House on Haunted Hill (1959)

I think I was around 13 when I first saw this movie. Having become a fan of Vincent Price a short time before thanks to House of Wax and The Fly (both of which I saw during AMC's MonsterFest), I certainly knew of it and it was only a matter of time before I bought the VHS. This movie is interesting for me personally in that it's one that, over the years, has come in and out of my life due to its public domain status (which is why some of the images you're going to see in this review aren't of the best quality). Like Night of the Living Dead, you often come across it in horror movie packs and, sure enough, I've ended up with various versions of it on DVD since I bought that VHS, which I did away with after I got one of those aforementioned horror movie packs for Christmas. However, I eventually sold that movie set as well (mainly because of the poor quality of the movies and other technical imperfections) and I didn't have a copy of the film at hand until October of 2011, when I bought a double feature DVD of it and the 1999 remake at a convention. But that's neither here nor there. Bottom line, this is a very enjoyable flick. It's really more of a murder mystery than a haunted house movie, leaving you to decide for yourself whether or not there were any ghosts, and the very abrupt ending, which leaves one of the main conflicts unresolved, can be jarring if you're not prepared for it (as was the case with me when I first saw it) but it has enough good old-fashioned chills and thrills to satisfy most lovers of the genre.

Frederick Loren is an eccentric millionaire who invites five strangers to spend the night in a supposedly haunted house, offering each one of them $10,000 if they do so. The participants include Nora Manning, a secretary for one of Loren's companies; Lance Schroeder, a brave test pilot; Dr. Trent, a psychiatrist; Ruth Bridgers, a columnist; and Watson Pritchard, the terrified owner of the property who is convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the house is indeed haunted. Also along for the festivities is Annabelle, Loren's fourth wife (the first three either disappeared or died mysterious deaths). When the guests arrive, Loren announces that at midnight, the house will be locked up tight from the outside and there will be no way to escape until the next morning. Several bizarre events happen before midnight, including Lance getting knocked on the head in an unexplainable way and Nora being frightened by a ghostly figure, and, at the last minute, the caretakers unexpectedly leave, locking everyone in. With the bizarre events becoming more and more threatening, including the apparent murder of Loren's wife, the group must now try to survive the night. But is the house really haunted or is there something more earthly but no less sinister going on?

The director is, of course, William Castle, the legendary master of gimmick horror films. Castle loved going beyond mere visual entertainment by having his movies become participatory for the audience, turning theaters into out-and-out carnival shows by way of the gimmicks he would instill both in the them and the actual films. For House on Haunted Hill, a plastic skeleton was rigged in some theaters to fly over the audiences' heads during a scene near the end when a floating skeleton terrorizes Anabelle Loren. The film itself also breaks the fourth wall at the beginning and end. At the beginning, following some frightening sounds that accompany a completely black screen (as if we're entering a haunted house at an amusement park), Watson Pritchard, the frightened owner of the house, tells us its sordid history as well as his own connection to it and then, Loren himself appears, inviting us to join the other characters in spending the night, offering us money as well. (I wonder if anybody in the theaters at the time asked where their $10,000 was after the film was over?), and introducing the other guests to us, giving us their names, backgrounds, etc. Finally, at the end of the film, Pritchard says that the ghosts are coming for him now, looks straight at us, and says, "And then they'll come for you." This is what Castle did very well with his movies. He obviously liked to have fun with them and that feeling very much carries over into them and, in turn, the audience. Other than some genuine shock moments, this film isn't exactly scary, but it doesn't need to be. It's just entertaining.

Vincent Price is at his menacing best as Frederick Loren, the eccentric and fairly sinister millionaire who throws the haunted house party. You just look at him and you know that there's something malevolent about him, especially when you learn that he's up to his fourth wife. According to his current wife, Annabelle, the first one disappeared and the other two supposedly died from heart attacks, even though they were a little young for that to have been the case, but in the end, the real truth, whether Loren murdered them or not, is never revealed. One thing's for sure, though: he and his new wife, Annabelle, despise each other. She, in particular, wants his money and has tried to murder him before to get it. Given that, it's odd when you consider that Loren doesn't just divorce her (they say he can't prove that she tried to kill him but surely he could have gotten a divorce for some other reason) but, instead, seems to take delight in playing with the idea that she may try to murder him again and even thinks up ways to do her in himself out loud. At the end of the film, when it's revealed that Annabelle and the psychiatrist, Dr. David Trent, were conspiring to kill Loren, he turns the tables on them and kills them both instead, showing that he is indeed capable of murder and making you wonder if he did actually kill his first three wives. And while he does confess the murder plot to the others afterward, he doesn't reveal his part in how Anabelle and Trent died and coolly admits that he's ready for justice to decide whether he's innocent or guilty, reinforcing the idea that he's not someone who can be trusted, even if he did kill just to save himself.

