The film was thought lost for many years, thus enhancing its reputation among the movie-going cognoscenti.  In 1968, filmmaker Curtis Harrington found a fine-grain print in the Universal vault, in deteriorated condition.  Every subsequently-shown version has been struck from this print, and no full restoration has ever been conducted.  Halliwell lamented the loss of quality –

‘…it seems that The Old Dark House can never again be seen in a print which glows so beautifully and with such satisfying depth, turning faces into gargoyles and shadowed corners into areas of tingling terror, as the one I saw, and saw again, in Bury in June 1947.’

J. B. Priestly wrote the novel Benighted, upon which this film is based, as a metaphor for various types of post-war pessimism which existed in England at the time.  He described it as “an attempt to transmute the thriller into symbolical fiction with some psychological depth”.