HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL
*** out of *****

Genres
Haunted House
Horror

1959
Directed by
William Castle
Written by
Robb White
Cast
Vincent Price …. Frederick Loren
Carolyn Craig .... Nora Manning
Richard Long .... Lance Schroeder
Elisha Cook Jr .... Watson Pritchard
Carol Ohmart .... Annabelle Loren
Alan Marshal .... Dr. David Trent
Julie Mitchum .... Ruth Bridgers
Leona Anderson .... Mrs. Slydes
Howard Hoffman .... Jonas Slydes

The enjoyment I get from watching a film like House on Haunted Hill is like the enjoyment I get from reading an Agatha Christie novel, or from wallowing in the overdone melodrama of a Victorian horror. I love the stock characters, the body in the wall, the mysterious noises, and the monsterish house keepers. The genre may have moved on (or sideways, depending on your view point), so watching an old spooky house film now is kind of like seeing someone break dancing in a silver tracksuit (i.e. what once was half-cool is now retro-cool, or I just wasted five bucks at the Salvation Army).

The plot is an old classic: A millionaire with mysterious motives (Vincent Price) invites a group of desperate strangers to a party at a haunted house and offers them $10,000 if they survive until morning. But is the house really haunted, and could the party have something to do with the fact the he and his wife would clearly murder each other if they could get away with it? The desperate strangers are your classically diverse lot. There’s the jet pilot, the noble secretary who has to support her whole family with a single pay packet, the drunk gossip columnist, the upstanding doctor, and the unapologetic doom-saying coward.

All the actors do a good job; they seem to be past-their-prime b-movie actors rather than the up-and-coming-no-talents that you sometimes get in these sorts of films. Elisha Cook is excellent in the coward role, a role that’s well written by Robb White; his cowardice is understandable since he owns the house, has seen the ghosts, and his brother was killed there. This is a much more enjoyable basis for a character’s cowardice than the out-and-out coward a lot of movies favour. And Cook has a way of delivering those undermining prophesies of doom that don’t make you want to smack him like he’s a gloomy first year English lit major.

Then, of course, there’s the great Vincent Price, the ultimate haunted house party host. He has the ability to make the most unpalatable thing sound rather charming, while having that undertone of malice. Even if he had you tied to a rack and was about to pour acid in your eye sockets, it would be hard to really be mad at him. And that is a talent. The world is lucky he didn’t decide to become a dictator of some Eastern European country. Damn lucky.

Carol Ohmart as his wife matches him (a tough job). She manages to come across just as charmingly cruel as he does, without just being a bitch. Importantly, you can see enough underneath to understand how he could have wound up married to her. And you wouldn’t complain if she tied you to a rack either.

To be sure, the film has flaws. And if you were watching this expecting to be scared, then you might consider them fatal. Can you dismiss the silliness of the scares? I don’t think you can entirely since the film is meant to be scary. After some of the hilarious early face-pulling it would be impossible to actually get spooked (one reason why I rate the film a middling three stars). And I won’t say what the film’s big special effect is, but I will say that it wouldn’t fool anyone.

Robb White’s script uses all the classic haunted house movie tricks, but also has amusingly wry dialogue. It’s directed at a good pace by William Castle. Together they don’t let the film succumb to two of the haunted house genres big problems; too much walking down corridors, and too much sitting around talking about boring garbage. My only gripe is with one piece of story logic, which has to do with the relationships between the characters and the way in which the invites to the party were arranged (but to explain what it is would be a spoiler).

Some films lose their effect and their appeal, others lose their effect but gain a different appeal. Maybe people never really found this stuff scary, and always found it just spooky fun. I can’t say, but I can say House on Haunted Hill has come down to us as a fun film. It has that unique atmosphere that the black and white horror films of this era had, and that’s something every film buff should sample at least once, even if it doesn’t scare them.

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