Even minus his mustache, British stage actor Tod Slaughter seemed to be twirling it. This predecessor to Snidely Whiplash and Dick Dastardly did everything to innocent young maidens except tie them to a railroad track (probably because his local mercantile was out of rope), and it usually ended with a gruesome demise, both for the maiden he coveted and in the last moments of the film, himself. The fun is in watching his evil get the better of him, knowing that the come-uppance is going to be worth waiting for.
"Murder in the Red Barn" introduced Slaughter to film audiences in the most unusual way. The prologue takes place on a small theater stage (presumably to give the viewer the idea of how intimate these very dramatic productions were) and has a host introducing all the major players in dramatic descriptions with Slaughter, of course, coming out last. Then, the scene switches to a dance in the titled red barn where Slaughter's squire character is established as a charming rogue who has the locals fooled by his graciousness. He switches gears very fast when a gypsy fortune teller predicts his death by hanging after which he gets into an argument with the dashing young gypsy hero (legendary British leading man Eric Portman) over the sweet Sophie Stewart, a farmer's daughter with a touch of class.
An assumed liaison with Slaughter leaves Stewart apparently in the family way (the production code prevented this from being even insinuated), and having gambled away $6000 pounds, Slaughter must marry an aging widow. To avoid having Stewart as a barrier to this, Slaughter arranges to meet her in the red barn where he brutally murders her. He must hide his crime and blames it on Portman, but no villain gets away with their crime for long, and the ironic twist at the end has Slaughter facing his destiny with a definite lack of dignity. There's no punishment greater than guilt for what Stewart's unsympathetic father D. J. Williams must face after tossing her out into the cold which leads to her sad fate.
So poorly photographed that it almost seems like a film made right after the advent of sound, this may not appeal to a vast majority of classic film fans. For the most part, Tod Slaughter wasn't a horror movie star, but a melodrama movie star whose actions were horrific but never supernatural like Karloff or Lugosi. He could be referred to as a "poor man's Charles Laughton" with his portly looks. Ironically, Laughton would play one character straight out of a Tod Slaughter movie, the Hitchcock adaption of "Jamaica Inn" where you really couldn't tell the difference between his character and most of Slaughter's.
"Murder in the Red Barn" introduced Slaughter to film audiences in the most unusual way. The prologue takes place on a small theater stage (presumably to give the viewer the idea of how intimate these very dramatic productions were) and has a host introducing all the major players in dramatic descriptions with Slaughter, of course, coming out last. Then, the scene switches to a dance in the titled red barn where Slaughter's squire character is established as a charming rogue who has the locals fooled by his graciousness. He switches gears very fast when a gypsy fortune teller predicts his death by hanging after which he gets into an argument with the dashing young gypsy hero (legendary British leading man Eric Portman) over the sweet Sophie Stewart, a farmer's daughter with a touch of class.
An assumed liaison with Slaughter leaves Stewart apparently in the family way (the production code prevented this from being even insinuated), and having gambled away $6000 pounds, Slaughter must marry an aging widow. To avoid having Stewart as a barrier to this, Slaughter arranges to meet her in the red barn where he brutally murders her. He must hide his crime and blames it on Portman, but no villain gets away with their crime for long, and the ironic twist at the end has Slaughter facing his destiny with a definite lack of dignity. There's no punishment greater than guilt for what Stewart's unsympathetic father D. J. Williams must face after tossing her out into the cold which leads to her sad fate.
So poorly photographed that it almost seems like a film made right after the advent of sound, this may not appeal to a vast majority of classic film fans. For the most part, Tod Slaughter wasn't a horror movie star, but a melodrama movie star whose actions were horrific but never supernatural like Karloff or Lugosi. He could be referred to as a "poor man's Charles Laughton" with his portly looks. Ironically, Laughton would play one character straight out of a Tod Slaughter movie, the Hitchcock adaption of "Jamaica Inn" where you really couldn't tell the difference between his character and most of Slaughter's.