The Haunted House on AllMovie

In the late 1930s-early 1940s, Monogram Pictures hoped to create a popular screen team in the form of teenaged thespians Jackie Moran (he was Huck Finn in Selznick's 1938 version of Tom Sawyer) and Marcia Mae Jones (a former child star who'd been in pictures since the silent days). In The Haunted House, Jackie plays a newsboy, while Marcia is cast as the niece of the paper's publisher. There's a killer loose in town, and both police and reporters are baffled. Jackie and Marcia join forces to catch the killer themselves so as to clear their mutual friend of a murder charge. The climax takes place in the haunted house of the title, with thrills and chills abounding. The high slapstick content in The Haunted House can be attributed to screenwriter Monty Collins, a veteran of the Columbia Pictures comedy short subjects unit. The director is Robert McGowan, formerly the guiding hand behind Hal Roach's Our Gang comedies of the 1920s and 1930s.