Friday night at the home drive-in: Chamber of Horrors AKA The Door with Seven Locks (1940) by #NormanLee based on the novel by #EdgarWallace w/ #LeslieBanks #LilliPalmer #GinaMalo #RichardBird "What dark secrets lie hidden behind…" #British #Horror #NotQuiteClassicCinema pic.twitter.com/F3BVezHtfR
— Angus Kohm (@AngusKohm) October 12, 2019
I don’t think I ever saw Chamber of Horrors AKA The Door with Seven Locks (1940) on late night TV – although I could have. It has all of the elements that I recognize from classic “Old Dark House” movies of the 1930s and ’40s. Eyes watching a character through the eyes of painting on the wall, dead bodies that disappear when a character tries to point them out, a mad villain with a collection of torture devices (well, maybe that one is a little less common, but…), etc.
When I saw that it was based on a book called The Door With Seven Locks, I wondered if it was the same book that inspired House Of Dark Shadows (1983), but that was an earlier novel called Seven Keys to Baldpate which, oddly enough, was made into a movie seven times. The Door With Seven Locks has only been made twice.
I’m not sure how many movies can be included in this “Old Dark House” genre. One list on the imdb has 112 titles on it (and I recall seeing quite a few of them). Chamber of Horrors is not the best, or most famous, of these films. But I found it to be a thoroughly enjoyable example of #NotQuiteClassicCinema, and I will undoubtedly be watching it again.
