The House of Mystery (1934)

John Prendergast, an archaeologist who drinks too much brandy, steals objects and a dancer from a temple in India in 1913. The priest curses him telling him that someday he will pay for his crimes. He re-animates a gorilla who chases him off. Twenty years later in the U.S., Prendergast has changed his name to John Pren. Backers of his 1913 expedition are aware of his wealth and demand their due shares of his plunder. Pren warns them that the "spirit of Kali" (the re-animated gorilla), killed two English sponsors that he tried to repay. Pren agrees to give the investors their portions of the profits under his conditions that they spend a week in his manor house with him. With everyone assembled, a seance is held to try to contact and appease Kali, but one of the backers is found strangled when the lights come up. That night, a second backer is found dead, dressed in a gorilla suit. The police show up and attempt to make sense of the goings on. Everyone talks about tom-toms beating in the background just before another murder takes place. A third backer is murdered, and Pren is found unconscious nearby. Pren has become attached to his nurse, Ella. This enrages Chandra, the dancer that left the temple with him twenty years earlier. A Scotland Yard detective, undercover as a plumber, finally sees a pattern in the killings. Chandra can control Kali the Gorilla who is kept hidden in a secret room. Pren has been faking paralysis to put off suspicions of his part in the scheme. Now that Chandra is angry, she has Kali attack and kill Pren. Nurse Ella is rescued in a nick of time.