Family gatherings can be murder. Even worse if you are not a member of the immediate family. As we head into this year’s holiday season, I have no doubt that many reading this will feel that even more acutely than in the past. Sure, there will be the usual gathering around the table (or in […]
By the time Castle set out to write House on Haunted Hill with Robb White, old dark house stories had long since gone out of fashion, at least in any serious sense. In fact, most films in the subgenre had already transformed from purely serious thrillers into horror comedies like James Whale’s The Old Dark House (1932) or all out parodies like the Bob Hope-Paulette Goddard vehicles The Cat and the Canary (1939) and The Ghost Breakers (1940). Sure, Hammer had revived gothic horror with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Horror of Dracula (1958), but those were films of a very different sort than Castle was after. It seems to owe a lot to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House—the gathering of a group of strangers in a haunted house, the eccentric caretakers, the hanged woman, the very similar titles—but they were also released the same year. In fact, Castle’s film was released in January and Jackson’s book was released in October making it practically impossible for either to have had any kind of influence on the other. So, it is all apparently a very strange coincidence.
Castle and White opted for a balanced blend of apparently supernatural scares mixed with real-world explanations. The script is a spiteful marriage drama by way of the classic old dark house story with a touch of House of Wax (1953) thrown in for good measure. The result is one of the greatest blends of classic and modern ever produced. The final film features some of the greatest jump scares this side of Val Lewton, who essentially invented them, and these have set the tone for the kinds we find in the modern era. This is especially true of the sequence in which the innocent of the film, Nora Manning (Carolyn Craig), who accepts the invitation to the house because she needs the money Loren is offering for staying the night to support her family, receives a classic shock. As she searches and pounds the wall of an empty room, she rises to find the caretaker Mrs. Slydes (Leona Anderson) standing beside her, teeth bared in a snarl like a wild cat about to strike and hands fashioned into claws. Nora screams one of those great classic horror screams before Slydes seems to float out of the room without the use of her feet. It’s surprising, weird, and even a bit goofy, but it works and is a prime example of William Castle at his best.
And then there’s the severed head in the luggage, the handguns in the tiny coffins, Mrs. Loren found hanged in the stairwell only to be seen floating toward a window in a later scene, the blood dripping from the ceiling. It’s all delicious stuff. Though it may not deliver the scares in the same way now that it did back in ’59, it does still deliver the goods. So much of what we love about modern horror can be found here. The cast is rounded out by a group of wonderfully colorful characters: Richard Long as the test pilot Lance Schroeder, Alan Marshal as Dr. David Trent, the wonderful Julie Mitchum as journalist and gambler Ruth Bridgers, and Elisha Cook Jr., one of the greatest character actors of all time, as the jittery former resident of the House on Haunted Hill, Watson Prichard.
Of course, the real star of the picture is the iconic Vincent Price at a time when his reputation as a horror actor had not yet been solidified. In fact, Price had appeared in relatively few horror films up to that point, instead appearing primarily in dramas, westerns, noir films, and the like, though often in villainous roles. The handful of horror films he had appeared in before the late fifties amounted to Tower of London (1939—which is really a retelling of Richard the Third), The Invisible Man Returns (1940), and House of Wax (1953). After the success of the latter film, he was offered more work in horror, but he opted at the time to take on other types of roles to avoid typecasting. This all changed in the mid-1950s when he was “greylisted” in Hollywood and some studios became more reluctant to hire him.
In her biography of her father, Vincent Price: A Daughter’s Biography, Victoria Price wrote that he “professed anger at his peers who had given names, sorrow for his friends whose lives had been destroyed, and admiration for those who had stood up to McCarthy. But he kept his own story to himself…” But recently it has come to light that Price was investigated by the FBI “for his connections with various organizations which were suspected of having ties with the Communist Party,” as Christina Violetta Jones wrote on the National Archives blog in 2023. In 1954, he was let go from the television show Pantomime Quiz on which he made regular appearances. Price then wrote a letter to the FBI to clarify the situation, saying in part, “I have never joined or worked for any organization that I knew was a Communist organization or Communist dominated or in any other way subversive.” Apparently, Price had gone through quite an evolution politically from being rather right wing in his youth to becoming a Roosevelt Democrat as he became more deeply connected with the artistic community. It seems that some of the organizations he investigated and visited during this evolution were possibly connected with the Communist Party or at least suspected to be by the FBI.
Whatever the reality, Price was finding it difficult to find work and he took the work he was offered including The Fly (1958) and Return of the Fly (1959), both of which are solid pictures but cut of a decidedly different cloth from The Ten Commandments (1956). As William Castle tells it he “lucked out” one day when he spotted Price sipping coffee at “a small shop near the Samuel Goldwyn studio.” Castle introduced himself and asked if he could join the actor. Apparently, Price was quite depressed as he lost a part he really wanted to play to another actor. Castle then regaled him with the story for House on Haunted Hill which captured Price’s attention and quickly brightened his mood. They made a deal on the spot and the rest is history. More than any other film that came before, House on Haunted Hill cemented the Vincent Price persona that horror fans have come to know and love. His acid humor, his sinister delivery with that velvet voice, but still always that twinkle in the eye. Castle and Price’s collaboration would continue with The Tingler (1959) before the star signed on with AIP for the Corman-Poe pictures which placed him well on the way to becoming the horror icon for the ages we now know him to be.
Though Price invites us to a night filled with “food and drink and ghosts” in his opening narration, there isn’t much food on the table in the film itself. There is plenty of drink, however (arsenic on the rocks anyone?), and plenty of ghosts, though whether they are real or not is left up to us. There is also the lovely twist of a vat of acid and a dancing skeleton which led to Castle’s “Emergo” gimmick for the film in which a twelve-foot skeleton emerged from a box on a wire and danced above the audience at the film’s climax. It may not have been his greatest gimmick (the seat buzzers for The Tingler are my personal favorite) but it did mark an important step in William Castle’s evolution as a showman and carnival barker for an era that had left the old “freak shows” behind in favor of something more modern.
So hopefully when you gather wherever you gather this long, cold season, may your hearts avoid being chilled by blood dripping from the ceiling. May the flesh not creep from your bones. And may your spouse not plot your murder through any elaborate usage of a rope and harness or an acid pit and a marionette. I guess what I’m saying is that as much as things may suck, it could always be worse…Right?
In Bride of Frankenstein, Dr. Pretorius, played by the inimitable Ernest Thesiger, raises his glass and proposes a toast to Colin Clive’s Henry Frankenstein—“to a new world of Gods and Monsters.” I invite you to join me in exploring this world, focusing on horror films from the dawn of the Universal Monster movies in 1931 to the collapse of the studio system and the rise of the new Hollywood rebels in the late 1960’s. With this period as our focus, and occasional ventures beyond, we will explore this magnificent world of classic horror. So, I raise my glass to you and invite you to join me in the toast.
