First Thoughts on "The Old Dark House"

There’s a reason James Whale is the most revered of the Universal Horror directors, and those reasons are on full display in The Old Dark House, one of Sarah Bea Milner’s picks for 1932. This was his first horror picture after helping ignite the Uni horror craze the year before with Frankenstein, and it reunited the British director with his fellow countryman and Frankenstein star Boris Karloff—but they were clearly uninterested in retreading the same ground, or even taking a victory lap. Their proper sequel, Bride of Frankenstein, was still three years away, but here they’re clearly testing out that film’s delightful refusal to take itself too seriously.

Cinematic self-awareness was not terribly common in the early 1930s; the movies simply hadn’t been around all that long, and while there were occasional burlesques of common tropes and genres from Keystone and Keaton and the like, what Whale attempts in The Old Dark House must’ve felt altogether new and refreshing. The very title is a wink, like Whedon and Goddard titling their Evil Dead riff The Cabin in the Woods. We all know (or think we know) what to expect from a creepy movie about an old dark house, especially one that starts on a dark and stormy night, a premise so venerable, Rocky Horror was still sending it up forty years later.