Hello, everybody! This is Frankie Franken with the next installment of
The MonsterGrrls' Thir13en For Halloween, and I hope that so far it's been a happy one for you!
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| The poster (1932) |
These
days, people are doing all kinds of remakes of stuff, whether it's
movies or TV shows, and this is happening in horror films too.
Recently there were remakes of both
Nightmare On Elm Street and
Friday The 13th,
and even though there's a lot of demand for original content, Hollywood
still keeps doing remakes. Today we'll take a look at a recently
rediscovered classic horror film,
The Old Dark House, which was originally made in 1932 by James Whale, who directed
Frankenstein and
The Bride Of Frankenstein. This same film was remade in 1963 by horror auteur William Castle, who directed
13 Ghosts and
The House On Haunted Hill (both of which got remakes, too!).
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| Horace and Rebecca Femm: There's one in every family... |
|
The Old Dark House
is the film that more or less invented the "old dark house" genre of
horror movies, and has a lineage that includes such diverse films as
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and
The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and certainly more than one episode of
Scooby Doo, Where Are You! Three
travelers, Philip and Margaret Waverton (Raymond Massey and Gloria
Stuart) and their friend Roger Penderel (Melvyn Douglas) are caught in a
rainstorm and arrive at a remote, decaying old mansion looking for
shelter. The house belongs to the Femms, a family of recluses that
seems more than a little crazy. The Femm family includes craven,
fearful Horace (Ernest Thesiger), his fanatical sister Rebecca (Eva
Moore), their mute butler Morgan (Boris Karloff) and their brother Saul
(Brember Wills) who spends most of the film locked in the attic. The
Femms are reluctant to entertain the travelers, but bring them out of
the storm
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| ...but in this one there's several: Morgan Femm and Margaret Waverton |
anyway. Soon, Sir William Porterhouse (Charles Laughton) and
his mistress Gladys DuCane Perkins (Lillian Bond) arrive at the house,
which seems to make the Femms behave even more strangely. Things come
to a head when Morgan, who is unfortunately alcoholic, gets drunk and
releases Saul, who turns out to be a psychopath
and a pyromaniac.
Upon its release in 1932,
TODH
was not well reviewed. Although most New York reviewers praised the
film for its wealth of talent (including horror luminaries Karloff,
Thesiger and Laughton), the film was panned by
Variety and
The Hollywood Filmograph,
and suffered negative word-of-mouth. For several years it was
considered a lost film, until a print was found in the Universal Studios
vaults in 1968 and restored. Today it is considered a cult film and
enjoys a reputation as an interesting landmark in the career of director
James Whale.
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| The poster (1963) |
In 1963, William Castle remade
The Old Dark House
as a joint effort with Universal Studios and Hammer Films, starring Tom
Poston, Mervyn Johns, Robert Morley, Janette Scott and Fenella
Fielding. The remake deviates from the original in many ways: apart
from being in color, the remake is the story of Tom Penderel (Poston),
an American car salesman traveling in London who delivers a car to an
old mansion in Dartmoor, the family home of his eccentric roommate
Casper Femm (Peter Bull) who has told Tom that he must return to the
mansion each night before midnight. Upon arriving, the car is damaged
in a storm and Tom is invited to stay at the Femm house, where he meets
Jasper, Casper's twin brother (also Bull), his two nieces Cecily (Scott)
and Morgana (Fielding), gun-obsessed father Roderick (Morley) and Uncle
Potiphar (Johns) who is building an ark in anticipation of another
Great Flood. Though initially frightened upon discovering that Casper
is dead, Tom is attracted to Cecily, and ends up staying the night. Tom
is drawn into the Femms' weird world and soon discovers himself in the
midst of a murder plot against the Femms, where someone is attempting to
gain the family estate by killing all the living heirs.
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| Tom finds a fiend |
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| Poston, Scott and Morley |
TODH '63 is considered inferior to
TODH '32, despite the fact that
TODH
'32 was kind of an oddball film all its own. Though the stories are
basically variations on the theme of outsider trapped in an old house
with strange people, I think
TODH '63 has a few merits of its
own. The macabre comedy is played up, bringing a kind of Addams Family
feel to the picture (the film's credits even feature drawings by Addams
himself!), and the actors for
TODH '63 were pretty talented too:
Morley was a well-known and established actor in film and theatre, Johns
was a distinctive character actor in England who was known for his Bob
Cratchit to Alastair Sim's
Scrooge, Poston was a noted comic
actor in both film and TV, and Fielding was a popular actress who had
appeared in several films, most notably to horror fans in the comedy
Carry On Screaming. All in all,
TODH '63 is a very different film, and shouldn't be judged for its connection to the original. The Mad Doctor said this about
the Dark Shadows movie, if you'll remember, and I kind of feel the same thing is going
on here. So if you're interested in seeing either (or both) of these
films, they're worthy additions to your viewing experience, especially
at this time of the year.
Well, that's it for me, and I'll see you soon. Come back for the next installment of our
Thir13en for Halloween!
Sincerely,
Francesca "Frankie" Franken
MAD DOCTOR'S NOTE: Both versions of The Old Dark House are available from Amazon and Netflix. Check them out.
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