Does the Thread of the Haunted House Comedy Begin with Buster Keaton?
Note: This is the hundred-and-fifteenth in a series of historical/critical essays examining the best in film from each year. Essentially, I am watching films from the beginning of cinematic history that interest me and/or hold some critical or cultural impact. My personal, living list of favorites is being created at Mubi, showcasing five films per year. All this being explained, what follows is an examination of my fifth favorite 1921 film, THE HAUNTED HOUSE, directed by Edward F. Cline and Buster Keaton.
The horror comedy film was a big deal in the 1940s, with the Abbot and Costello “MEET” movies and more kind of taking over the “straight” horror films that were defined in the previous decade. But the subgenre had already been around for decades, and Buster Keaton’s 1921 short THE HAUNTED HOUSE feels like a sort of a genesis of the form as it would come to be known.
I say “feels like a sort of a genesis” because Keaton didn’t invent the archetype that he, to his credit, executed with incredible aplomb with THE HAUNTED HOUSE. The concept is, however, already like another 1921 short from Keaton, THE HIGH SIGN, which I wrote about last week. In that film, Keaton navigates a booby trap-filled home and attempts to thwart the efforts of a gang of criminals. In THE HAUNTED HOUSE, Keaton navigates a booby trap-filled home and attempts to thwart the efforts of a gang of criminals…but in this short, the criminals are dressed up in spooky clothes and gags are centered on all kinds of pseudo-supernatural machinations.
Last week, I wrote about the cartoon logic of Keaton’s shorts in particular, and THE HAUNTED HOUSE carries that energy. The Great Stoneface not so bravely encounters all kinds of great optical illusions and visual gags that don’t really make sense in our reality; it’s an elevated reality, but not quite impossible. But then, when Keaton “dies,” he climbs up a beautifully realized vision of steps up to heaven (eerily similar to Fritz Lang’s DESTINY of the same year). And in typical Keaton forthrightness, he has his fictional facsimile sent right back down to Hell. This sequence, which turns out to be a dream/concussion hallucination, perfectly closes a madcap, fantastical short with a true fantasy sequence.
The structure of the film, which doesn’t ever really cross into “comedy horror” (since it doesn’t even have enough of the minimal “horror”) a la the Universal movies of the late 1920s, nevertheless sets a precedent for those to come. Many of them are never truly supernatural, with some Scooby Doo revelations that make clear the magical things were improbable Rube Goldberg-esque machinations and people in costumes. Besides the comedy horror film, the “old dark house” subgenre (not necessarily to be confused with James Whale’s apparently played-straight THE OLD DARK HOUSE [1932]) is THE HAUNTED HOUSE’s specific form.
As mentioned, it wasn’t necessarily the first. In its most primeval form, Georges Méliès could be considered the pioneer of this aesthetic (and many others). His spooky Faustian films and early haunted house pictures are manic, fantastical, comic, and spooky. During the 1910s, there were a few other shorts that could have crossed into the territory, including, and this is a bit of a stretch, THE GOLEM AND THE DANCING GIRL (1917). But heading into the 1920s, THE HAUNTED HOUSE distinguished itself with a more distinct goal. And by the end of the decade, the aforementioned Universal films and others solidified the concept. Movies like THE MONSTER (1925), THE BAT (1926), THE CAT AND THE CANARY (1927), THE GORILLA (1927), OUR GANG and other comedy shorts, and more are the clear products of early experimentation that morphed into the full-fledged genre of the ’40s and the proliferation of the concept across pulp and “B” grade media, most notably comic books.
And THE HAUNTED HOUSE was a key part of that, even if it wasn’t exactly the first. It’s also, to be clear about the quality of a vast part of the subgenre, very, very good. The trope was definitely part of a B movie trend, and Keaton’s execution of the concept was more trim and, well, funny than most, especially of the time. And with that, this is the last essay for a short film on my favorite films list! I guess 1922 was the first year the film industry got real in my eyes, real long with the features.
