scarred butler is essentially a lesser imitation of his Frankenstein monster who when drunk, again, stumbles about in fights and chases a woman around a room, it's still effective and grotesque. Surprisingly, even better are the imported stage performers Eva Moore as the domineering and spitefully religious matriarch of the house and Ernest Thesiger as her nervous Nellie brother, whose blasphemy is hardly disguised by the actor in being coded as gay. For this and his even better role in "Bride of Frankenstein" as Dr. Pretorius, Thesiger will always be remembered as a master of camp and gay-coded characterizations. In this one, I especially love how he reacts to Laughton's characteristic scenery chewing, with his face and the way he says, "No--," to Laughton's remark, "Well, there's no accounting for taste, you know, ha ha." An actress, Elspeth Dudgeon, also plays the bedridden old man, appropriately named "Sir Femm."

Being a 1932 talkie, it's creaky, with the dialogue sometimes difficult to distinguish, but the stormy sound effects are quite atmospheric and especially good for an early talkie. There are some good mechanical effects for the car ride in the storm, including a miniature landslide, even though these effects are secondary to the humorous bickering and backseat joking of the auto's occupants. It's a theatrical film, too, which was probably unavoidable being an early talkie and with so much theatrically-trained English talent behind and in front of the camera. Regardless, there is some nice use of shadows, from the constant flickering of fire, to Stuart's shadow playing before scaring herself with a subjective view repeating her prior encounter with the matriarch. Additionally, there are mirror shots distorting Moore's face as she rails against the wickedness of her late sister and as she seems to hypocritically enjoy and envy watching Stuart undress. Subsequently, Stuart sees her own face distorted in the mirrors and has another subjective series of nightmarish visions replaying the gaze of Moore's distorted face as well as the leering look of Karloff, as the storm thunders around them.

An obscure film for many years and once considered lost, we have Whale's friend and fellow filmmaker Curtis Harrington and the George Eastman House to thank for saving this one from the vaults of the by-then-uninterested Universal studios.