Horror movies are endlessly popular—why are so few any good? This year has brought only one keeper (Amat Escalante’s Mexican feature The Untamed), and last year was the same (Robert Eggers’s low-budget indie The Witch). Fortunately, Halloween always prompts a few theatrical revivals of essential horror movies. On Friday at Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago Film Studies Center presents Tod Browning’s silent shocker The Unknown (1927), with live accompaniment by local musicians Kent Lambert and Sam Wagster, and on Halloween night at Northeastern Illinois University Auditorium, Chicago Film Society screens The Seventh Victim (1943), the most unnerving of the legendary B movies produced by Val Lewton at RKO Pictures. A new 4K restoration of the late George A. Romero’s epochal Night of the Living Dead (1968) opens Friday at Music Box, and Gene Siskel Film Center has a new restoration of James Whale’s overlooked gem The Old Dark House (1932).
Adapted from a novel by J.B. Priestley, The Old Dark House became a Hollywood prototype with its tale of unsuspecting travelers trapped in a house full of maniacs. What gives the film real power, however, is one’s growing sense of the house not as a building but as a psyche, and of the individual characters as its emotional components. Horace Femm is fear, and Rebecca Femm is shame. Margaret in her silk slip is desire, and Sir William Porterhouse (Charles Laughton), who arrives at the house with his girlfriend not long after the first party of travelers, is rage, still brooding over how his late wife was snubbed by his wealthy friends. When the travelers begin to explore the house, the forbidden upper floors seem like far reaches of the unconscious. Philip and Margaret, venturing upstairs, discover the siblings’ bearded, bedridden, 102-year-old father, Sir Roderick Femm, who speaks with a woman’s voice; in a perverse bit of gender-bending, Whale gave the role to actress Elspeth Dudgeon, billing her in the credits as “John Dudgeon.”
A half century later, we live in a more socially liberated time, but sexual impulse has hardly diminished as an aspect of horror movies. (Spoilers ahead.) That Mexican feature The Untamed, which you can still catch next weekend at University of Chicago Doc Films, involves two women who venture into the woods outside their town to enjoy mind-bending orgasms with a strange creature from outer space. The Witch, from last year, takes place in an early Puritan community so rigid that the heroine is lured by the promise of freedom and excitement to a coven of witches in the woods, where she sheds her nightgown and dances naked in the moonlight. As The Unknown and The Old Dark House proved many years ago, no monster could be as exciting or as terrifying as the spell cast by our own bodies. v
Directed by James Whale
The Unknown ★★★★ Directed by Tod Browning
