House of Mystery (Van Beuren Studios, RKO, 1934)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (February 28) at 8 I ran my husband Charles two more movies from the 50-film “Crime Wave” DVD boxed set, House of Mystery and The Strange Lvoe of Martha Ivers. I was briefly perplexed because imdb.com lists quite a few films with the title House of Mystery, including at least three that seemed likely to be the one in the box: from 1931, 1934 and 1940,respectively. This House of Mystery was the 1934 version, produced by Paul Malvern and directed by William Nigh – and Nigh’s presence as director is almost always a bad sign. With only a handful of exceptions, a Willliam Nigh film can be counted on to be boring, soporific, slovenly acted and just plain dull. This one was no exception – after it was over Charles called it “chloroform on celluloid” – though, as with a lot of Nigh’s films, the basic story had real potential and could have been entertaining with a more competent director. The 1934 House of Mystery was based on a play by Adam Hull Shirk called The Ape, and apes figure prominently in Shirk’s oeuvre. His most famous (or infamous) credit on film was a 1930 pseudo-documentary called Ingagi, in which a group of white explorers visit the Congo to hunt down a gorilla-worshipping tribe and find them literally sacrificing a young woman to their gorilla-god. The gimmick is that the gorilla supposedly had sex with the woman and produced a mixed-species monster as their offspring. The producers of Ingagi tried to pass it off as an actual documentary, but they were “outed” when someone recognized one of the Black people in the cast as a fairly well-known African-American actor whose face was shown in casting directories.

The 1934 House of Mystery opens with a prologue set, according to the opening title, in “Asia – 1913.” The title doesn’t specify just where in Asia it takes place, but judging from the reference to “caste” in the dialogue and the six-armed statue of a god in the temple sequence it’s not hard to figure out that it’s in India. The central character of the prologue is John Prendergast (Clay Clement), who’s ostensibly an anthropologist leading an expedition to research India’s ancient history. Only he’s really just there to loot the sacred Hindu temples for their gold and other riches, and he’s also an alcoholic and in love –oir at least in l;ust – with Hindu priestess Chanda (Joyzelle Joyner from the cast of the 19030 science-fiction musical Just Imagine, though she’s billed here as “Laya Joy”). Prendergast disrupts the big church service at the temple, desecrates the altar, steals the six-armed god statue (it’s of the god Kali, though the name is pronounced ”KAY-lie” instead of the usual “Kah-LEE”) and runs off with boththe gold and the priestess. Needless to say, the Hindu priest officiating at the ceremony calls down a curse on Prendergast and anyone else who receives any money from his crimes, and when we cut to the 1934 present Prendergast – or “Pren,” as he now calls himself – is in a wheelchair after having suffered a sudden, unexplained paralysis in both legs. He and his attorney invite the original investors in his expedition, or their heirs if they’ve died in the meantime, to spend a week at his old dark house, at the end of which he will distribute the remaining money he made from the trip. Only he’s already given shares to two Englishmen who were suddenly murdered after they got the money.

Alas, the U.S. house guests of Pren also start getting murdered, one by one, and each of the killings is preceded by the sound of a tom-tom drum and the scent of incense. There’s al;so a stuffed ape in Pren’s study and it’s so lifelike that it fools several people in the movie, including the police officers who arrive to investigate the murders and are even dumber than their usual counterparts in 1930’s films. The stuffed ape is actually mounted in front of a secret doorway behind which is a real ape who has been trained to kill the first human being it sees whenever it hears the tom-tom and smells the incense. It’s no particular surprise when we learn that Pren has merely faked being disabled – virtually nobody shown n a wheelchair in a 1930’s movie actually needed it (that changed only when Lionel Barrymore’s arthritis got so bad ne needed a wheelchair for real, so MGM had to find him parts he could play from one) – but there’s a legitimate surprise when it’s revealed that the real culprit behind the killings is [spoiler alert!] Chanda the Hindu priestess, who ranm off with Pren not because she was in love with him but because she wanted to follow him to make sure the curse worked.

House of Mystery got a nominal remake in 1940 as The Ape from Monogram Studios, again directed by William Nigh (unfortunately), though with the plot totally reworked. In that film Boris Karloff played a scientist who goes around killing people to extract their spinal fluid so he can make a serum that will cure his paralyzed daughter. The Ape was one of Karloff’s mad-scientist movies like the ones he was making at Columbia at the time. and he supposedly committed the murders in an ape suit he made himself from a real ape whom he’d stolen from a local circus – and the film’s writers, Curt Siodmak (who was usually much better than this) and Ricahrd Carroll, totally ignored the major amount of skinning and tanning needed to turn an ape carcass into a viable ape-suit for a human. The screenwriter of House of Mystery was Albert DeMond, mostly a scribe of Republic Westerns and serials, though he was the author of one of the most hilariously over-the-top movies of all time, The Red Menace (1949), which Charles and I watched together years ago and when it was over I said, “As Right-wing cinema goes, this is not The Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will.”