Le manoir de la peur (1924/7)

aka The Manor House of Fear

A mysterious stranger (Romuald Joubé), always wearing black like a future country singer, and surrounded by an air of Big Romantic Drama, comes to a small town in the French countryside and buys a creepy old mansion. Why, the place is so creepy, you even need to cross a cemetery to enter it, and once you’re inside, it’s all German Expressionist angles and weird lighting. Also coming in the stranger’s package of horrors are an even creepier servant (Cinq-Léon, whose thin stretched body seems made for horror as well as comedy, a bit like a French Max Schreck), and a caged chimpanzee. Given that the stranger is doing mysterious experiments in the house that look a lot like mad movie science to expert eyes, and is generally not a fan of socialising, the villagers don’t take to him too kindly.

The only one around willing to actually get acquainted with the man before damning him is young Jean Lormeau (Gabriel de Gravone) whose love to a “lovely little” (that’s what the film says) village girl (Arlette Marchal) seems doomed by the angry disposition of her father.

So when a series of mysterious (everything is mysterious in this movie) nightly robberies and murders start, people have an obvious villain to direct their anger towards, and Jean the obvious guy to eventually understand what is actually going on. The truth, however, is rather more strange, sillier and more awesome than the villagers believe.

Apparently, when Alfred Machin and Henry Wulschleger made the lovely Le manoir de la peur, French silent movie audiences weren’t really ready for something this pleasurably macabre, and it took three years and Universal’s buying of the film for the US market to get it in front of an audience. At least that’s what the handful of sources about the film I could find tell me.

By the time he made this film, Machin was already a veteran filmmaker having started out with his first film in 1907. Machin doesn’t seem to have dabbled in the fantastique often, in the later years of his career using his own studio and the animals from his own private zoo predominantly to populate comedies and romances. I know nothing about Wulschleger, alas.

Watching the film, one doesn’t believe to be in the hands of novices in this particular genre. In fact, Le manoir is at the absolute stylistic height of this sort of affair for its time, using moody light, highly dynamic editing, just the right tinting, an authentically creepy looking village (or the parts of an actually village easy to be made to look thus) including that preposterously creepy looking manor house exterior, and some choice sets obviously influenced by German Expressionism to create a mood of the macabre and the strange. It’s visually striking, inventive and often breathtakingly beautiful if you like the grotesque and the weird. While they’re at it, the filmmakers also pack a nicely edited chase scene and some train stunts into the final act that are on the technical standard of Buster Keaton stunt work, so pretty sensational. These scenes are filmed and edited with such a sure eye for the dynamics of action scenes, it’s somewhat difficult to believe this is a nearly lost silent movie.

On the plot side, this is obviously a melodramatic pot boiler, whose murderer (hey, Dario Argento, you’re not the only one who liked the murderous ape in Poe!) turns out to be chimpanzee controlled by an evil servant but it’s a very well paced example of this sort of thing, presented with the proper lack of irony a film needs to tell this sort of story. It’s not completely lacking in originality either, for in how many films of this style does the obvious mad scientist turn out not the be a mad scientist at all, but simply a private researcher with a sad past who does nothing wrong apart from hiring the wrong creepy looking servant? Apart from what you may read as implied classism, it’s a neat twist on a trope that wasn’t even properly codified by the time this was made, suggesting Machin to be quite a bit ahead of his time.


So Le manoir de la peur turns out to be a true hidden gem, the sort of nearly-lost film we’re lucky to be able to experience today, suggesting an ocean of lost movies just as worthwhile as the best ones from the silent era we still can experience today.