32 Days of Halloween VI, Movie Night No. 16: The Lodger (1927)

So it’s silent movie night here at 32 Days of Halloween. And, hey, we’re at the halfway mark right now. Holy crap. Time flies when you’re trying to horrify yourself. Anyway, we’ve looked at a number of silent films over the five-plus years that we’ve been doing this. Now it’s time to go to the early days of one of the masters: it’s Alfred Hitchcock‘s third film, the 1927 silent flick The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog.

You might think the plot is familiar to you: a serial killer stalks the streets of London while a new and eccentric tenant is raising eyebrows in a family’s home. Could they be the same person? The original novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes has been adapted six ways from Sunday…it’s been a feature film five times, this being the first. Most recently it was adapted in 2009 with Simon Baker and Alfred Molina. I’m most familiar with it as a radio play: it’s been done on the air at least three times, with Vincent Price starring once and Peter Lorre once.

I found a version of the film with a score behind it, as I find I enjoy silent films best when they’re not, you know, completely silent. Enjoy.

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The Lodger‘s best showing on DVD is apparently the Hitchcock Premiere Collection, which gives it a number of bonus bits.

And here’s a bonus: the aforementioned Lorre performance from Mystery in the Air. I love this stuff. The musical stings are Epic.

And no, you’re not hallucinating. That’s Harry Morgan hosting.

Previously on this night, we’ve enjoyed The Lost World from 1925, wicked jazz with William S. Burroughs and withcraft, a legless and scary as hell Lon Chaney, Will Rogers and The Headless Horseman and then the non-silent Wasp Woman (before we had any clue what we were doing).