Down the cobwebbed hallway
Paul Leni was a German Expressionist import, fresh off directing Waxworks in Berlin, and this was his American debut, a film now credited with more or less inventing the old-dark-house genre: heirs gathered for a will reading, a hooded killer, comic relief undercutting the dread. The template got reused constantly afterward, from The Old Dark House in 1932 through the 1939 Bob Hope remake and beyond. Leni died just two years after making this, only four years after arriving in Hollywood, so this stands as one of the clearest surviving records of a genuinely important but tragically short American career.