Much like “Night of the Living Dead”, William Castle’s “House on Haunted Hill” is one of those horror movies everyone’s seen thanks to the power of public domain. It always made the rounds during Halloween when I was a kid and became a staple of the holiday television season, much like how those old stop-motion Rankin-Bass specials are a staple of Christmas. It doesn’t get the same amount of play these days as it used to, though I’m sure American Movie Classics or Turner Classic Movies gets some mileage out of it in October. Re-watching it now, though, I don’t find it quite as satisfying as I did when I was little.
Millionaire Frederick Loren (Vincent Price) is throwing a party at the infamous house on Haunted Hill, inviting a slew of strangers to join him. Each partygoer is promised a whopping $10,000 payday, but the catch is that they must stay the entire night in the creepy, haunted mansion. Poor Nora (Carolyn Craig) finds herself trapped between the seemingly unearthly forces of the house and the maniacal plotting of Loren’s greedy wife, Annabelle (Carol Ohmart). Is the house really haunted? By the end of the night, they’ll know for sure.
“House on Haunted Hill” starts out promising-enough, with a great opening credits sequence featuring nothing but a black screen and lots of eerie sounds of the most classic design (rattling chains, howling wind, inhuman laughter, etc). Vincent Price’s narration is great, and his whole performance is, too, and the movie generally wastes no time getting down to ghostly business. Perhaps the best sequence in the entire film happens early on, as Nora encounters a spectral hag in the darkness of the wine cellar.
The problem is that at about the halfway point, the movie takes something of a turn away from the supernatural and toward a typical murder mystery plot as the paranoid partiers try to figure out who offed Annabelle with a hangman’s noose. I think the worst offense of the film is the ending, where every seemingly supernatural event seen during the flick is explained away by strictly earthly means. I’ve seen my fair share of haunted house pictures and read more than enough ghost stories in my lifetime, and I can say that one of my greatest peeves is the “Scooby-Doo” ending, where we find out that nothing otherworldly was going on at all and there’s a reasonable explanation for everything that scared us. “House on Haunted Hill” doesn’t even offer a brief “out” by leaving one event unexplainable and having the characters and audience wonder about it, hackneyed though that tactic may be.
The ending of the film tries to revive that ghostly feeling by way of describing the house as having two more ghosts, but that comes after the point where we learn there were never any ghosts in the house to begin with, so it rubs off as “too little, too late”.
Still, there are quite a few qualities to enjoy about the film, even with the somewhat copout of an ending. As mentioned, Vincent Price’s performance is great as he comes off as both charismatic and menacing, particularly during the scenes where he’s alone with Annabelle. There’s some overacting from the supporting cast, particularly Elisha Cook (who plays ancestral owner of the home and superstitious drunk, Watson Pritchard), but none of it gets too distracting. Before we learn the “twist” ending, many of the ghostly horror effects are executed quite well. The hag in the cellar I already mentioned, but there’s some great moments involving severed heads hidden around the bedrooms, bodies hanging from nooses and a creepy old caretaker lurking behind the curtains.
The ending with the marionette skeleton is a bit goofy, though I suppose from the context of the film it wasn’t meant to look entirely convincing. In fact, for the original theatrical release of the movie, theaters were outfitted with a pulley system that sent a skeleton flying over the audience’s heads at just the right time to freak them out. So with that in mind, the rather clunky-looking skeleton probably had a lot more oomph to it back in the 50s when accompanied by the gimmick effect.
“House on Haunted Hill” is still an enjoyable (and short) Halloween-time treat that’s perfect movie marathon fodder. And if you don’t mind “Scooby-Doo” endings, then you certainly won’t have the same criticisms that I do. It’s very much a classic of late night public access “fright nights” that don’t exist anymore, and the score (consisting of OOOOooooOOOO!) is surprisingly effective. I just don’t care for it as much as I used to.
Grade: B- (as in, “But, what? Did the police just put the murder weapon back in the secret couch compartment when they were done with it or something?”)
4 comments:
I admit the ending is rather bland, as Price's character essentially explains everything that happened in the film. Still, I'll pretty much watch anything Vincent Price is in, (Including 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo), and I enjoy it well enough for what it is. I actually own it, and Last Man on Earth and Night of the Living Dead, in a pack of 20 otherwise terrible public domain horror films.
Incidentally, did you see the live Rifftrax-ing of this last October? I'd wanted to go, but was unemployed at the time and didn't want to spend full ticket price to see it.
Yeah, I also own it via one of those cheap 50-movie packs full of public domain junk (a decent value for what you're getting, which is mostly terrible B-stuff).
Never saw the rifftrax, though I haven't been into those since the original MST3K closed its doors.
I paid $5 for mine at Wal-Mart. It was worth the price of admission for "Blood Tides" alone.
In theory, I want to support Rifftrx. In practice, I don't buy that many new films (the last movie I bought new on release was Iron Man II.), so their new site doesn't do much for me. But I do plan to attend their next theatrical riffing, what/whenever it may be.
Vincent Price was good in this but hes good in everything oh they're showing this this week end on Saturday fright special
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