Haunted Spooks (Hal Roach Productions, Pathé, 1920)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Sunday, October 26, Turner Classic Movies followed up the main feature on their “Silent Sunday Showcase,” The Monster (1925), with a quite amusing Harold Lloyd short from 1920 called Haunted Spooks. Co-directed by Lloyd’s producer, Hal Roach, and Alf Goulding (who had managed Fred Karno’s on-stage comedy troupe in Britain when both Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel were in it), and written by H. M. “Beanie” Walker (mostly a silent-film title writer who was one of the few people in that job who was able to graduate to screenplays when sound came in), Haunted Spooks features Lloyd as “The Boy” (in most of his short films he was nameless) who’s trying to attract the attentions of a wealthy girl (Marie Mosquini). When he definitively loses her to a man of her own affluence and social standing, Lloyd sets out to kill himself. His failed suicide attempts are by far the funniest parts of this film. First he tries to shoot himself with a gun he found on the street, but it turns out to be just a water pistol. Then he tries to get run over by a streetcar, but it switches to another track just in time to miss him. In his next attempt, he ties a boulder to himself and leaps off a bridge into the water below – but the water is only a few inches deep. He tries to throw himself off another bridge, but he lands in a rower’s boat. Then he tries to throw himself into the path of an oncoming car – but the driver, an attorney (William Gillespie), not only stops in time to avoid hitting him but drafts him into a scheme he’s got going to protect the inheritance of a character listed in the credits only as “The Girl” (Mildred Davis) but later named via a package sent to her as “Mildred Hillary.” It seems that Mildred is in line for an inheritance of a house and a plantation, but only if she and her husband live there for a year. That poses a problem for her since she is unmarried, but the attorney has the plan to recruit Lloyd’s character to marry her and for the two of them to move into the plantation house together and live there for the requisite year.

Only the film’s villains, Mildred’s uncle (Wallace Howe) and his wife, are determined to make sure Harold and Mildred aren’t there the required year by scaring them off. As Harold and Mildred drive to the house, they’re in a car with a cage full of chickens in the back seat, and the chickens keep pecking Harold in the back of his neck until he puts a cushion between him and the cage. He’s also beset with a driver in front of him who puts out hand signals first to the left, then the right, and so on so Lloyd can’t pass him. When they finally get to the mansion, Uncle’s Black servants don white sheets and pose as ghosts. A pair of trousers seem to move by themselves – really because there’s a young Black boy (Ernest Morrison) inside – which causes Harold’s hair literally to stand on end. Then Morrison gets covered in flour and convinces Harold he’s a white ghost, an interesting reversal of the gag we’ve seen before of white performers getting covered in fire ash and appearing in blackface. “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart, who’s African-American herself (and I admire her for proving by example that not all film geeks are white males) apologized for the stereotyped “humor” of the Black characters – though at least one Black actor in this film, Blue Washington, cuts a very distinguished look in his face and overall bearing even though Walker’s titles make him and the other Black characters speak in the usual abysmal dialect. (The more I see what other directors did to Black actors, the more I admire Willliam Wellman for telling his Black actors in Safe in Hell, Nina Mae McKinney and Clarence Muse, to ignore the dialect the film’s writers had scripted for them and instead deliver their lines in normal English.) Though the haunted-spooks parts of Haunted Spooks don’t match the sheer joy of Lloyd’s failed suicide attempts earlier on (one of Lloyd’s rare flirtations into black comedy that came to fruition seven years later in the marvelous 1927 feature The Kid Brother, a surprisingly dark film for such a mundane title, and seven years after that in one of Lloyd’s talkies, The Cat’s-Paw), overall it’s a bright, enjoyable movie that shows how ready Lloyd was to make feature-length films, which he started with the four-reel “streamliner” A Sailor-Made Man (1921) and then his first true feature, Grandma’s Boy (1922).