The rarest of Whale's masterworks is this Old Dark House, once accounted a “lost film,” and only recently “rediscovered” by the American Film Institute and Eastman House. The Old Dark House relates a bizarre story in which a party of travellers - including Charles Laughton as a Manchester magnate accompanied by a chorus girl - seek refuge from a storm in the dwelling defined by the title. They are received by a crazy brother and sister, whose household includes a brute lecherous butler (Karloff), a bedridden 102-year-old patriarch, and a pyromaniac younger brother. The cast is uniformly splendid, and as always with Whale, the monsters are decidedly human. Visually, Whale concocts a tremendous thunderstorm, roads swirling like rivers, an eerie house with a chinese-box series of horrors, old age, muteness - atmosphere and imagery are high Hollywood Gothic.