I headed home afterwards and got a phone message from Charles, whom I went to see with the tape I’d recorded earlier that morning of the movie The House on Haunted Hill. It was a 1958 production from Allied Artists, produced and directed by William Castle, and to liven up his pretty conventional haunted-house thriller plot (Vincent Price is an aging industrialist with a young wife, Carol Ohmart, whose lover Alan Marshal has plotted with her to kill him by inducing another person to do so in the context of a “haunted house” party) Castle invented a process called “Emergo.” At the climactic moment in the plot — when Marshal is being threatened by an animated skeleton (it’s supposed to be the remains of Vincent Price, after his body has purportedly been dumped into a vat of acid in the haunted house’s basement; but it’s really a hoax cooked up by Price, who’s seen through the murder plot and survived it, to scare Marshal into taking a tumble into the acid vat himself) — an actual model skeleton was supposed to emerge from behind the screen and, suspended by a wire from a track on the theatre ceiling, fly over the heads of the audience before returning to the back of the screen. The first time Castle tried this on the studio lot, he used an actual plastic model skeleton which proved too heavy for the wire suspending it — so much so that it fell off and struck the Allied Artists studio chief in the head. When the film was commercially released, he settled for lighter inflatable skeletons, thus leading many young boys to sneak slingshots into the theatres and see if they could bring down the skeletons while they moved through the theatre.
Seen today, on TV and without the benefit of “Emergo” or the
ballyhoo behind it, The House on Haunted Hill emerges (pardon the pun) as a fairly well-directed thriller with a
fundamentally silly plot line. Castle was strong on atmosphere, and weak on
just about everything else; while he had an excellent grasp of the technical
aspects of filmmaking, his sense of what constituted an appropriate story was
about as strong as Ed Wood’s. Carol Ohmart proved to be a surprisingly good
actress — she and Price are really the only people in the cast who create
genuinely human and understandable characters (Elisha Cook, Jr. is also in it,
doing his usual scared-little-man schtick; I actually like him better in movies like The Maltese Falcon where he got to play an out-and-out baddie) — but
all the performers are undercut by Castle’s direction, which has all the
subtlety of a sledgehammer (this is a movie for those who think the “Haunted
Castle” in Disneyland is incredibly frightening) and is punctuated by his
annoying habit of having the screen go completely black at climactic moments. —
10/13/96
•••••
Next up on TCM’s haunted-house marathon for Hallowe’en 2017 was The
House on Haunted Hill, a film produced in
1958, released the following year and directed by William Castle from a script
by his frequent collaborator (and also associate producer) Robb White. Seen
right after The Haunting it
emerges (pardon the pun — you’ll understand later) as a sort of low-rent
version of Robert Wise’s self-conscious attempt at a “quality” haunted-house
film — I had to keep reminding myself that William Castle made his movie five
years before Robert Wise made
his. It was Castle’s first, but far from his last, film with Vincent Price as
his lead; Price had been an all-around character actor in Hollywood from 1938
(when he made his film debut at Universal in something called Service
de Luxe) to 1953, usually playing lounge
lizards or the heroine’s gawky short-term boyfriend whom she ultimately
abandons for The Man She Really Loves
(the part he played in what’s probably his most famous non-horror film, 1944’s Laura). A couple of times in his first 15 years in the
business he approached the sort of roles he would ultimately become famous for
— he played the Invisible Man in the 1940 sequel The Invisible Man
Returns and a Gothic (but not really
horrific) role as the evil “patroon” in upstate New York in 1946’s Dragonwyck. Then in 1953 he made House of Wax, Warner Bros.’ 3-D remake of their classic Mystery
of the Wax Museum from 1933 and a film that
got an undeserved reputation because the far superior original was out of
circulation for decades and was considered lost.
Partly due to the 3-D process,
House of Wax was a mega-hit and
got Price “typed” as a horror actor, though it also revealed that — unlike
Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi — he really didn’t take the genre all that seriously. Every time Price got a weak
script or was obliged to play an ill-motivated character, he responded by
sliding into camp, delivering mannered performances that alerted us to the
sillier aspects of the character and the story and in a way made fun of anyone
in the audience who was actually taking this seriously. A few directors —
notably the notoriously misanthropic Michael Reeves, who used Price quite
effectively in his last film, The Conqueror Worm (based on the real-life exploits of 17th
century British “Witchfinder General” Matthew Hopkins) — gave Price roles of
real substance, but for the most part he got slogged through one stereotyped
horror role after another. In 1977 Price triumphantly broke through his
typecasting for a one-man stage show called Diversions and Delights, in which he played Oscar Wilde; he was brilliantly
witty in the first half of the show and desperately wrenching in the second
(which was based largely on Wilde’s De Profundis), but alas no one seems to have recorded or filmed
Price in this role and he went out in the early 1980’s doing pretty much the
same things he’d been doing for the last 30 years in Tim Burton’s film Edward
Scissorhands and the video for Michael
Jackson’s song “Thriller.” The House on Haunted Hill casts Price as Frederick Loren, well-to-do
something-or-other who’s on his fourth marriage (his first wife “just
disappeared,” we’re told, while his second and third ones died of heart attacks
… in their 20’s) to Annabelle (Carol Ohmart, one of the most interesting and
ill-used talents in Hollywood history; I know about her mostly from my dim
memories of a piece the Los Angeles Times Calendar section ran about her over three decades ago, which described
her as caught between the demands of a born-again Christian mother and a film
career that got launched when Paramount noticed that she was a blonde with big
breasts and signed her to be their alternative to Marilyn Monroe).
