It would appear that the original negative is now lost, and the latest DVD release would have disappointed LH:

‘Faded prints harm this movie.  You need all the lustre of 35 millimetre to bring out the smells of the rain, the musty rooms, the log fire, the undercooked potatoes.’

The film's faults, however, were minimal:

‘Granted, the few interpolated bits of romantic stodge were stodgy indeed… but for sixty minutes out of seventy-two I sat back in ecstasy, realising myself to be in the presence of a curious offbeat directorial talent who had contrived to bring a minor piece of English literature to Hollywood as a horror story and yet preserve its subtleties unimpaired for those inclined to seek them out.’

It would remain one of Halliwell’s all-time favourites:

‘It’s a small enough film, but one which bears any number of reshowings because writing and performances are alike clear-cut and the whole bears the unmistakable stamp of personality… every time I drive through the Welsh mountains I hope wistfully and in vain to turn a corner and find before me the house of the Femms.’

LH was doing his National Service when he discovered this classic, on a re-release:

‘I was in the army, at Bury, a place famous only for the invention of black puddings… it was in a draughty old barn called the Palace that I caught up at last with The Old Dark House, which lighted my life at least momentarily.’

He describes it as:

‘A connoisseur’s horror film, from J. B. Priestley’s novel about an assorted group of people marooned in an inhospitable old mansion on a stormy night.’

The incomparable James Whale directs Ernest Thesiger, Boris Karloff, Melvyn Douglas, Raymond Massey and Charles Laughton in a strange, oddball mixture of horror and comedy, which Halliwell called:

‘…a splendidly consistent sardonic comedy grouping together half a dozen eccentrics on a stormy night in a Welsh madhouse… [a] delectable chapter of grotesquerie.’