The Old Dark House (1932)

If you had to locate the cin­e­mat­ic ur-text of haunt­ed house movies, James Whale’s fruity bone-rat­tler from 1932, The Old Dark House, would like­ly be in con­tention. Enough time had passed for the con­ven­tions of the genre to be gen­tly skew­ered, but the con­ceit was still ripe enough to be tak­en in a num­ber of new and excit­ing directions.

It begins as it should, on a rain-lashed evening in Wales. Three trav­ellers are brav­ing the road to Shrews­bury, but a land­slide blocks their path and forces them to seek refuge in a sin­is­ter-look­ing coun­try stack. After ini­tial­ly being turned away by cata­ton­ic and deformed but­ler, Mor­gan (Boris Karloff), they are invit­ed in by Ernest Thesiger’s wiry fusspot Horace Femm and his mad-eyed old­er sis­ter, Rebec­ca (Eva Moore).

As the trav­ellers mere­ly attempt to sur­vive through the night with what­ev­er scant com­forts avail­able, it appears that their hosts are expe­ri­enc­ing undue dis­com­fort as a result of this night­time impo­si­tion. The elec­tric fails and the lights go out. Mor­gan hits the drink too hard. Locked doors and secret rooms are dis­cov­ered. The Femm’s macabre fam­i­ly saga is unfurled. Whale recre­ates the blus­tery Welsh coun­try­side in an LA back­lot with a fusty atten­tion to detail.

He goes easy on the pyrotech­nics and jump scares, opt­ing instead for an all-per­vad­ing sense of grotesque and per­ver­si­ty. In one sequence when Rebec­ca is deliv­er­ing a mad mono­logue detail­ing her strict con­ser­v­a­tive world­view, the cam­era pulls away from her face and refracts the image through a warped mir­ror. The sud­den effect is ter­ri­fy­ing in and of itself, but also acts as a visu­al har­bin­ger for things to come. This new restora­tion offers a vital reminder of the film’s visu­al inge­nu­ity and care­ful­ly cal­i­brat­ed atmospherics.