House of Mystery (1934), by William Nigh

That the Old Dark House film and the gorilla picture were wedded early on stands to reason. All the time today do we see popular trends welded anxiously onto each other in an attempt to double-dip on certain media markets. I doubt this was the first ODH gorilla movie, but it was far from the last. Indeed, depending on where you look, it seemed almost mandatory for a gorilla to at least be teased as playing a part in the events to come once all the characters were settled in the house. House of Mystery is not a great A-Lister...it's one of the dumb ones. I don't like it for any good reason, and it's perhaps arguable whether I like it at all. This is a rare film where most of my amusement comes from pure gawking, and that probably means it's no good at all.

In one of the weirdest openings I've seen in these films, we start in "Asia, 1913." Archaeologist John Prendergast likes two things here in "Asia": drinking, and dancing girls. When he's cut off from one he turns to the other, in this case seeking out the dancers at the Temple of Kali--pronounced "Kay-LIE" here because white people in the '30s were not great at paying attention to these things. (So we're in India, then, and not just "Asia.") Conspicuously the Temple of Kali features a pair of guys in gorilla suits--they aren't there for nothing, coming to life when Prendergast is brought there after drunkenly killing one of the Temple's sacred monkeys, invoking the curse of Kali when he calls the priests "dogs" and starts whipping them (!!!). Prendergast escapes, taking not only one of the dancing girls with him but also a fortune in jewels. He and the girl seemingly get married, in an amazingly casual subversion of 1910s race relations, and we fast forward to twenty years later. A man named Professor Potter and his wife are looking for Prendergast and believe that he is now living under the name Mr. Pren in a large mansion, having been confined to a wheelchair or pretending such. Alongside an insurance salesman and several other annoying individuals, the Potters go to Pren's house to talk over the terms of finally doling out payments to those who invested in the Prendergast Expedition all those years ago. Unfortunately, it is Pren/Prendergast's belief that the Curse of Kali extends to those who inherit the wealth of the treasure. Thus, all the heirs must stay in his Old Dark House to see the horror of Kali before they can be allowed in on their share. Before long they're all sat down at the seance table, and a gorilla lunges out of the darkness at Mrs. Carfax...

So, I can imagine the first thing you're thinking: are gorillas an actual part of Hinduism? I tried to look into this to see if any sort of research was done on behalf of the screenwriters, and the closest I could come is this: there is a character in a Ramayana named Hanuman who is a monkey-like being in the service of Rama. However, this movie is about the cult of Kali, who, as far as I know, isn't even another avatar of Vishnu, as Rama is. Hindu belief has a less strict sense of orthodoxy than Christianity but as far as I know there has never been an ape cult of Kali in Indian history. This is just the beginning of the movie's many problems.

There's the weird bit where the medium lady's spirit guide is named "Pocahontas," and I'm not sure if she's supposed to be the historical Pocahontas or just a ghost who goes by that name. This is used for a couple of cheap shots equating Indians with American Indians, which is made worse by the fact that the drums that accompany the gorilla attacks are called tom-toms. I found out actually that "tom-tom" comes from Indian and Sri Lankan immigrants to England, where it was adopted by white people as the name for a toy drum and later for part of modern drum kits--so actually this is more accurate than the word's use in the Westerns it's likely to remind audiences of. In the '30s, however, one has to wonder if this is a furtherance of the "Pocahontas" Indian/Indian cross-up.

Regarding the film's racism, then: poor Chanda, Pren's wife, gets treated like shit in this. There's this lovely exchange about her between the girl and the insurance salesman douchebag guy, who--argh--end up together.

Girl: "I don't like the looks of that person."
Asshole: "Person? She looks more like Gandhi's ghost!" (??????)

