It’s truly amazing to find that House
on Haunted Hill came out several years before The Haunting.
Everything about this movie screams that it was made as an attempt
to cash-in on the later film; playing out with a much stronger
B-movie vibe and giving us definitive answers, whereas The
Haunting gave us only questions and ambiguity. It reminds me of
how film buffs frequently say that they should remake bad movies to
create good versions, because The Haunting was effectively
this movie done again, and done better.
The set up is that millionaire
Frederick Loren (Vincent Price) has invited five people to a party at
a supposedly haunted house. Once the doors are locked, they’ll all
be trapped in the house for the night. The next morning they, or
their surviving next-of-kin, will receive $10,000.
One interesting variation on the
general set-up of the Haunted House movie is that none of the deaths
are claimed to be “mysterious.” Seven people have died in the
house, all by murder. So within this setting, the ghosts (assuming
that they exist) must use humans to carry out their evil. They also
note that none of the murders have been normal stabbings or
shootings, with at least one carried out by a man throwing his wife
in a tank of acid. Perhaps the filmmakers intended this to bring
back an element of ambiguity to the deaths. However, for the deaths
we witness, the events and motives leading to them were clearly in
motion long before any of these people set foot in the house.
The movie uses a lot of weird events
and shock scares. I don’t think for one moment you would put it
past Loren to have set them up, and none of them would have been
especially difficult to fake. Dead bodies, a face in a box, and
someone being jumped from behind by the caretaker… He also gives
all of the guests loaded guns, for God knows what reason. The scares
do grow stronger over the course of the film, but to list them all
would take far too much of my time and the time of anyone who reads
this.
The B-plot, if you could really
consider it separate from the A-plot, is how Loren and his wife both
despise each other, and each of them are convinced the other will
kill them if given the opportunity... or maybe they’re just
paranoid... or maybe the wife is merely casting suspicion on him. At
no point do you believe either of them would hesitate to kill the
other if presented with the opportunity. And in the end, your
suspicions about both of them prove to be entirely founded.
The final resolution shows that both
Loren and his wife (Carol Ohmart) were attempting to kill each other,
but that Loren was one step ahead of her. He set her up to think
she’d killed him, then used a skeleton on a string to scare her so
that she fell into a vat of acid, along with her lover. He then
disposes of the skeleton in the acid and confesses to the murder,
knowing that in the absence of any evidence of his ambush, he can
claim that the whole thing was self-defense, and at worst, receive a
light sentence.
I will be honest, I do love the ending.
I like it mainly because it’s not something we often see. Usually
villains will either be rational, planning to get away with it all,
or irrational, planning to take their victims will them. However,
Loren fully intended to be caught while still taking measures for
damage control. I give the ending points for novelty if nothing
else, although I suppose that it might be an attempt to conform to
the Hayes Code while still giving the villain a win.
Now, I realize that from the tone of
this review, it probably sounds like I’ll say that no one should
watch this movie. However, the opposite is true! It’s 75 minutes
long; much shorter than a lot of modern B-movies. It also has some
real talent, and many of the cheap scares pack more of a punch than
any shark-filled tornado. I highly recommend this movie for
Halloween, or any night when you don’t want to be bored.
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