Classic Pick – House On Haunted Hill (1959)
Yes, it’s still fall and that means there’s still space for some quality horror movies. William Castle’s House On Haunted Hill (not to be confused with The Haunting or The Haunting Of Hell House) is a B-horror classic, featuring one of Vincent Price’s more gleefully sinister performances.
Price is Frederick Loren, a millionaire living in a high-modern mansion atop a hill with his beautiful and nasty wife Annabelle (Carol Ohmart). He invites five strangers to his home for an evening of murder and mayhem – if they can stay the entire night in the house (and survive), they stand to receive $10,000. But there is a catch, of course: the house is haunted by murderous ghosts and Price has equipped every one of his guests with a “party-favor” in the form of a loaded gun. Sweet dreams, he tells them.
Castle was well-known for his peculiar form of horror – less a well-structured ghost story, more a carnival ride with ghosts, skeletons, and severed heads springing out to make you jump for a moment. House on Haunted Hill is one of his more effective films, despite plot holes that gape as widely as that acid pit in the basement of Loren’s house. The film is very much about the mechanics of fear, as the characters (besides Loren and his delightfully venal wife) are barely even types. They’re just people in a deadly amusement park, trying hard to hang on to their sanity while placing themselves in increasingly insane situations. While The House on Haunted Hill receives no points for verisimilitude, it is a cracking good time all the same.