The Old Dark House relates a bizarre tale in which a party of travelers--including Charles Laughton as a Manchester magnate accompanied by a chorus girl--seek refuge in a forbidding mansion in which there is more than one screw loose. They are greeted by a brother-and-sister lunatic team and their singular household: a brute, lecherous butler, played to the hilt by Boris Karloff; a bedridden 102-year-old head-of-household, and a younger brother who plays with fire. The guests' attempts at lightheartedness in the face of this intensity are underscored by the film's scenario which, as William K. Everson notes, “pits the five inhabitants of the house against the five guests. In a very rough kind of way, each has an opposing counterpart--and the night of terror brings out the best (or worst) in all of them....” Whale mixes a quasi-realistic atmosphere (his monsters are decidedly human, his guests ever so civilized) with high Hollywood Gothic: a tremendous thunderstorm, swirling roads, and the eerie house with its Chinese-box series of horrors.