Annabelle
suggested to her husband that they host a party in the House on Haunted Hill,
which for once isn’t the usual crumbling old Gothic manse but a state-of-the-art modern design, Frank Lloyd
Wright’s 1920’s Ennis House in the Los Feliz district of Los Angeles. The
interiors were built on a soundstage but the exteriors were shot at the real
Ennis House, and the cast members noticed that the wind made an appropriately
hissing noise as it blew through the cracks between the windows and their
frames, because Wright’s daringly angular design made it impossible for the
window frames to be completely sealed. I give William Castle real points for using
a modernist home as the House on Haunted Hill; to my knowledge the only
previous haunted-house movie set in an architecturally up-to-date house was the
1934 film The Black Cat, and in
that (the first film to team Karloff and Lugosi) Karloff was playing an
architect and the modern house was one he had designed himself. Robb White
constructed an effective plot line in which Loren offers his guests $10,000
each if they’ll stay the night in his haunted house, and he picks the guests
from people whom he’s met in the course of his business and who all desperately
need money: test pilot Lance Schroeder (Richard Long), psychiatrist Dr. David
Trent (Alan Marshal), gambler Nora Manning (Carolyn Craig), gossip columnist
Ruth Bridgers (Julie Mitchum, Robert Mitchum’s sister) and the house’s owner,
Watson Pritchard (Elisha Cook, Jr., doing the same scared-little-man act he’d
been up to for at least 12 years, since The Big Sleep). The plot owes a great deal to Agatha Christie’s And
Then There Were None (also known as “Ten
Little … ,” with the final word being changed as each of its predecessors
becomes politically incorrect) and Bruce Manning’s The Ninth Guest (filmed by Columbia in 1934 and again, with Boris
Karloff in the lead, as The Man They Could Not Hang in 1939); once midnight comes around the reluctant
guests will be locked in, the housekeepers will leave (and won’t return until
eight in the morning, when they will open the house with their keys), and if
anybody doesn’t survive the evening, their $10,000 will be divided among the
people who do.
One of the other features of the house is a huge vat of acid
under a door in the floor of the basement: the acid, we’re both told and shown,
dissolves the flesh and muscles of any living creature unfortunate enough to fall
into it and leaves behind only their bones. Their bones still remain attached
to each other and fully articulated — if there were an acid capable of
dissolving living animals down to their bones, their skeletons would lose
structural integrity and end up just a pile of bones. But William Castle needed
his script to defy science in this particular because of a special technical
innovation he had in mind for the first-run showings of the film: “Emergo.” At
one point in the climax the skeleton of someone who’d otherwise been dissolved
in the acid vat was supposed to rise from it and travel on tracks around the
theatre, an ingenious way of “breaking the frame” and creating a truly three-dimensional movie experience (not a mere
glasses-fueled simulation of 3-D reality). Unfortunately, when Castle first
demonstrated “Emergo” for executives at his distribution company, Allied
Artists (nèe Monogram), the heavy
plastic skeleton he was using fell off the wire holding it on its track and hit
one of the Allied Artists executives in the head. For the film’s public release
Castle hit on a less openly hazardous way of doing “Emergo”: instead of using
plastic skeletons he would use inflatable balloons in the shape of skeletons
and release them to travel across
the theatre during showings. Unfortunately, the younger people who were the
main audience for this sort of film by 1959 eagerly accepted the challenge
posed by “Emergo” and sneaked rocks, slingshots and even BB guns into theatres
hoping — and, all too often, succeeding — in bringing down the skeleton
balloons and often puncturing them in the process.
Like silent-era master Tod
Browning, William Castle generally didn’t like supernatural horror films, and
so this one, like many of Castle’s works, has a scientifically possible —
however implausible — explanation: it seems that Frederick Loren had discovered
that his wife Annabelle was having an affair with Dr. Trent, so he staged the
entire experiment in the House on Haunted
Hill as his way of catching the two lovebirds “in the act” and killing
both of them. Why he felt he needed
to go to all that trouble is never quite explained, but still The
House on Haunted Hill (even without
“Emergo,” which means that the supposedly scary climax turns out to be a dull
pan around the basement set, a shot originally designed merely as background
for the skeleton balloon’s progress around the theatre) turns out to be a
pretty good movie, better acted than I remembered it a few years ago (when
Price and Ohmart were the only actors that at all cncouraged me) and
fundamentally silly but also considerably less pretentious, and therefore quite
a bit more entertaining, than The Haunting. — 11/1/17
