This Old Dark House

Posted by davidkalat on October 29, 2011

It’s no great surprise that the two movie genres that gripped me so thoroughly when I was a little kid and which continue to dominate my love of cinema to this day (as I careen towards geezerdom) are horror and comedy. They are much closer than they might superficially appear. I’ve been to plenty of comedy films that induced in audiences gasps of awe and terror, and horror films that provoked in audiences nervous laughter. Drawing a line between the two involves splitting hairs and other forms of killjoy pedantry.

And so, in honor of Halloween, I’d like to tip my hat to one of the most venerable tropes of classic gothic horror, which also happens to be a slapstick mainstay: the old dark house!

In the early part of the twentieth century, these things were as plentiful as dirt. In broad strokes, the most common variant followed this pattern: a group of people are gathered together in a forbidding mansion for the reading of a will—this permits the collection of competing factions, people who’ve never met before but have something in common and something to lose. Then, this roster of attendees starts to diminish, one by one, as someone decides to prejudice their chances in terms of the impending inheritance.

That, and a lot of folderol—guys in devil costumes, ambulatory skeletons, gorillas. That sort of thing.

Bob Hope did two of these:

Ginger Rogers one:

Even Laurel and Hardy:

The Three Stooges worked almost endless variations:

And lest you think it was a format relegated to B-movie schlock, an old dark house film called The Inugami Family is one of the great classics of 1970s Japanese cinema. (The following clip merely scratches the surface of this awesome movie–imagine Columbo v. Fantomas as a Japanese-made giallo. It rocks.)

In 2008, while global capitalism was imploding, movie satirist Larry Blamire turned his comic attention to this moribund genre and the result was Dark and Stormy Night–a pitch perfect parody of something that wasn’t all that serious to start with.

I’ll watch just about anything Larry Blamire touches, but the joke in this film is somewhat attenuated by the fact that he’s spoofing what was predominantly a comedy genre to start with (and boy, let me tell you, I can’t wait til the folks behind the Scary Movie franchise take to spoofing their own spoofs).

To be fair, not all old dark houses were meant to be humorous. Even some of the ones I listed above took themselves seriously—for example, the Ginger Rogers one is meant to be a genuine thriller.

It is instructive to look at the one that bequeathed the genre its name—James Whale’s The Old Dark House is a “serious” horror movie, but like the best of Whale’s work, it straddles the line between over-the-top horror and wry absurdity.

The laugh lines in Old Dark House don’t undercut the chills—if anything they help to establish and maintain the atmosphere of tension. The things that are wrong in this house can’t be resolved by flippancy and sarcasm—we know, we’ve tried.

The old dark house genre was a sort of cinematic haunted house—a bunch of self-conscious thrills that never really amounted to anything. You could wander a haunted hay maze and have carnival workers in masks jump out at you yelling “Boo!” or you could watch stuff like this:

Same difference, really.

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7 Responses This Old Dark House

Posted By swac : October 29, 2011 9:28 am

The first thing that came to mind for me (besides Bob Hope) was Olson & Johnson’s Ghost Catchers, which I managed to find in grey market form at a film fest a few years back. If only there was a Universal Franchise Collection of their O&J titles…I never did manage to snag that Australian DVD of Hellzapoppin’ before it vanished from the marketplace.

Posted By Tom S : October 29, 2011 3:00 pm

When talking about classic horror with people, they often assume that people in the 30s found all the stuff we find campy now terrifying- that nobody laughed during Dracula and so forth. But before and after the debut of the big Universal monsters, there’s stuff like this, which obviously expects that the audience for horror and the audience for comedy have a lot in common, and are going to want the one to bleed into the other. My guess is that we’re not as much more sophisticated than the people in the 30s as we’d like to believe.

Posted By suzidoll : October 29, 2011 8:21 pm

We showed Whale’s OLD DARK HOUSE last weekend at Facets. Most of the people in the audience were very young and had never seen it. The person who introduced it did a good job of setting it up so the audience knew what to expect, and in the Q&A afterward, you could tell many enjoyed it. And, at the end, old Brother Saul creeped most of us out.

Posted By Jenni : October 29, 2011 11:42 pm

Laughed outloud at the Hope clip and the spoof clip by Blamire. Our family watched SHAWN OF THE DEAD today, which we’ve seen before, but it definitely falls in the catagory of horror blended with bits of comedy, even though it is a modern movie, not from the 1930s or 40s.

Posted By John Maddox Roberts : October 30, 2011 1:52 pm

The inspiration for much of this may have been the stories of H.P. Lovecraft from the 20s and early 30s. HPL’s stories were full of old houses and their creepy inhabitants. Many of his titles referred to houses: “The Shunned House,” “Dreams in the Witch House,” “The Picture in the House,” “The Rats in the Walls,” “The Strange High House in the Mist,” and others.

Posted By medusamorlock : October 31, 2011 6:20 pm

Thanks for these hilariously horrifying clips and a great look at one of my favorite combo-genres! I was just thinking that I wish the Marx Brothers had done a haunted house movie — that could have been amazing. (Only during the Paramount years, though!).

Really great post!

Posted By Jim Vecchio : November 1, 2011 7:27 am

Thank you for including Laurel and Hardy. As long as you mentioned MURDER CASE, I wanted to also mention OLIVER THE EIGHTH, which is a classic blend of horror and comedy. I remember when I was a kid and the UNIVERSAL horror movies and the like first hit the small screen, “discovering” THE BOOGIE MEN WILL GET YOU, another classic!

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