How cult British and American horror makers re-animated a classic.
“Such a partnership of British class and American brashness, working from a source by the great J.B. Priestley and with a plethora of famous and talented thespians signed up, would surely result in a masterpiece of horror comedy. So, what went wrong?”
Cinematic horror comedy, down the decades, has always been an awkward beast, but frequently an enjoyable one. Whether the wit interwoven with shock and melancholy of An American Werewolf in London or the outright joyously shuddery anarchy of Killer Klowns from Outer Space.
And, somewhere between those two extremes of dark and horrific gallows humour and candy floss-coloured frivolity of fear, a great many horror comedy films over the years gravitated towards one particular plot. An intrepid naif – sometimes more than one – ends up, by accident or invitation, at a forbidding abode in the middle of nowhere: comic-sinister eccentrics surround them, murders frequently commence, and there seems to be no way out.
The list is extensive: the 1980s brought us House Of The Long Shadows with its to-die-for main cast of horror icons; the 1970s presented the likes of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the Cook and Moore The Hound Of The Baskervilles, and the odd but engaging Frankie Howerd vehicle, The House In Nightmare Park. Heading back through the decades, we had the likes of the perennial favourite Carry On Screaming!, The Horror Of It All, What A Carve-Up!, The Ghost Breakers, Seven Footprints To Satan, and in 1932, perhaps the most influential of them all, and certainly one of the first…
…The Old Dark House.
This tale, stylishly directed by the great James Whale, remains a masterclass in mixing creepy noir atmosphere with heightened theatricality (Ernest Theisger’s performance remains a particular delight), resulting in a horror film so successfully leavened with humour that it causes as many chuckles as shudders. It rapidly became a classic of its kind and has remained that way to this very day.
So, it perhaps wasn’t so surprising, given the self-cannibalising nature of cinema, that some thirty years on, plans were laid to remake it.
And to be fair, the makers certainly couldn’t be faulted for ambition. A pairing of British and American horror talent to make the hairs rise on the back of the neck: Britain’s very own Hammer Film Productions, riding high on the success of such reinventions of classic yarns of terror as The Curse Of Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy and The Hound Of The Baskervilles, and America’s William Castle – the director and showman of such films as Macabre, Homicidal, The Tingler and House On Haunted Hill, the King of the Gimmicks who brought the electrical shocks of Percepto and the airborne skeletons of Emergo into the cinema! Such a partnership of British class and American brashness, working from a source by the great J.B. Priestley and with a plethora of famous and talented thespians signed up, would surely result in a masterpiece of horror comedy.
So, what went wrong?
That’s perhaps unduly harsh. There is still a great deal to enjoy in the film: it’s simply that – compared to the original – it is decidedly lacklustre. And there’s one major reason for that. James Whale’s original is undoubtedly a humorous piece, but he never forgets that it stands among a cycle of such classic horror films from Universal of the 1930s as Lugosi’s Dracula and Karloff’s The Mummy – not to mention Whale’s films of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man andBride Of Frankenstein. There is a lot of intentional humour in Whale’s horror films, but it never overwhelms the uncanny and the unsettling.
The big failing in Hammer and Castle’s take on the tale – apart from some pointless changes to the plot of the original that are annoying, but not deal-breaking – is that there’s pretty much only comedy left, and frequently somewhat predictable and uninspired comedy at that (there’s a running gag involving a trap door which never manages to be funny, although it does take on a mildly-amusing symbolic nature at the end). Whale’s original is undeniably comical, but it also has lashings of atmosphere, of suspense, in its setting, its sets, and its performances. The already-mentioned Thesiger’s Horace Femm is a clear example – he’s somehow at once as camply-acidic as Kenneth Williams on steroids, and yet also a genuinely creepy, foreboding figure. And every actor in the original is definitely giving their all. By contrast, the 1963 cast – while undeniably excellent – largely seem to be on autopilot, providing rote portrayals that play very much to previously-established screen personae. Fenella Fielding is glamorous, seductive, and predatory: Peter Bull is huge, portly and foreboding; and so on and so forth. Characters edge from archetype into stereotype.
There are some genuinely engaging performances – Tom Poston’s hero, Tom Penderel, is endearing and energetic, displaying a real flair for physical comedy that reminds one of Danny Kaye or Jon Pertwee, and the veterans Joyce Grenfell and Mervyn Johns as Agatha and Potiphar Femm provide some welcome humanity as well as an air of real, and even slightly ominous, eccentricity – but there’s something of an overall air of ‘will this do?’ to what the actors involved generally bring to the table. They’re not really stretching themselves, they’re playing entirely to audience expectations, and as such they tend toward the somewhat bland, when they should be aiming for the odd and the unsettling.
Even the opening credits – often unkindly but not unreasonably described as the best part of the film by some critics – designed by no less than Charles Addams (who amusingly signs his work with a hairy, brutish hand on the screen before our very eyes), still have a certain air of the uninspired. The old, dark house that he depicts (while enlivened by the odd piece of funny/creepy animation) is a decidedly lacklustre affair, with none of the sinister, baroque presence of the Addams Family mansion, or even the Munsters’ 1313 Mockingbird Lane. The all-too-little-seen exteriors of the old dark house in the film itself may be provided by the impressive regular Hammer location of Oakley Court, usually seen by night and in the middle of a raging storm, but there’s so little of them that this doesn’t really help.