Carol Ohmart plays Annabelle Loren, Loren's current wife, and as I said up above, she openly despises her husband and wants him dead in order to get his money, having attempted to kill him before. She also says that besides the money, another reason for her wanting to rid herself of Loren is because he's supposedly insane with jealousy at times and it's strongly implied that he's abused her before, which is given some credence with the moment where he grabs the back of her hair and slowly pulls it during an argument. Despite this, though, the fact that she's tried to kill him before and goes through this elaborate plan to try to do so again shows that she herself is quite deranged as well. She even kind of looks like a ghost herself, in my opinion. It's hard to explain but she has a sort of otherworldly quality to her, especially when she's dressed completely in white later on in an attempt to frighten Nora Manning into thinking that she is seeing ghosts. That leads us to the real mastermind behind the plot to kill Loren: Dr. Trent, played by Alan Marshall. Up until the reveal, he comes across as the voice of reason among the group, insisting that ghosts are nothing more than figments of hysteria and that what they have to worry about in the house is being killed by each other. However, we eventually discover that he's been using his psychiatric expertise to try to manipulate Nora, the most easily frightened one of the group, into accidentally killing Loren, even going as far as to attack her in the cellar in order to make her think Loren is out to kill her. In the end, however, he and Annabelle are both killed by Loren, who knew all along about their plot and turns the tables on them.

Carolyn Craig plays Nora Manning, the secretary who turns out to be the unwilling pawn in Trent and Annabelle's plot to murder Loren in that she's the most easily frightened one of the group. She screams her head off whenever something frightening happens and is the only one encounters the supposed ghosts of the house. She's scared out of her mind by a freaky old woman, finds a severed head in her bedroom, sees an image of Annabelle Loren outside her window, is nearly strangled to death off-camera by Trent, and eventually shoots Loren out of fright (however, having known about Annabelle and Trent's plot from the start, Loren put blanks in the pistol given to Nora). She also has something of a romance with the handsome test pilot Lance Schroeder, played by Richard Long, who is the type of character you'd expect to be the lead in this type of film but, while he is capable enough, he ends up not being the hero. Not only does he get struck in the head early on but he's also locked in a secret panel and has to be rescued by the others. Still, he is a charming enough guy, although the supposed romance between him and Nora is very rushed and, really, the only reason they get together in the first place is because he's the best looking guy of the group and she's the prettiest woman aside from Annabelle. Speaking of which, you're also led to believe early on that there's going to be something between Lance and Annabelle when she confides in him her fears about her husband but it never happens. In the end, Lance isn't a bad character; just kind of typical in these types of films made around that time.

Other than Loren, the most memorable character in the film is Watson Pritchard, played by Elisha Cook. He owns the house and knows everything about its horrific history, which is that seven people, including his brother and sister-in-law, have been murdered in the house and he's convinced that their spirits haunt it... along with possibly something else that's nothing but pure evil. His immense fear drives him to become increasingly drunk throughout the night and spout off about how the ghosts will eventually take them all. As a result, he's not the most helpful character when things really start to become serious but he's definitely memorable. Finally, there's Julie Mitchum (Robert Mitchum's sister) as columnist Ruth Bridgers, who needs the $10,000 due to her gambling problem. Other than blood dripping on her hand a couple of times, which Pritchard insists is a sign that the ghosts have "marked" her (which leads to nothing anyway), and some talk about why she wants the money and is in a hurry to get it, she has no significance to the plot at all and you kind of wonder why she's even there as she does nothing. I would say that her presence is in order to further the body count but she doesn't get killed, so who knows?

The house itself is quite interesting and elaborate. Exteriorly, it doesn't look like your typical mansion, as the outside shots are of Ennis House in Los Angeles, whose design was based upon Mayan temples. So, it looks odd to begin with. The inside is much more typical and has all of the cliched haunted house bits: secret rooms, a rocking chandelier (which almost kills Nora as soon as she arrives), a vat of acid in the cellar, a large bloodstain on the ceiling of one room, an organ that plays by itself, and so on, as well as just an overall creepy vibe, especially in the dark cellar and the upper hallways when the lights are dim. As I said at the beginning, the question you have to ponder is whether or not the house is really haunted. While this film is nowhere near as subtle in its depiction of purported ghosts as The Haunting (subtlety was no in William Castle's vocabulary), most of what happens is revealed to be the result of Annabelle and Dr. Trent's plot to murder Loren and Loren's attempts to turn it around on them: Annabelle fakes being hanged and then positions herself outside Nora's window to frighten her, Trent himself attacks Nora in the basement, the supposed skeleton of Loren that pushes Annabelle into the acid at the end is revealed to be a marionette controlled by Loren himself, and so on. We can also assume that the bizarre hand that reaches around an open doorway to try to grab Nora at one point is Trent again and that the self-playing organ she comes across afterward was rigged to do just that. Even the "severed" head that Nora finds in her suitcase is revealed to be a fake one that was planted there by either Annabelle or Trent and then hidden when she left the room. Trent's insistence to sedate Nora after she finds that head is gone I think suggests that he may have been the one behind it, as she may not have been as clear-minded and may have killed Loren earlier if she had taken the sedative.

