House on Haunted Hill (1959)


Producer and director William Castle is much more known for his gimmicks than he is for the actual movies he made.  House on Haunted Hill, for example, had a gag called "Emergo", in which at a certain point in the movie a plastic skeleton would emerge from above the screen and float over the audience before being reigned back in. It was one of his more famous tricks, but the reason House on Haunted Hill has remained a Halloween classic all these years, other than the fact it is in the public domain, is that Castle managed to come up with a fun movie to go along with it.

A millionaire names Frederick Loren (Vincent Price) rents a house owned by Watson Pritchard (Elisha Cook Jr.) for a party suggested by his wife Annabelle (Carol Ohmart).  The house Pritchard owns is his family residence and is reputed to be haunted.  Loren offers his guests - pilot Lance Schroeder (Richard Long), secretary Norah Manning (Carolyn Craig), psychologist Dr. David Trent (Alan Marshal) and columnist Ruth Bridges (Julie Mitchum), as well as Pritchard - ten thousand dollars if they can remain in the house from midnight until 8:00 am the next morning.  

The reason the house has a reputation is there had already been seven murders involving previous occupants, including two of Pritchard's family.  It even has a vat of acid in the basement in which one of the victims was dispatched.  As things unfold it is discovered that the Lorens are not a loving couple and that Frederick has a habit of losing wives.  When Annabelle turns up dead everyone, and especially Frederick, comes under suspicion, but it turns out that there may be a bit more of a cunning plot involved.

Robb White wrote the script and, though the mystery at the center of it all is quite convoluted and there is nothing that hasn't been seen before in "old dark house" movies, it is quite a lot of fun.  The movie opens with a blank screen and blood-curdling scream, followed by a number of noises and the disembodied head of Pritchard giving a quick introduction to the house before Loren gives us our cast of characters.  Vincent Price is in prime form in this and, despite the gimmicky premise and Castle's carnival style of presenting a film, keeps things rather low key and doesn't go for some of the hammier acting he is known for.

Carol Ohmart is quite entertaining as Loren's scheming wife, while Richard Long and Carolyn Craig, who get the majority of the screen time other than Price, are okay.  It's the typical square-jawed hero and middle class heroine one sees in many movies of the 1950s, although it's pretty obvious that Craig was hired for her ability to scream her head off.  

Besides the opening the so-called scares, outside of Annabelle appearing outside of Norah's window, are kind of on the corny side.  This is by design as, though Pritchard talks a lot about ghosts in the house, this isn't a movie where any are shown.  If one wants to see ghosts it is best to go for another Castle film, Thirteen Ghosts, in which the audience was originally given special glasses to see them on screen.  This is more of a low-budget murder mystery with some hints of supernatural activity to get things moving.  Move they do, as I have to imagine that William Castle, although an obvious businessman, was forever having a blast making these movies.

House on Haunted Hill (1959)
Time: 75 minutes
Starring: Vincent Price, Carol Ohmart, Richard Long, Carolyn Craig, Elisha Cook Jr., Alan Marshal, Julie Mitchum
Director: William Castle

 

Comments

  1. PT DillowayOctober 20, 2024 at 4:56 PM

    It's pretty quaint by today's standards. I said on my blog it's basically as scary as a Scooby Doo episode.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's worst
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman's basement, and most of the props w
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in childbirth, was born
Read more