Wiki doesn’t seem to have this as a separate category because there’s a lot of overlap in genres. Basically the sort of 1930s-1940s era movies that Scooby Doo is a parody of.
The Old Dark House (1932)
The Black Cat (1934)
The Cat and the Canary (1939)
The Gorilla (1939)
The Ghost Breakers (1940)
Hold That Ghost (1941)
Spook Busters (1946)
One Body Too Many (1944)
Scared Stiff (1953)
After a certain point (c1960) they all became parodies. House on Haunted Hill was probably the tipping point. After that, would you count comedies like The Ghost and Mr. Chicken?
When I was a kid, the local amateur theatre group put on “The Cat and the Canary”. Scared me stiff.
especially when they opened a closet and the pale-faced dead lawyer fell out, flat on his face
The Hound of the Baskervilles, the 1959 version is probably the closest to a Scooby plot and still be serious, at least in English.
The 1978 English version of *The Cat and the Canary” seems pretty serious:
I always got the impression Scooby and gang were often installed in haunted house situations, with all the chasing through montages.
Based on tired old Hollywood films.
The end of the toons always reminded me of the summing up by a dectective in cozy mysteries.
1930s:
- The Bat Whispers
- The Cat and the Canary
- The Old Dark House
- The Ghost Camera
- The Ninth Guest
- The Terror
1940s:
I suppose the Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) fits, even though it’s obviously a parody. And a musical. It’s sort in a category of its own really.
The Munsters movie Munster, Go Home! was one (that mocked the trope).
IIRC, there is no money at stake in the 1932 version of The Old Dark House. However, there is in the 1963 “remake.”
Similarly, there is no money or haunted house involved in the 1932 version of The Black Cat, though there is in the 1941 movie of that name.
13 Ghosts (1960) is another William Castle film with a haunted house and money at stake, as well as what might have passed for “laughs” for certain younger viewers.
No they do not. What’s your point?
The word “caper” in the thread title implies a film where the haunted house is a prop for a money making scheme.
That’s not my understanding of the word. While moral questionability may be part of the definition, fraud or crime are not necessarily specified or required.
Almost always the case in a Scooby Doo episode.
1963’s “The Old Dark House,” starring Tom Poston, isn’t considered one of William Castle’s better efforts, but I’ve always loved it.
Trivia: In the United States it was released in black & white. Everywhere else it was in color.
A “haunted” tavern that’s not really haunted, secret doors, etc, and a few criminals as well.
Oddly enough I got musing on this subject because of something rather unrelated: the music score for an Android game that to me sounds, especially at the climax of the score, like an old-time Spook Busters movie. Someone tiptoeing by candlelight down a darkened hallway while a cloaked figure behind them reaches out with a clawed hand.
Two of my favorites:
The Ghost & Mr. Chicken
Murder, He Says (Fred MacMurray)
It also had one of Castle’s neatest “gimmicks” – a Ghost Viewer that let the audience decide whether to see the ghosts or not. It was just a cardboard “mask” with two strips of colored plastic – one red, one blue. It was like a standard anaglyphic 3D viewer, except that both eyes looked through either the blue or red filter.
The film was in black and white, except for the specia; “ghost” scenes, when it would go blue and red. The ghosts were printed in red. If you looked through the red filter you didn’t see them. (or if you didn’t use the viewer at all they weren’t very visible. But if you looked through the blue filter they were pretty clear.
I’d heard about the film (mainly through Famous Monsters of Filmland) all my life, but I finally got to see the effect a couple of years ago when I got hold of a DVD with the film properly formatted in color. (I’d seen the film before, but when they broadcast it on TV, they don’t retain the colors, so you don’t see the effect.)
It’s a pretty dumb movie, obviously meant for kids (two of the ghosts are a circus lion and a lion tamer who’s missing his head – har har). One of the stars is a pre-Adam-12 Martin Milner and another is Margaret Hamilton, playing a witch-like character again. Great fun if you watch the bi-colored version.