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The Appropriate Tune - "Vincent Price", by Deep Purple
Movie theaters are a very neutral part of the movie watching experience. For most folks, it’s just a building where you go, pay 35 dollars for a bag of popcorn, and sit in darkness for a couple of hours. Some might have better air conditioning, some have comfier chairs, but they’re all essentially the same, interchangeable with each other.
Which is why I think the marketing gimmicks of William Castle are so interesting in hindsight -- Using the theater itself to enhance the viewing, adding a tactile sensation to the experience. You could watch The Tingler, and maybe you’d be scared, but if you were watching it and as soon as the creature started moving you felt movement on your back? It’d probably hit a bit different, maybe even make the whole evening much more memorable than it would have been. Unfortunately I don’t have gimmicks to these reviews, aside from the bone-chilling writing quality, but I still feel like giving the nod to Castle today by covering one of his most famous films. So that’s what we’ll do.
In House on Haunted Hill, VINcent Price stars as Frederick Loren, a wealthy and eccentric man who has invited several people to stay at this mansion for a Halloween party, with a promise of 10,000 dollars if they manage to stay the night. Sounds like a sweet deal, but Frederick and his Annabelle have made sure that getting that money won’t be easy by filling their home with all manner of frightening and chilling things. And perhaps something even darker, if Frederick gets his way…
There’s a bit of Agatha Christie here, with its small cast of characters stuck in one place. There’s a bit of Hitchcock here, with its gleefully morbid sense of taste. But the eagerness with which the movie throws scares at you, sights, sounds, words, anything that could elicit a reaction, feels fundamentally like William Castle. He’s a carnival dark ride of cinema, and he does it extremely well.
The other big selling point of the film is, of course, Vincent Price. He’s not really doing anything out of the ordinary as Frederick Loren, a macabre man whose every word feels threatening feels almost stereotypically Price, but it doesn’t matter because he’s just too damn good at what he does. Your eye is just naturally drawn to him and your ear to his voice, you just want to keep watching him freaking people out. The film stands on his own without him, it’s a decent spooky mystery, but Price certainly raises the whole thing up a level with his presence.
Not all of William Castle’s movies stand the test of time, I saw 13 Ghosts a while back and that was pretty shit, but I’ll say that House on Haunted Hill. I’ve heard that even the remake that came out in 1999 was fairly well regarded (the remake of 13 Ghosts was, however, still shit). So thumbs up from me. If you’re in the need for classic scares, you know where to find them.
STATUS: RECOMMENDED
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