The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939/1959)

Holmes Movies: beware the moor in those dark hours when the powers of evil are exalted

We continue our season of Sherlock Holmes adaptations with a look at two versions of The Hound of the Baskervilles, the first made in 1939 and the second made in 1959. You’ve almost certainly seen some version of this Holmes story (probably one of these films), but in case your memory needs prompting, here’s a quick summary of the plot.

Know this, then: the Baskerville family of Dartmoor is said to be haunted by a great demonic hound, the most recent victim being Sir Charles Baskerville, who was found dead of heart failure on the yew walk, his face contorted with horror and beside the body, the footprints of a gigantic dog! Now his distant relative Sir Henry is coming to take up the title, and family friend Dr Mortimer has enlisted Sherlock Holmes to keep him safe. Holmes instead sends Watson to Devon, only for Watson to discover, much to his chagrin, that Holmes has followed him in secret to conduct a parallel investigation. Together they discover that the villain is a local entomologist, Stapledon, who is a distant scion of the Baskerville line and who is trying to inherit by scaring all the other family members to death with a big dog.

In the cinema, the nineteenth century is the setting for tales of ‘mystery and imagination’. There is horror, from Frankenstein to Poe to the high Victorian gothic of Dracula; there is the invention of the detective story (Poe again); and scientific revolutions have their own terrors, like Mr Hyde or the Invisible Man.

The Hound of the Baskervilles, a tale of scientific detection packed with gothic atmosphere and monsters out on the misty moor, seems to fit perfectly into this genre. But, although set in 1889, the novel was a product (just) of the twentieth century, and its horror lies not out on the moor, but in the minds and hearts of men.