The Old Dark House

Travellers are stranded by a storm at a remote Welsh house occupied by the Femm family, who are all wrong in different ways.

Whale directs it as a black comedy, which is what separates it from everything else Universal made: the horror is the dinner party, the dialogue is arch and quick, and Ernest Thesiger delivers the line about the potatoes as though it were Wilde.

Karloff plays the mute, scarred butler and got top billing, but the film belongs to the family, particularly Eva Moore as the deaf religious sister and a disturbing turn from the pyromaniac brother upstairs.

It was thought lost for years until Curtis Harrington, a director and friend of Whale's, tracked down a negative at Universal in the 1960s.

The whole English strain of horror comedy runs through it.