As far as I know, yes, he is questioning that she's a person. (Also, I'm sure a reference to Gandhi's death won't have a harsh edge to it in fourteen years or so. Asshole.) Now, Chanda came back with Prendergast to become his wife, right? Like...they're married, right? 'Cause we saw them kissing back in India, right? Nooope. It turns out that Lead Gal is the one Prendergast wants, and Chanda is, in the ex-archaeologist's own words, "just [his] housekeeper." JESUS. You can presume from those kissing scenes that he fucked her as soon as he got her back to the homeland, and then proceeded to fuck her in another way by ditching her for other (white) girls. When it turns out that Chanda is the killer, having worked with Prendergast to use trained gorillas to scare off those who are after "his" investment money, you really don't feel bad at all that her last victim is Prendergast himself. When the two of them left India, she was probably about twenty, and so she's in her early forties now, but there's a certain age to her face that would make the film loads better if they decided to do anything with it. Maybe that's why in the end Chanda gets away, with the only assertion that she's caught being a "don't worry about her" from the local cop. Since everyone in this movie is an idiot I'm assuming said cop has no way of catching her and is just trying to cover his ass. Dick.

One has to ask what the makers of this movie thought its appeal was. In order to answer that question, we have to ask what the movie sets out to do. Well, because it's an Old Dark House film, it's basically out to make money off of cheap scares and cheaper laughs. (Seriously, the "comedy" in this is so bad that it nearly becomes good through sheer surrealism.) The slackness of its research suggests that any sort of subtext, including the movie's imperialism (or possible subversion thereof), are probably accidental. Ever since the miracle stories of the days of the writing of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or the bizarre descriptions of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the West has had an obsession with weird tales, and has primordially linked those tales with the foreign. Whether they be from the forest beyond or the next continent over, people from other lands have been associated with the mystical and monstrous. The trend has only been challenged comparatively recently and it will be a long time yet before the racist aspects of tropes such as it die out completely. Even last year's The Mummy showed that studios at least are still interested in marketing the "exotic" as a source of horror, mystery, and unknown evil. However, to go back and try to answer my own question, I can't imagine a group of filmmakers setting out to make a movie which attempts to make funny the misadventures of abusive, idiotic assholes who--at least in the case of Lead Girl--are punished if they have any trace of redeemability. Oh, wait, never mind, I can imagine such people, because that sort of formula has always been used by movie comedies and is still being used today. Arrrrrggghhhh.

Just gawk, folks. Just gawk at how fucking stupid this movie is, and give it no quarter. You will only find entertainment if you expect nothing and give no fucks about your own well-being.

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Doctor X (1932), by Michael Curtiz

It wouldn't be Spookyween without an Old Dark House. Now, calling Doctor X an Old Dark House film is a bit of a misnomer as the movie takes a little bit to actually get to the ODH in question. But this is the first Old Dark House movie I watched, and if it wasn't for it, then I think I would have developed a migraine over movies I love today like Sh! The Octopus and House of Mystery. These movies were so good at packing in menageries of oddity into their cheap and quick desire to make people laugh and scream that it's hard not to gawk at them today. Plus, with some authentically antiquated creepy visuals and a stellar performance from Lionel Atwill, there are some nice thrills to supplement the trashy hilarity.

For six months, New York has been wracked with murders committed every full moon by the rather dully named Moon Killer. Reporter Lee Taylor, a cowardly klutz, is looking for news on the murders and stumbles across an autopsy on one of the victims led by Dr. Xavier, head of a prominent medical research institute. Not only do the cops learn that the victims are being partially cannibalized, but they reveal that each of the victims was butchered post-mortem by a particular brain scalpel only used in the Xavier Institute. Xavier and all his scientists are now under suspicion. Xavier insists on the privilege of conducting his own investigation to help exonerate his Institute's reputation; this being the '30s, the police agree. We meet each of the doctor's staff in turn. Dr. Wells is a cannibalism specialist, but he lost an arm years ago and therefore isn't really super great at crushing people's tracheae, which is usually how the victims met their end. Dr. Haines is the most capable physically, but he's (initially) the least suspicious, as his deal is just that he reads porn. Dr. Duke is a rude, shrieking bastard, but he's also paralyzed and thus not really the strangle-murdering sort. And Dr. Rowitz gets creepy framing and has scars and an eyepatch, plus a scientific fascination with the moon, but he seems harmless enough. Taylor ultimately finds out where Dr. Xavier's testing of himself and his staff will take place: his creaky upstate mansion, a suitably aged and shadowy locale. Xavier and his scientists, along with Xavier's daughter Joan and his maid and butler, pack themselves into the house, with Taylor not far behind. Xavier will find his killer, alright--but he should know that keeping his killer so close is playing with fire.

