It's been a strange sort of spooky marathon, what with the strike and all making me think outside the box. In any other year, that might really hamper me, but 2023 has also been the year of broadening my horizons with the Criterion Challenge. I mention that because the two dovetail together nicely for this instance. For the Criterion Challenge, I did a silent Buster Keaton film from the 1920s called Three Ages. It was a pretty good and funny bit of silent slapstick from one of the all-time greats of that particular genre. Somehow or another, in my research for things outside studio-released films, I came across this. A spooky-themed Buster Keaton silent short film? Okay, sure, why not!
It may be lacking in the spooky department compared to some things, but it's all in the right spirit of fun for this thing so who needs to quibble? The titular haunted house doesn't factor in until about halfway of the 20 minute runtime, and for a brief moment I thought I had chosen wrong and would need to pick something else. That's not the case, as you can see from this having been posted. That being said, the ten minutes before the haunted house escapades are still wickedly funny. I don't know much about silent film, but I did grow up watching episodes of Mr. Bean; as it turns out, that was well within the wheelhouse to appreciate this. Buster Keaton fumbling around as a bank teller with glue on his hands and making the money stick to everything, and then everything sticking to everything else, elicited an incredible laughing fit from me. Like, holy fuck. This was funny as hell.
Then the part that we're here for happens, and the setup to get us into the haunted house is surprisingly layered and dense for a 20 minute short. The house isn't haunted, but is a front for money counterfeiters operating in cahoots with a man from the bank, who fake the house being haunted to scare away intruders. In addition, due to a misunderstanding involving bank robbers and Keaton picking up their gun, the cops are after him and so he runs into the haunted house. In addition to that an opera group performing Faust is chased off the stage for being terrible, so they also run into the haunted house, including a guy in a devil outfit. What follows is a thing of silent beauty, as Keaton and the actors and the counterfeiters in ghost costumes and some skeleton men bumble around the house scaring each other and causing havoc. To a modern lens, it's like Mr. Bean crossed with Scooby-Doo. The repeated gag with Keaton and the staircase which collapses into a slide is amazing, especially the payoff to it at the end which I dare not spoil.
Sometimes it's good to just have fun with the spooky marathon. It isn't about getting scared out of your wits or unsettled every time. Every once in a while, let your hair down and watch a spooky-themed comedy. At 20 minutes, this is just charming and wonderful. It made me want to seek out even more short but sweet Buster Keaton antics, and that's no mean feat for a film that's over a century old. You can do a lot worse this Halloween season, so why not give an old classic a go?
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