Thank goodness! What a tragedy it would have been to lose this deliciously ghoulish comedy of manners. The film was adapted from JB Priestley’s novel Benighted, and sees a young couple, a chorus girl, a war veteran and a gruff self-made industrialist take shelter in a tumbledown Welsh mansion during a rainstorm. Its inmates, the Femm family, are quite frankly bonkers. Head of the household is Horace (a juicily camp turn by Thesiger: ‘It’s only gin.
I like gin,’), who’s constantly bickering with his batty, deaf sister. Full of acid wit and howlingly funny, The Old Dark House is one of the most giddily glorious films you’re ever likely to see.Ĭast: Julian West, Jan Hieronimko, Sybille Schmitz Upstairs, their 101- year-old dad is bedridden and Saul their pyromaniac brother is locked in the attic, while Morgan the mad butler (Karloff) is getting fighting-drunk in the kitchen. In 1932, the New York Times’s film critic was not impressed. Vampyr, he declared, was ‘one of the worst films’ he’d ever seen, but added grudgingly that director Carl Dreyer could always be relied upon to be ‘different’. And Vampyr is different, a film like no other.
Dreyer spun his cinematic nightmare from two stories from a Sheridan Le Fanu collection.
It stars Nicolas de Gunzburg (a Russian aristocrat who bankrolled the film, appearing under the alias Julian West) as an occult-obsessed young man who visits a French village haunted by a vampire. The lord of the manor dies and his young daughter is gravely ill, bite wounds to her neck. His intention, said Dreyer, was ‘to create a daydream on the screen and to show that the horrific is not to be found around us, but in our own unconscious mind.’ And Vampyr is often compared to a waking dream, full of strange hallucinatory images that strike dread in audiences even today. In lesser hands, the wild theatrics and camp stylings of Ken Russell’s story of religious persecution and demonic possession in seventeenth-century France would turn The Devils into no more than a fleshy, hysterical romp.
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