Like many an Old Dark House film, Doctor X is part comedy as well as part horror-mystery. This works to varying effects throughout the film. Much of this comedy is centered around our ostensible protagonist, Lee Taylor, a character whom other critics hate so much you'd think he was Jar Jar Binks. I find him sort of charming, but then, I also have severe brain damage from having sat through the vast plethora of comic relief reporters who crop up in horror films from the 1920s through the 1940s. That he ends up with Joan Xavier in the end is something of a male entitlement issue, a conformance to tropes better left dead, but Fay Wray's performance is entirely fitting that of the daughter of a mad scientist, and while she could definitely do better when it comes to bedmates, you'd better believe she's wearing the fucking pants if they go places. I trust her judgment in men, and I do find some of Taylor's shtick at least a little funny, so I'll be kind to him. The movie never made me laugh out loud, but it had a consistent pace and rhythm to it that helped draw me into the experience.

This movie is so old that a character has to explain to us how a joy buzzer works. Contrariwise, this movie also features Prohibition jokes and a character entering what is obviously a brothel, salaciously-clad ladies included. Keep it classy, 1930s. And don't forget, Dr. Haines' "textbook" turned out to be full of "French Art," which is made all the funnier by the fact that Xavier calls Haines a "most studious worker." But this changes, as the movie goes on, and we see that Haines is definitely some sort of sicko. After all, it's not quite professional behavior to stare at the swimsuit-clad body of one's boss for prolonged periods of time, is it? That Haines is physically abled and the seeming meekest of all the scientists makes it stand to reason that he's the killer--he and Xavier himself, who the movie beautifully never keeps above suspicion, especially by having him played by Lionel Atwill. But nope, this is a '30s horror film so of course the real solution to the mystery is something far less comprehensible. Spoilers ahead.

The killer is Wells, and he's able to strangle people because he knows how to make new limbs. While his field is ostensibly cannibalism studies, we find out that he's actually been working on something called "synthetic flesh" (a phrase which he ends up saying in the best voice possible no less than three times in the film's climax). Not only can he recreate his missing arm, but he uses the synthetic flesh to makes a monstrous face and head for himself, resembling something like the handsome older brother of the closet-monster from The Brain That Wouldn't Die. The scene in which he applies the synthetic flesh has some artsy, proto-psychedelic flair to it. He then explains that he wasn't in Africa to study cannibalism, but was instead actually there to use the flesh that natives eat to develop his synthetic flesh.

This makes no sense. If Wells was never a cannibal, or even particularly interested in cannibalism outside of--I don't know--securing meat from the cannibals, why the hell does he start eating the corpses?! Maybe he wants to convince that the public that this killer is a maniac and not a respectable doctor, but this argument falls flat when he considered; 1) Wells also butchers his victims with a scalpel, which is why the Xavier Institute is under suspicion to begin with; 2) Wells is a known expert on cannibalism. That's what he's a doctor in! Also, how does studying the feeding patterns of cannibals provide insight into the creation of an organic flesh substitute? Is synthetic flesh refined in the human gullet or something? Is that why he was taking bites out of his victims...? Maybe that's why the comedy is here--it's conforming to type as an ODH film, but it also helps cover the fact that They Just Didn't Care. Or, perhaps more properly, that It's Just a Show, and We Should Really Just Relax.

Doctor X can fade into a dull sit at times, but it really is one of the best of its kind. Filmed at a time before mass film censorship, it takes full advantage of the guttural sensationalism at the time and comes up with something nearly as fucked up as West of Zanzibar and Murders in the Zoo. It's absolutely not perfect, but I watch it every October. Join me, won't you?

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Sh! The Octopus (1937), by William McGann

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.