House on Haunted Hill

While looking through my YouTube TV library's list of scheduled recordings (their cloud DVR will save all airings of the same movie until you explicitly tell it not to), I noticed that TCM has another airing of the William Castle classic House on Haunted Hill for tomorrow (Sept. 28) at 10:00 AM. With that in mind, I made a point of watching the copy that's already in my library so that I could do a review here.

The movie starts off with a voiceover and disembodied head shot of Watson Pritchard (Elisha Cook Jr.), who owns the titular house. He informs us that it's a haunted house with ghosts roaming around and where several murders were committed in previous generations. He also informs us that the wealthy, eccentric, and little-seen Frederick Loren (Vincent Price) has rented the house and that he and his fourth wife Annabelle (Carol Ohmart) will be holding a party there.

Now, as you can guess, with an opening like that, there's a catch. Well, multiple catches. The guests haven't seen Frederick before, but have been lured to the property with the carrot of $10,000 -- a reasonably nice sum in 1959 -- on the condition that they spend the entire night in the allegedly haunted house. Those guests are Lance Schroeder (Richard Long), a test pilot; Nora Manning (Carolyn Craig), who works in one of the subsidiary businesses owned by Mr. Loren; newspaper columnist Ruth Bridges (Julie Mitchum), there for the story; and Dr. Trent (Alan Marshall), who specializes in cases of hysteria. To make sure that everybody spends the night, Loren has the caretakers bar the doors shut. There's also no electric, only gaslight, and no telephone or radio.

Watson believes more than anybody else that the place really is haunted; after all, he's been in the house long before Loren ever came around. The other guests have various levels of belief in whether the house is in fact haunted, while Mr. and Mrs. Loren are at the point of their marriage where it may be about to break up, a bit of important foreshadowing there.

As you can guess, the guests begin to get more reason to believe the place really is haunted, not being helped by the fact that Watson never bothered to have the pool of acid in the basement drained. Because really, who doesn't keep a pool of acid in their basement without anything to prevent people from falling into it accidentally, or perhaps be pushed. Lance and Nora are the pair who get the obligatory subplot of possibly being future romantic partners; they stay to investigate the basement and find this may be dangerous. Lance also looks for secret passages because once again, a house like this is bound to have one or more. And, of course, we're going to get at least one dead body along the way.

House on Haunted Hill having been directed by William Castle, you know that there's going to be more gimmick here than real frights. Indeed, I found myself laughing at the idea that any of the guests would actually be taken in by the frights here, excepting the vat of acid, which I'd stay the hell away from. And you also have to wonder how the villian thinks he'll get away with it before the meddling kids pull off his rubber mask. But damn if the movie isn't entertaining. I can only imagine it was even more entertaining in a dark theater with the Castle gimmicks like a skeleton flying over the audience. (The end credits humorously list "Skeleton as Skeleton".)

So if you haven't seen it before, get a bunch of your friends, turn down the lights, and enjoy the fun that is House on Haunted Hill.