As far as I can tell, the Old Dark House subgenre started around 1920--that was the year that saw the stage debut of The Bat, an effort by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood to create an updated adaptation of the former's mystery novel, 1908's The Circular Staircase. The Bat enjoyed tremendous success onstage and inspired not only three films (in 1926, 1930, and 1959), but also the character of Batman, ostensibly. The success of The Bat inspired several other plays with the same formula--a group of varied and variously-savory persons locked in an Old Dark House are menaced by a murderous treasure-seeking costumed criminal--including The Monster and The Cat and the Canary in 1922, which were both notably adapted to film as well. By 1925, we saw the release of The Gorilla, which would go on, somehow, to spawn three film adaptations, including two which are lost. What we are left with as far as The Gorilla goes is the 1939 version starring the Ritz Brothers and Bela Lugosi, one of the most repugnant "horror" "comedies" of all time. But this version serves the same relative function for the film incarnation of the ODH subgenre as its source material did for the stage version of such. While the 1922 ODH plays were already leaning much more to the comedic side than The Bat and The Circular Staircase, The Gorilla seems to have been even more of a parody, being comparatively late to the game. Similarly, ODH movies were in their prime long before 1939, considering that the namesake of the subgenre, James Whale's The Old Dark House, came out in 1932. Despite being the headliner of this group of movies, Old Dark House is yet another parody, but was based off of a mystery novel which I've yet to read, which may be more serious. You can imagine that a parody made long after the expiration of both the source of parody and the parody subgenre itself is going to be a trainwreck.
Sh! The Octopus is another too-late parody of the genre, but unlike The Gorilla, it proves to be one of the most captivating of them all. While it was based on a play of the same title, the credits also name the writer of The Gorilla, apparently because Sh! The Octopus: The Play was a parody of The Gorilla: The Play. Sh! The Octopus thus not only mocks the conventions and tropes of the Old Dark House movies but it also mocks the comedic deconstruction of such. You may think that a parody of a parody would be agonizing, but it's not. If anything because most people who see this film are going to be too distracted by the constant lunacy of this film's construction.
So instead of a maniac with a Gorilla motif, we have a maniac with an Octopus motif, and instead of a creepy old mansion we have a creepy old lighthouse. We meet Paul Morgan, an artist who intends to borrow the lighthouse to paint seascapes; Kelly and Dempsey, two idiot cops, one with a baby on the way; Captain Hook, a one-handed sailor who goes berserk when he hears the ticking of a clock; and many others. As soon as everyone is dragged to the lighthouse, all sense of continuity breaks down and we enter the Vignette Zone. As in, this entire movie is a string of vignettes, which reveal that no one is who they say they are and also that there is a real octopus killing people besides the criminal Octopus! There is a shocking casualness to every twist and turn, because they do not matter. This movie runs 54 minutes and so you can imagine the sort of pace this has when I say that the number of subplots sometimes rival those of a Keeler novel. This is a parody in the purest form--laying out the points you want to parody, one after another, and then parodying them, one after another. It's almost a minimalist work, in that like other minimalist narratives it barely has a story. Along the way we have many hundreds of awful, awful jokes that are nonetheless wayyy funnier than anything in The Gorilla. If anything because the jokes, too, are thrown out with a who-cares sense of initiative. Again, this is a parody of a parody. The jokes are bad because the jokes have always been bad. Good ol' cynicism wins again.
If you don't believe me when I say that this film is cynical, I want you to know that the ending--spoiler alert--is that everyone fucking dies in a massive explosion. Okay, that's not the real twist ending...that would be that it's all a dream. After we see them all die in a massive explosion. I don't even know how to interpret the "it was all a dream" ending anymore--as anyone who's seen Wizard of Oz knows it's hardly a function exclusively of B-movies. It does go to explain the complete disconnect between everything in the main film, so you can commend the filmmakers for using this particular out in a logical way, for once.
Most of the comedy of the film comes from exaggerating the elements of an ODH film to the fullest extent--ironically, in the course of doing so, it begins to precede later developments in horror film, such as the krimi or the slasher craze. There are uncountable plot twists, secret passages, and personality faults spread out throughout the lighthouse and the cast. The lighthouse keeps them all running so they never get a chance to get clues, even as it turns out one by one that each of them could be the criminal threatening the rest. Compare the Octopus to the titular character from the German Fellowship of the Frog, which kicked off the krimi trend in that country--compare the untrustworthy cast to that of an Italian giallo--and compare the crazies who try to warn away the trapped idiots and the dripping blood from the ceiling to similar things in movies like Friday the 13th and its ilk. For better or worse, the Old Dark House movies laid the seeds for the horror films of the '60s, '70s, and '80s, Sh! The Octopus included. Having now seen quite a few of the ODH films, I can say that none of them make me think of movies from the relative future more than Sh!, probably because of how exaggerated it is. There is that belief that famous media is always eclipsed by its imitators--that many of the stereotypes we associate with one genre or another are usually absent in the movies that created or heavily influenced that genre. Perhaps there was a seed in the Western consciousness that demanded a revival of the ideas that were laid bare as the ODH films were stretched out further and further from their roots. In a lot of ways, the ODH films and their turn towards comedy is a product of how Americans felt during the inter-war period. The Circular Staircase was written before World War I and is a more serious work. But after the War, The Bat and other Staircase-derived works become the subject of light entertainment, slowly melting down in that lowest of brows, slapstick. It's suddenly cozy to hang out in a leaky old haunted house in the middle of the night, with exotic butlers, foreboding sea captains, and amiable drunks. One of the ladies of Sh! The Octopus gets this line: "I used to play in caves all the time when I was a little girl!" These are the children of the Spiritualists--the world of the supernatural, and indeed the similarly-forbidden world of the criminal, is a healthy and amusing distraction from the horrors of War. The genre fell apart probably because it got too stupid--again, exemplified by The Gorilla--but also, there's a Pre-World War II anxiety that puts some twitchiness into Sh! I can't quite put my finger on it, but it's there. Few more years and we're back to blowing up the Old Dark Houses, and the Germanic millionaire viscounts are suddenly the bad guys. Horror movies of any stripe did not do well during World War II.
To tie this all back: am I reaching (more than I already am) to say that the American slasher was born in the shadow of 'Nam? Did we suddenly need thrilling/comedic/shitty Grand Guignol images of graphic violence to let out all our tensions from a war we typically regretted? Did we find comfort in the knowledge that Michael or Jason couldn't get us just as we did with the Bat or the Gorilla? Did the cozy haunted mansion that brought us peace become teenage sex in a cabin in the woods--nooks of "risky innocence," free of chemical bombs and blown-up cities? Did the slasher die and become a mangled parody of itself because of the rise of Middle Eastern conflicts in the 1990s leading to dawn-of-the-Millennium warfare that has lasted for an ungodly fucking long time now? Are we too distracted by real world horror to believe in these junky little films anymore? Have I finally jumped the shark? Who killed the Kennedys? Or Laura Palmer, for that matter? Who is Number One? Who shot J.R.--AW, QUIET, KELLY!
Sh! The Octopus is a very entertaining movie which I highly recommend. Not only is it funny and decently acted, it has some pretty amazing special effects and even manages to get some good dynamic shots, which help it escape from the stage-play stiffness that plagued many of the Old Dark House movies. I don't really know if I'm just seeing connections where there aren't there--which I do often--but it feels prescient, and moreso than many of its peers, which are often painfully dated.
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