Weird Movies: The Old Dark House
It starts conventionally enough. A group of travellers have to take shelter in an old dark house to escape from a terrible thunderstorm that is making the roads impassable. It’s the classic scary movie trope, and at first glance The Old Dark House is nothing more than an old-fashioned spookfest. Predictable set-up, creepy kooks inhabiting the house, stalwart heroes, cringing heroines. Very run-of-the-mill. You think this must be the movie all those other movies about old dark houses are based on. Then it gets weird.
The movie never goes where you think it will go and you’re never quite sure of the tone. Is this supposed to be funny? Scary? Just odd?
There are no ghosts in The Old Dark House. No monsters. The main danger is revealed early on, when the host of the house, Horace Femm announces of his butler “This kind of weather will get him drinking, and he’s a savage when he drinks!”
Believe it or not, THAT’S the main threat in the Old Dark House. The butler, Morgan, (played by the sinister, looming Boris Karloff) has too much to drink and just goes off his rocker. He begins chasing around the female characters while grunting, grabbing them by the shoulder or the wrist, but not really doing anything worse than that. I’ve seen this kind of thing in old movies before. This is how alcoholism is sometimes portrayed. The inebriated wretch chases around women Benny Hill style with a deranged look in his eye.
And believe it or not, that’s the plot. Five people trapped in a decrepit old house being menaced by a lecherous alcoholic butler! The male characters keep conveniently leaving the room at the right time to attend to some trivial task (“We need to get a lamp from upstairs”), the mad manservant enters and he chases the women around while breathing heavily.
There’s a little more to it than that. We keep getting introduced to new members of the family who live in the house. At one point the actress playing the fanatically religious sister also plays her own father with a spirit-gummed beard on her face. And at the end the TRUE threat is revealed when the actor playing Horace Femm takes a turn as his brother, Saul Femm, the most psychotic of all the family members who has to remain locked in the attic or he’ll burn the whole house down - “Have you ever really studied fire?”
But mostly the movie is the menace of an alcoholic butler interrupted by well-acted and oddly moving monologues about the First World War and true love.
What’s amazing about the movie is that it’s really watchable and that’s got to be mostly due to the direction of James Whale, who directed the original Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein. Somehow he keeps it moving, hooks you in with the atmosphere, and teases just enough visually to keep your eyes glued to the screen. It’s also very funny, often intentionally I think.
This is a strange gem of a movie from that black-and-white period where people didn’t truly know how to make movies quite yet. That is to say, there was no formula for making movies. If you watch the original Dracula you’ll notice this phenomenon. They forgot to give it a plot. Some people come into a room, they leave, Dracula comes in, looks around, leaves, people come back in, Dracula flies by, they scream, then they leave, Dracula re-enters…etc. etc. on and on. No real plot to speak of. But the picture itself, the images on the actual film, are FUN to look at. I can’t totally explain why. That’s what the Old Dark House is like.
Check it out if you’ve ever got a Sunday afternoon to kill. Especially if you worry your butler is hitting the sauce too much. That’ll make it scarier. I ordered it through Netflix.
