House on Haunted Hill (1959)

One of the most interesting personalities to emerge from 1950’s Hollywood was William Castle. He had been a director for Columbia Pictures since the early 40’s, but it wasn’t until 1958 that he made his first independent horror film, Macabre. The success of that film gave him the opportunity to direct one of his most famous films, House on Haunted Hill.

House on Haunted Hill is one of the seminal haunted house movies. It stars Vincent Price as an eccentric millionaire who invites 5 people to spend the night with him and his wife in a haunted mansion. Each of the five guests stands to win $10,000 (now over $85K) if they can make it through the night. They consist of a square-jawed test pilot, a drunk newspaper columnist, a holier-than-thou psychologist, a low-level employee who serves as the film’s scream queen, and the house’s owner, played in all his neurotic glory by Elisha Cook, Jr. Also along for the ride is Price’s “amusing” wife, and the pair keep up a pretty good running dialogue about how much they hate each other.

For as famous as this movie is, it’s also incredibly goofy. The plot holes alone are staggering. Why does this house have an unprotected well full of acid that still seems to be incredibly potent? If the old lady is just the caretaker’s wife, why is she skulking around the way she does? And how does she hover? Does she ride one of those hoverboards all day? How is she getting into closed rooms, and why is she being such a dick to Nora? These plot holes get even wider when we hit the movie’s “twist”. Also the columnist has basically no narrative thread, except that mystical blood drops on her hand. It doesn’t go anywhere.

You know that some well-meaning person donated their body to science, and this is where their skeleton ended up.

So a movie with this much nonsense should be terrible, right? And yet every time I watch it, I thoroughly enjoy it. Nothing makes sense, but that doesn’t stop it from being spooky where it counts. Castle loves horror, but he manages to balance it out with enough fun to keep it thoroughly entertaining. When House on Haunted Hill went on tour (as movies did in those days) he showed it in a format called “Emergo” which meant that at appropriate moments, a plastic skeleton would fly over the audience’s heads. William Castle was the king of horror gimmicks, and there would be another one to come later in 1959.

House on Haunted Hill (Youtube)