If Hollywood’s horror offerings this October have you feeling unperturbed and disappointed, a restoration of a classic in the genre will help to provide your spook-filled fix. A year after Frankenstein and a year before The Invisible Man, James Whale directed an adaptation of J. B. Priestley’s Benighted, titled The Old Dark House.
Ahead of a screening at NYFF, theatrical run at Quad Cinema, and a Blu-ray release, Cohen Media Group has unveiled a trailer for the restoration, which looks hauntingly gorgeous. Starring Boris Karloff, Charles Laughton, Eva Moore, Gloria Stuart, Melvyn Douglas, and Raymond Massey, the film follows a group stranded at a mysterious mansion. Check out the trailer and poster below.
Cast from the mold of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and the many gothic tales in its wake, J. B. Priestley’s 1927 novel Benighted was one of the most popular among the dozens of stories of the late 1920s and early 1930s for the page, stage, and screen about stranded travelers wandering through gloomy, secluded mansions at night. In their film adaptation, James Whale and his writers Benn Levy and R. C. Sherriff gave the novel a comic spin, bringing the film closer in spirit to the director’s later Bride of Frankenstein. The Old Dark House was thought to be lost in the years after Universal lost the rights, and it was filmmaker Curtis Harrington who rescued it from oblivion.
The Old Dark House screens at NYFF on September 30, opens at Quad Cinema on October 6, then hits Blu-ray on October 24.