House on Haunted Hill (1959)

House on Haunted Hill (1959)

Directed by: William Castle

Starring: Vincent Price, Carolyn Craig, Richard Long

This is literally one of my favorite horror movies of all time. It’s so beautifully campy and hilariously ridiculous, I get a hearty laugh every time I see it. This movie alone was worth buying that 50-pack of old horror movies (for fifteen bucks, but still).

Vincent Price plays a playboy millionaire who decides to have a party with a bunch of random strangers in a haunted house. The gimmick is that anyone who spends the full night there gets 50 grand, which sounds pretty easy… until weird things start happening and people start dying…

This is a movie I really wish I could’ve seen in theaters. And I don’t mean nowadays theaters, I mean when it was first released. It’s a William Castle movie, and for those of you not in the know, he was famous for his in-theater gimmicks that went along with his movies. I know we’re going through a 3D boom right now, but this is way better than that. For this film, there was a skeleton on a wire that busted out of a box at the end of the movie and hovered over the audience. In another Vincent Price film, The Tingler, there were vibrating devices in the theater seats. Nobody does that kinda thing anymore. If you want to see a really good movie about a character based on Castle, you should check out John Goodman in Matinee. I was surprised at how much I liked it… but I guess that’s a whole other review, isn’t it?

I’d definitely recommend House on Haunted Hill to anybody who hasn’t seen it. Also, I’d definitely recommend that nobody ever watch the fucking terrible remake they did in the 90’s. Whoever thought that was a good idea should be dragged out into the street and shot.