The Old Dark House
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Wikipedia
Featured:  |
The Old Dark House is a 1932 horror film directed by James Whale and starring Boris Karloff, produced just one year after their success with Frankenstein. It is based on the 1927 novel Benighted by J. B. Priestley, and was written by R.C. Sherriff and Benn Wolf Levy. Filled with humorously sophisticated dialogue, the movie also stars Melvyn Douglas and features Charles Laughton, Ernest Thesiger (Doctor Pretorius in Whale's 1935 The Bride of Frankenstein), Raymond Massey, and Gloria Stuart (the elderly "Rose" in 1998's Titanic) as the ravishing young ingenue. According to the Penguin Encyclopaedia of Horror and the Supernatural, the Femm family's ancient patriarch was played by a woman, Elspeth Dudgeon (billed as "John Dudgeon"), because Whale couldn't find a male actor who looked old enough for the role.
In spite of the presence of Karloff, The Old Dark House was largely ignored at the American box office, although it was a huge hit in Whale's native England where the audience was more in tune with the director's distinctive, ironic sense of black humour. For many years, it was considered a lost film and gained a tremendous reputation as one of the pre-eminent gothic horror films. Finally, in the late 1960s/early 1970s, the original negative of the film was discovered by Curtis Harrington in the vaults of Universal Studios and restored so that it could once more be shown in public.