The film as a whole lacks atmosphere, any real feeling of tension or suspense, and this is its single biggest failing. With horror all but absent, there’s little left but comedy, and as a result there’s something of an air of Christmas panto or West End farce. Except, rather than a stammering Brian Rix falling out of a wardrobe without his trousers, here you’re more likely to find a smiling Joyce Grenfell in a rocking chair with knitting needles rammed through her neck. Which, incidentally, makes this film sound a lot more alarming than it actually is.
And yet…it’s hard to dismiss this effort completely as a waste of time and talent, with never a backward glance. With its basic plot of a mad and greedy family slaughtering each other to the last man or woman standing, there is a certain residual potential for gruesomeness (and despite its complete lack of the supernatural or paranormal, this plot is pretty much identical to the previously-mentioned The House In Nightmare Park), and while The Old Dark House doesn’t contain such unnerving horrors as the hero’s gradual descent into avaricious, obsessive madness or a sinister set piece to match the performance of When The Dolls Dance Every Night, that simple but effective story is still a decent scaffold on which to hang some gruesome murders – and, for all of the bloodlessness, they’re definitely unusual – not just the knitting needle killing described, but various deaths by such outré methods as jury-rigged firearms and high explosives at least give the film a redeeming dash of the weird and the violent which saves it from the jaws of tedium!
There are also some staples of horror/mystery tales put to effective use, such as the unexpected bog which almost claims our unwitting hero’s life at one point, and is again thankfully filmed at the dead of night in a furious downpour, even if the final effect (again defused somewhat by a mistimed sight gag) isn’t the full Grimpen Mire. Adding some definite visual appeal are some impressive sets: the interior of the old dark Femm family house certainly conveys the appropriate air of faded and threadbare grandeur, and then there’s the Ark that Potiphar, obsessed by the idea that God is about to drown and cleanse the Earth again, is busily building in the Femms’ extensive gardens. It feels as though a significant part of the film’s budget went towards the genuinely imposing and inventive interior set for the outer shell, as the hold is home to a veritable menagerie of animals – lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Or at the very least, lions and dogs and ducks. Whatever the case, they’re present in sufficiently impressive numbers and genuinely on set to make a favourably memorable impression, and then there’s the pleasing realisation that, just like a certain mysterious police public call box that was to debut on our small screens later the same year, Potiphar’s Ark seems decidedly bigger on the inside…
And, for all of the predictable performances of most of the cast, this does mean that they all know exactly what they’re doing, and the portrayals that they provide are therefore at least adequate: Ronseal performances that do exactly what it says on the tin. If you want a seductive femme fatale with a sinister edge, then you can’t really better Fenella Fielding as Morgana: if you want a pompous but threatening bull of a man, then of course you cast Peter Bull – from his name onward, he’s perfect for such roles. Meanwhile, several performances are genuinely good – Tom Poston’s bumbling, determined hero: Joyce Grenfell’s ladylike, jittery maiden aunt figure; Janette Scott, fresh from fighting Triffids that spit poison and kill, playing a sweet heroine with unsuspected depths; and best of all, Mervyn Johns. The best part of two decades on from such homegrown classics of the supernatural as The Halfway House andDead Of Night, he remains – albeit somewhat more wrinkled and crusty-looking – an engaging, unassuming everyman who can suddenly and convincingly reveal idiosyncratic and even sinister aspects of character. To me, at least, he’s as much a screen icon of British horror as Messrs Cushing and Lee, and as Potiphar he comes very close to stealing the whole film from under the noses of a cast that definitely isn’t to be sniffed at.
And the humour, while it may not bring the house down or set the cobwebbed tables on a roar, is a perfectly serviceable mixture of that famed dry British wit and good old-fashioned slapstick. All of those involved in it play it with a certain degree of style and gusto, so at the very least the film is consistently engaging – there’s always something happening to keep the attention, and the twists keep coming until the closing moments, and as a result we, the audience, may feel a little disappointed (especially if we recall the original version), but importantly, we never feel cheated.
This, then, is perhaps the best way to regard 1963’s The Old Dark House: as a film that we can only wistfully suggest should have been so much better, given the sheer talent involved on both sides of the camera, one that may even have surpassed the original version – but that it is hard to dislike. It may be oddly unassuming, and a little more obvious ambition might’ve resulted in a superior end product (but then, when doesn’t it?), yet it remains watchable and enjoyable from beginning to end. No classic, but a more-than-fair way to pass an hour and a half in the company of skilled storytellers and players who are at least giving us some good, unpretentious entertainment.
And the very ending surely treads into the realm of horror, as Tom finds himself trapped in a forced marriage to Morgana. Caught in not-so-holy matrimony to the young Fenella Fielding? As later generations would probably conclude, what a way to go…
❉ ‘The Old Dark House’ is available on Blu-Ray from Powerhouse Films, RRP £9.99. Click here to order.
❉ Ken Shinn still lives in Gloucestershire, has now entered his sixth decade, and has no plans to stop writing cult fact and fiction any time soon. Recent work of his can be found in ‘In The Lap Of The Gods’ from Cult Ink and ‘The 11th BHF Book Of Horror Stories’ from BHF Books. He has recently had a whole slew of articles published in We Belong Dead’s ‘Mods And Shockers’, and his debut collection of short fiction, ‘Shinnthology!’, is still available from BHF Books via Amazon UK.
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