House on Haunted Hill
(
1959
)
You know, I'm beginning to suspect that William Castle's marriage wasn't exactly harmonious. I have no real sources for this, as unlike famous actors, the private lives of pulp filmmakers are not excessively documented. The director's autobiography STEP RIGHT UP!...I'm Gonna Scare the Pants Off America is more interested in telling exaggerated stories about the movies he made and the stars he rubbed elbows with than divulging any intimate details. Indeed, in a cursory search, I've found almost no information at all about Castle's wife, Ellen. The evidence is all in Castle's work, which have a marked tendency to orbit around distressed marriages. From the downright depressing marriage of The Tingler (1959) to the initial infidelity and murder of Strait-Jacket (1964) to Castle's interest in directing Rosemary's Baby (1968) a film that hinges on a husband's secretive betrayal of his wife. Then there's today's film, whose plot concerns a husband and wife trying to murder each other over the course of one night in a haunted house. Of course, an artist can have an interest in a topic without any real-life experience in it, yet the unhappy marriages of Castle's oeuvre could hardly be accidental. After all, Castle may have been a product of the tough cynical Hollywood of the 1940s, but his horror movies were made in the middle of an era of good feelings that valorized marriage and family more than any other time in recent American history. The theme was obviously close to Castle's own heart, whether it was the result of his fondness was from his own life experience, or if it was from just a desire to give his films the air of European sophistication, is a mystery that I can't hope to answer without some more information.
Speaking of European sophistication, given House on Haunted Hill's vulgar reputation it might surprise some viewers to learn that Castle's film positively reeks with the stuff. Henri-Georges Clouzot's Diabolique (1955) is the principal influence here, being the best known European thriller in the United States at the time. You can see all the components of the legendary film broken down and resembled in true Castellan fashion. There's the aforementioned murderously unhappy marriage, the subtle undertones of supernatural menace, and the mounting madness and hysteria. Now, of course, Castle couldn't import everything, the implied homosexuality of Clouzot's film, for instance, would never fly in the more puritanical New World. The setting too would have to change, the mundane world of the French countryside wouldn't do for Castle, so he moved the action to a very Anglo-American style “spooky old house.” On the outside, it may look like a Mesopotamia ziggurat, but inside the house is straight out of the Addam's family. Castle also added his own peculiar meta-theatrical twist on the film, in the form of a rail-mounted skeleton (who is, no shit, listed in the film's official credits) that lept out at audiences. Maybe one or two innocences were startled by this goofy innovation the first time it was deployed, but the Saturday mourning matinee crowd quickly grew to see the gimmick as ridiculous and gleefully pelted it with popcorn when it emerged. The result is a carnival reflection of Diabolique (1955), as genuinely entertaining as its progenitor is horrifying.
The premise is as absurd as any in Castle's work, save only The Tingler (1959): Millionaire industrialist Frederick Loren has decided to hold a party at the most infamous haunted house in America. He's invited five randomly selected strangers from across all walks of life, and offered them $10,000 dollars to stay the night in the house. If they expire before morning, Loren will pay the money to their families, if he dies they will be paid by his estate. The guests include Lance Schroeder (an air-force test pilot), Dr. David Trent (a psychologist), Nora Manning (a secretary), Ruth Bridges (a newspaper columnist), and Watson Pritchard (the house's owner who is more convinced than anyone that it really is haunted but he really needs the money). In addition, they are all joined by Frederick Loren himself and his wife Annabelle (the two of them spend the entirety of their first scene together talking about murdering each other and debating over whose party this really is, replace the word party with funeral and you'll have a pretty good indication of what their intentions are). To add an extra bit of excitement to what otherwise might be a dull evening, Loren hands everyone a loaded handgun and gives them all a quick lesson on how to use it. A bunch of panicky strangers locked in a house overnight with firearms and spooky stories. What could possibly go wrong?
Just how haunted the house remains up to the viewer's interpretation, as unlike Diabolque (1955), House on Haunted Hill never definitively tells us what is real and what is mere hysteria. Certainly, Watson Pritchard needs no convincing, as he leaps into long monologues about all the horrific events that have taken place in the house over the years. At one point he produces a knife, seemingly at random, and relates the story about how the blade was used to hack up his brother and sister-in-law. “We found parts of their bodies all over the house,” he explains breathlessly, “in places you wouldn't think.” He adds never mentioned what places you would expect to find pieces of a dismembered corpse in. He also notes that they never found the heads and sometimes late at night you can hear the wails of the unquiet dead (guess what will be turning up later on). The rest of the guests are mostly convinced that all this talk of ghosts is just so much bunk, at least until Lance Schroeder takes a blow to the head while investigating the basement and Nora Manning has a close encounter with a spooky old lady. Sure, later on, she's explained away as just the wife of the caretaker, but seriously take a look at this lady and the way she glides across the floor (is she wearing roller skates?) and tell me that this isn't a ghost. If you want definite proof one way or the other, I'm afraid that you'll be left waiting, as House on Haunted Hill has no real interest in telling us if its ghosts really exist or not. It's far too busy focusing on its mortal characters to worry about these kinds of details.
And what a cast of characters they are. Obviously, Vincent Price delivers a delightfully hammy performance as Frederick Loren, walking the fine line, as he always does, between genuine menace and campy ridiculousness. Yet here he finds himself backed up by a constellation of minor character actors, every bit as unhinged as himself. Indeed, Elisha Cook's performance as Watson Pritchard is, if anything, more absurd than Price's own. Add in the drunk and cynical Ruth Bridges, along with the pedantic and dismissive Dr. Trent and you have a full house of ludicrous characters. Sure, the young lovers, Ruth Manning and Lance Schroeder are as boring as their character types always are, but it's important that the audience have a scrap of normalcy when dealing with an absurd situation, if only so they can have a character they can project themselves into.
The plot and setting are deliberately anachronistic, even for 1959. Keep in mind this was the same age as I was a Teenage Werewolf (1958) and Frankenstein's Daughter (1958); the monsters had already made the jump from their gothic never-never land to Any Town USA. Castle dialed back the clock to the early 1930s, giving us a world of spooky castle-like homes most akin to The Old Dark House (1932). Even Loren's offer of $10,000 for a night in a haunted house makes more sense in the logic of the Great Depression than it did in the postwar boom years. All this makes the horror of the situation more alien to the viewer, and consequently less frightening. Normally, this would be a mark against a horror film but House on Haunted Hill has grasped a truth far ahead of its time: That people don't always watch horror movies to be frightening. Sometimes they watch them for a strange sort of comfort, to see all the horrors of the world personified as harmless (and most importantly make-believe) ghosts and goblins. Thus the effect of watching House on Haunted Hill is akin to being transported back to a time in our lives when things were simpler when we were good and evil was something external to us. Back before we'd ever hurt the ones we loved or made all the stupid mistakes the plague everyone on their long road to maturity and adulthood. Despite its themes of infidelity, madness, and impossible cruelty, House on Haunted Hill is a strangely innocent movie, if only because everything about it is so transparently phony.