HAUNTED SPOOKS is known as the film where Harold Lloyd got a bunch of fingers blown off by a prop firecracker that wasn’t just a prop. But it’s awash with funny intertitles by H.M. Walker, who seems to have expanded in verbosity as if to compensate for his star’s digital diminution.
Walker is credited writer on the great Laurel & Hardy shorts, but in reality mainly wrote the title cards, Stan throwing out most of his plots and coming up with his own business. As if Hal Roach, an inveterate credit-stealer himself, liked to see others also getting unfair credit for others work. Gave him a warm glow I expect. Roach’s directing credit here, shared with Alf Goulding, probably results from the film being shut down and restarted due to Lloyd’s accident, so he comes by it honestly.
This movie, which came out the same year as the (lost) Wally Reid version of THE GHOST BREAKER, combines fake ghosts hired to scare unwelcome bodies out of an ancestral home, and a deep south setting, both of which are elements in the original stage plot of TBG (the setting is changed to New York and Cuba in the Hope-Goddard remake). The goofy will-reading angle was also in the air, common in this kind of Scooby Doo nonsense, and set in stone by The Cat and the Canary on Broadway two years later.
My researches into the spooky house genre for Masters of Cinema’s forthcoming release of THE CAT AND THE CANARY (1927) turned up the weirdly persistent racism in the genre, exemplified by the blackface characters in stage performances and the first two films of THE GHOST BREAKER. Harold Lloyd was reputedly a horrible racist who tried to organise his neighbours to force Hattie McDaniel out of her home, and there are some to-put-it-mildly dated stereotypes here, though at least some real people of colour got paid to play the demeaning roles. I guess this strange conjunction of prejudice and the Gothic stemmed from the perception of Black people as superstitious. Introduce a quavering Black servant into your story and you can get in the idea of the supernatural in a pseudo-naturalistic way, and start making the audience nervous as their mirror neurons kick in. Still: bad, very bad.
Blue Washington does most of the eye-rolling; Ernest Morrison is a cute kid — as “Sunshine” Sammy he’d be a regular in the Our Gang films.
On a more pleasant note — there are some actual camera angles in this film, and not just pleasing silent comedy planimetric or symmetric compositions, but also a great low angle on a sheeted spook heading upstairs. Better than it needs to be. Hal Roach couldn’t be responsible, surely.
HAUNTED SPOOKS shares with The Ghost Breaker a disjointed and top-heavy plot structure, with a huge amount of barely relevant business to get through before the haunted house shenanigans commence and instantly conclude. Stan always reckoned that Roach’s story sense was muddled and he’d get himself tied in knots. Lloyd’s idea of plot was to link together “islands” — comedic set-pieces — similar to Kubrick’s conception of “non-submersible units” — cinematic set-pieces. If you have six, you have a feature film. If you have two, you have a short. It’s a very basic idea but it CAN work…
shadowplay 