However, there is a moment early in the film  involving Lance and Nora in the cellar that suggests that there could indeed be something supernatural going on as well. First, Lance walks into an empty room, is unexpectedly locked inside, and is later found with a bleeding wound on his forehead, even though he couldn't have bumped his head in the room because there was nothing in there to bump his head on. He later tells Nora that something was in that room when he went in and they go back down to try to find a secret panel that whatever it was could have used to escape. That's when the most frightening moment in the film occurs (it scared the hell out of me when I first saw it). Nora is in the room by herself, knocking on the wall to try to find a hidden panel or anything of the sort when she suddenly turns around and comes face to face with a hideous old woman, who proceeds to float out of the room like a ghost. Afterward, Lance says he didn't see anything, and while the old woman is later revealed to be the blind wife of the caretaker of the house, that doesn't explain how she appeared out of nowhere behind Nora in that room, since she and Lance never find any secret passage, or why she floated out like a ghost. Was she what Lance saw when he got locked in the room? If so, how did she get out? And what was she doing down there in the first place and why did she act so frightening towards Nora? The only explanations are either that she's in on the plot and had some elaborate stuff set up to get out of the room without being seen and to make it seem as if she's floating (a very well-hidden secret passage, a platform beneath her dress that makes her float, etc.) or she and her husband are, in fact, ghosts. Since her husband tries to get Nora to leave with them, maybe they are indeed ghosts and know what's about to happen since it happened to them. This is all speculation, granted, and William Castle wasn't known for making deep movies, but it is fun stuff to think about.

For 1959, there's some rather gruesome stuff that's both shown and discussed in this movie. We see a large bloodstain on the ceiling of one room, some of which even drips on Ruth Bridgers' hand, Nora finds a severed head in her suitcase and while it is a fake head, it's still horrific when she finds in it because it looks quite... juicy, and, of course, there's a vat of acid in the cellar which Pritchard gives a demonstration of by dropping a dead rat into it, which is reduced to a skeleton in seconds. That's to say nothing of the fact that Annabelle and Dr. Trent both meet their end in that vat at the end of the film and while you don't see it, the thought of it is still gruesome. Extremely gruesome simply in the way it's described is the murder of Pritchard's brother and sister-in-law: they were apparently hacked to pieces by the murderer and parts of their bodies were found strewn all over the house. Pritchard also believes that their decapitated heads still float around the house, talking to each other and crying, which makes me go, "Damn!" Sure, Hammer Films in England was doing stuff far more horrific around this time, stuff that you actually saw, but this is still pretty ballsy for a movie in 1950's America.

The music score for this film by Von Dexter may not be classic or even that memorable by itself but it's nicely atmospheric and suits the visuals well. The opening theme is very eerie, with a lot of eerie, theramin-created sounds that you hear throughout the film, hinting at something supernatural going on. My personal favorite bit of music is the one that plays when Annabelle enters the cellar at the end. All the doors in the room close, with a sting of threatening music playing every time one of them does, letting you know that she's in for it, and I also like an instance of music right before that when Nora enters the cellar and the candles along the walls go out one by one, with a ping-sound that grows higher in pitch accompanying each one. Not much else to say about the score other than it simply serves its purpose well.

House on Haunted Hill may not exactly be high art or even that scary, save for a couple of shock moments, and it is a bit dated, but, if you're willing turn your brain off, it's a fun B-movie nonetheless. When you have Vincent Price, a haunted house, ghosts, ghouls, rocking chandeliers, a vat of acid in the cellar, an organ that plays by itself, and a murder mystery, it's virtually impossible to not be in for an enjoyable 75 minutes. The movie also has an element of camp and fun to it that you just don't get nowadays, like going through a haunted house attraction at an amusement park. It's a movie that's meant to be nothing more than an enjoyable show and it works perfectly well as such.