When Women And Men Made Horror Movies For Keeps-Vincent Price’s “House On Haunted Hill” (1959)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell

House On Haunted Hill, starring Vincent Price, Elisha Cook directed by wild man horror film icon Billy Castle, 1959       

Sometimes Sandy Salmon the recently hired day to day film critic in this space throws me a “no-brainer” like the film under review mad monk Vincent Price’s Billy Castle-directed horror film House on Haunted Hill. Reason: when I was a kid I spent many, my mother might say too many, Saturday afternoons in the darks of the Strand Theater in downtown North Adamsville watching black and white double feature films to die for in the late 1950s, early 1960s. Mostly I was interested in film noir from the 1940s which Mr. Cadger the affable owner would play to cut down on overhead on first-run expenses and ran what today would be called retrospectives or even film festivals. But whenever a new horror movie was up he was on top of that knowing that kids “liked” to get scared out of their wits and would fill the seats to capacity (and buy gads of popcorn and candy which he told me one time was really how he made money on that now long gone but not forgotten theater turned to condos). So something like the film under review legitimate scary guy Vincent Price’s House on Haunted Hill would be like catnip to kids, including me.

Now everybody knows today, especially the kids who still make up the key demographic for horror films, that these films are driven by max daddy technological thrills and spills, a mile a minute, the more the better. And maybe today’s kids like them. But back in what was the golden age of horror films, the black and white film age where the shadows mean as much as what was shown the thing was driven by plot and not as much by gismos. And this film is a classic example which when I checked with a few guys from the old neighborhood recently scared the “Bejesus” out of them to quote one old friend. So what seems kind of hokey today was the cat’s meow back in the day.         

Here’s the play. This rich decadent playboy type guy Loren, Price’s role, and his youngish fourth wife are ready to party down in a house rented by Loren. (That house according to the blurb a Frank Lloyd Wright creation which now looked fairly modern compared to the usual Victorian house filled with odd spaces and menacing from the outside no question. The poster for the film shows such a Victorian-style house which is a little disingenuous. Worse though were the posters back then showing seemingly half-naked girls being exploited and yet no such thing happened in the film to the chagrin of teenage boyhood.) The game to be played was simple-five unrelated guests who needed dough badly for various reasons including just having that amount would each receive ten K if they made it through the night in the locked house. Fair enough.         

What the collective guest list did not know, would not find out until the end when it too late is that one of the five was a “ringer” had some other additional motive. Once everybody was “in” and locked down the games began. First Loren’s good-looking if diabolical blonde wife was killed which set the place in an uproar. Then one young woman was harassed enough that she would wind up killing the nefarious and weird Loren. Again fair enough. If you play with fire you are sure to get burned at some point. The thing of it was though this whole scene was a house of mirrors despite all the screams and odd occurrences. The wife had not been killed for she was part of a plot to kill her husband for his fortune along with her boyfriend, that Trojan horse on the guest list. And Loren was not killed either because he was on to the plot to kill him by his wife and her lover. In the end that wife and lover took the fall, went down the bloody road. In the end too between the screams and shadows (and even the hokey lover’s skeleton controlled by Loren to scare his wife to perdition) I, and my friends, were scared like crazy. Enough said.