Friday A/V Club: A Haunted-House Triple Feature for Halloween

For Halloween, here’s Au Secours!, a 90-year-old
horror-comedy from the French filmmaker Abel Gance. It takes a few
minutes for the story to get rolling, but once the chief character
enters the haunted house the film becomes a flurry of gags, camera
tricks, surrealist insertions, and generally goofy and/or creepy
strangeness.

Next up is another silent haunted-house comedy, Charley Bowers’
1928 movie There It Is—the picture that proved an American
can do surrealism as well as any Frenchman. Bowers is one of the
great forgotten filmmakers of the silent era, and this is probably
his funniest effort:

That version of the feature has a jazz soundtrack. Someone else
has posted it to YouTube with a more electronic score; to see that
version, go here.

Both Au Secours! and There It Is end with
“explanations” that do not, in fact, explain everything that has
happened. In the final flick of our triple feature, by contrast,
the audience always knows exactly what’s going on, even if the
characters don’t. It’s set on a haunted boat instead of a haunted
house, and it stars Laurel and Hardy, who in this outing are
basically a couple of thugs. From 1934, here’s The Live
Ghost:

(For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)