Norena Shopland
There’s a little-known film set in Wales called The Old Dark House (1932) by British director James Whale (1889-1957), famous for horror films such as Frankenstein (1931)and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Whale was an openly gay man at a time when it was risky to be so and his life story was recreated in the film God and Monsters (1998) starring gay actor Ian McKellen.
Much has been written on the queering of Whale’s films but The Old Dark House has been neglected, partly because it was lost for 85 years.
Director Curtis Harrington (1926- 2007), considered one of the forerunners of New Queer Cinema (a movement in queer-themed independent filmmaking in the early 1990s), was an admirer of Whale and later his biographer, but Harrington was worried about the loss of the original film so in 1967 he set out to find it finally locating it in the Universal Studios vaults. It was in poor condition and restoration was needed- only four copies were finally produced – but it was not until 2017 that the film was made available to the public[1] and only then could the queer nature of the film be truly assessed.
The Old Dark House is a comic horror, 72-minute film, that seems clichéd now – the dark and stormy night, the isolated house – but it was a forerunner of that cliché and was influential in the rise of creepy ‘old house’ genre of films. It is based on J.B. Priestley’s second novel, Benighted (1927).
The story concerns three lost travellers driving through Wales. Philip and Margaret Waverton (played by Raymond Massey (1896-1983) and Gloria Stuart (1910-2010) now better known as Old Rose in Titanic), whose marriage is ‘wavering’, and their friend Roger Penderel (Melvyn Douglas (1901-1981). They arrive at a remote house in a medieval-type location used to stress a difference, a displacing of people into a strange environment (see Queer readings in J. B. Priestley’s Benighted for more on the use of Welsh locations to emphasise this).
Having been reluctantly admitted into the house by the lumbering mute brute, Morgan (Boris Karloff (1887–1969) who had also worked with Whale on Frankenstein) the trio are further greeted with a character who was also to become a staple in horror films, the almost skeletal-like, ethereal man. This is Horace Femm (Ernest Thesiger (1879-1961)) slightly camp and effeminate, a play on his name. Thesiger, described variously as either bisexual or homosexual, was a friend of James Whales who three years later cast him as Dr. Pretorius in the Bride of Frankenstein (1935), a film that has been subject to a number of queer readings.
Whale sets the film in a large open set, almost like a medieval hall, complete with shadows cast by a roaring fire, and everything about the house appears unnatural and where the visitor’s modernity clashes. As we learn more about Horace and Rebecca the queer readings in the film become more pronounced.
The soaked-through Margaret asks Rebecca Femm, Horace’s sister if there is a room in which she can change and Rebecca takes her to her own bedroom where electricity has been spurned, Rebecca having no trust in it. She lights candles, placing the scene in another time, and as Margaret changes, Rebecca relates a story of her sinful sister Ruth who was made an invalid and whom Rebecca had to nurse. Sitting on the bed, filmed with jarring camera angles and split images Rebecca reveals Ruth had died in that bed as she stares openly at Margaret changing her clothes. There are hints of unnatural feelings and of Ruth’s possible death at the hands of Rebecca and Horace. When Margaret puts on a silk dress Rebecca approaches her ranting about sin and the disintegration of all flesh, and as she fingers the dress, she places a hand on Margaret’s skin causing the woman to jump back in horror.
Later, the visitors are provided with a meal during which they are disturbed by the arrival of two more travellers escaping the rain. Sir William Porterhouse (Charles Laughton (1899-1962)) and his companion Gladys Du Cane, (Elsa Lanchester (1902-1986)). This was bisexual Laughton’s first Hollywood film. At one point Gladys says of Porterhouse ‘he likes people to think he’s ever so gay’ which is arguably the first use of the word ‘gay’ to mean homosexual in a mainstream source. By the 1920s the association between the word and male homosexuality had been established and Whales was probably using it as a code for Laughton’s sexuality.
The film then follows the book reasonably closely (See Queer readings in J. B. Priestley’s Benighted for more details) until Philip and Margaret come across Sir Roderick Femm in an upstairs bedroom. As he tells the couple about his dysfunctional family, the voice and appearance are decidedly female, despite a straggly beard and prosthetic nose. The actor, billed as ‘John Dudgeon’, is in fact Elspeth Dudgeon (1871-1955) and this early trans performance was due, Whale claimed, in a patently thin excuse, to not being able to get a suitable actor. Or, as some have suggested, a woman’s voice was more like that of an old man.
Sir Roderick warns of danger from the final member of the Femm family, Saul (Brember Wills (1883–1948)) who is locked in a room upstairs. Morgan, when drunk, tended to release the pyromaniac madman as happens on this occasion.
From here the film significantly differs from the novel as the ending, which did originally follow the book, was not well received by preview audiences, so Whale changed it.
Saul, having escaped his prison, encounters Penderel and the two sit uneasily at the table in the medieval-like hall, Saul with a knife, and Penderel trying to convince the man he is his friend. Saul assures Penderel he loves him (a conversation not in the book) as the Biblical Saul had loved David. But that love had turned to hate when Saul believed David was trying to dethrone him and on two occasions throws a spear at David just as Saul later throws a knife at Penderel. Behind the citation of the Biblical Saul is the echo of the homoerotic relationship David had with Saul’s son Jonathan.
In both versions of the story Saul and Penderel then fight and in Benighted they fall to their death from an upper balcony, lying together in ‘a queer brotherhood’, in the film however, due to the influence of the audience, Penderel survives and is comforted in the heterosexual embrace of Gladys. But, in a further departure from the book, Morgan becomes distraught by Saul’s death and cradles his head before picking up the man and carrying him, almost like a bride, up the stairs.
Whale took the nascent queer overtones from Priestley’s novel and adapted it to criticise heteronormatively and social conventions and so influential was it that The Old Dark House became the inspiration for the camp comedy Rocky Horror Show, and Charles Addams adapted Morgan into Lurch for his cartoons and subsequent TV show The Addams Family.
However, this all took place in Hollywood, no filming was done in Wales.
[1] Douglas Messerli 2020 James Whale: The Old Dark House World Cinema Review, 2 September.