One of silent cinema's three greatest clowns, along with Chaplin and Keaton, Harold Lloyd, at his best, could make just about anything funny. Even suicide, which methinks is the best gag series in this two-reeler, "Haunted Spooks," with Lloyd's Glasses character seemingly going for a record for most successive failed attempts at self-immolation in one afternoon after, as he puts it, "I've lost another one of the only girls I ever loved." The making fun of African-American servants being afraid of ghosts somehow manages to be partially effective, too, but only after they're put on equal terms with the Caucasian characters. Additionally, this slapstick short is all the more impressive because Lloyd finished it after suffering a debilitating accident from a real bomb, mistaken for a prop, exploding in his hands during a publicity stunt.
At first, the servants business comes off as racist stereotypes--the whole wide-eyed, mouth-gaping and knee-buckling cowardice routine in unison of a bunch of black servants at the mere mention of a haunted house. There's also the supposed African-American vernacular in the intertitles, and it's unfortunate that the film's title invites a double meaning including the racial slur. The supposedly more-rational white man, however, as portrayed by Lloyd, initially declares, "I don't believe in ghosts." Yet, once he and his wife start running around as scared of spooks as the servants are, and the interjections of condescending intertitles stop of a white writer's idea of how black people talk, the routine isn't particularly offensive and rather fun. The child inadvertently donning a kind of whiteface from hiding in the flower pantry even works because it's not about race, but the supposed whiteness of ghosts. Similarly, Lloyd is able to get away with beating a servant he seems to mistake as either a spirit or someone pretending to be one because, in the next scene, he does the same thing to his wife. It also helps that one of the servants discovers the fraud.
This is not to say, of course, that the initial portrayal of African Americans, at least, is justifiable. As far as racism in old movies goes, though, this is hardly the worst offender. I've been reviewing a few of the first screen old dark house horror comedies recently, including this one, and just the other day I endured through the pain of D.W. Griffith's mis-titled "One Exciting Night" (1922), for which the humor is almost entirely based on dehumanizing racial stereotypes, to the point that the black servants were portrayed by white actors in blackface. At least, here they were portrayed by African Americans. Another old dark house entry, "The Bat" (1926), likewise has a somewhat offensive Japanese servant in that he's treated as a racial "other," but he was, at least, portrayed by a Japanese actor, as well.
As to the old dark house formula, several of the tropes are here. There's a will stipulating that the girl (I mean, the character is a teenager) and her husband must live in the house to collect the inheritance, and there's the uncle, who's next in line for the house and who, thus, disguises himself to frighten the residents out. And there's a storm and a bunch of characters running around scaring themselves silly. The trick of Lloyd's hair standing on end is another standout.
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