The Gorilla

The Gorilla is a 1927 American silent horror film directed by Alfred Santell based on the 1925 play The Gorilla by Ralph Spence. The film stars Charles Murray, Fred Kelsey and Walter Pidgeon. It was an early production of Edward Small.[2]

The plot of the film revolves around a series of murders committed by a man in an ape suit. The film today is considered lost. It was remade with sound in 1930 (The Gorilla) which is also a lost film, and again in 1939 (The Gorilla) starring Lionel Atwill and Bela Lugosi.[3][4][5]

The play was a huge success on Broadway, which led to producer Santell's making an almost immediate film deal. The story had the same mix of horror, suspense and comedy that made The Cat and the Canary such a hit with the public, in step with the "old dark house" films that were popular at the time. The film starred a young Walter Pidgeon who would years later win a number of Oscar nominations, and featured the work of cameraman Arthur Edeson who went on to shoot a number of classic horror films such as Frankenstein (1931) and The Invisible Man (1933).[5]