During the silent age there was a sub-genre of specific silent horror films donned the 'old dark house.' The more inspired of the lot allowed continental directors to revel in fluid camera movements, chiaroscuro lighting and the paraphernalia of sliding panels, clutching hands and vanishing corpses to create elegant exercises in terror, chiefly seen in Roland West's The Bat (1926) based on Mary Roberts Rinehart's work, Paul Leni's The Cat and The Canary (1927) which was later remade as a serviceable screwball comedy featuring Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard in 1939 and Benjamin Christensen's The Haunted House (1928) and his partial talkie starring Thelma Todd, Seven Footprints to Satan (1929)
Based as they were on popular Broadway plays of the time, most of the 'old dark house' productions were immediately remade during the advent of sound pictures, but the genre would reach its triumphant summation in the James Whale entry that succeeded Frankenstein aptly titled The Old Dark House in 1932.