Podcast - The Old Dark House
A movie about class consciousness, secrecy, Lilian Bond's feet, and super gay double entendres
We thought it’d be prudent to close out our 2023 Pride series with a movie that more explicitly meaningful to the theme than our last episode, Vamp. Where Vamp is an otherwise forgettable horror movie made memorable by the participation of Grace Jones and Keith Harring, this latest episode really lays it bare and makes things perfectly clear that horror movies would not be the genre that they are were it not for the contributions of James Whale, an gay man living openly in the 1930’s.
Where his best-known hits are central to the horror movie current, we chose one of his passion projects to dig into it and found a rich vein of gold there with the 1932 pre-code piece of gothic horror, The Old Dark House, starring Boris Karloff. It’s a movie about class consciousness in post World War One England, the high cost of secrecy, Lilian Bond’s feet, and some super gay double entendres. It’s also packed to the rafters with style and amazing cinematography and left a huge mark on the memory of people who would go on to make arch, campy horror movies in the future. It’s just one of the finest horror movies I’ve ever seen and I hope you’ll take our word for it by way of this episode of The Brothers Grim Horror Podcast and watch it, too.
Get a sample below:
Also, we launched a website which features all of our episodes and will shortly feature full episode transcripts if you’re into that sort of thing. You can find us in all the usual spots: