The Old Dark House, or, Who Let the Saul Out?

The title of this post was stolen from my husband, who was maybe half paying attention to the movie while next to me on the sofa. I first saw Young Frankenstein long before I saw The Bride of Frankenstein, so I always assumed that its amazing production design and cinematography were more modern inventions from Mel Brooks’s team. It would be years before I saw the original and realized that James Whale did it first. And that The Bride of Frankenstein wasn’t the quaint, dusty old relic that I’d expected from a Universal Monsters classic, but was actually a beautiful, surreal masterpiece. The Old Dark House is from 1932, so in between the original Frankenstein and The Invisible Man. It’s not as big a production as Bride, but it does have a similar sense of a filmmaker who’s working from a predefined template and a well-established method of making movies, and then making it as batshit wacky as he possibly can without breaking it. In addition to Boris Karloff as a “drunken brute” and…

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