“I am Frederick Loren, and I have rented the house on Haunted Hill tonight so that my wife can give a party. She’s so amusing. There’ll be food and drink and ghosts, and perhaps even a few murders. You’re all invited. If any of you will spend the next twelve hours in this house, I will give you each ten thousand dollars, or your next of kin in case you don’t survive.”
Vincent Price clearly relishes his part as a sociopathic millionaire in “House on Haunted Hill” (1959), oozing disdain for his equally contemptuous spouse and distributing macabre party favors to his guests: tiny coffins with pistols inside! In kind, we’ll savor our discussion of the film, though perhaps with a little less polish, on the next “Roy’s Tie Dye Sci Corner.”
This Halloween camp classic was the brainchild of William Castle. Castle was notorious for spicing up his B-movie entertainments with in-theater gimmickry, like wiring seats for electricity, including breaks so that audiences can pass judgment on a villain or scream away monsters, and issuing $1,000 life insurance policies in case anyone should die of fright. For “House on Haunted Hill,” a skeleton was sent hurtling over the audience at a key moment in a technique he dubbed “Emergo.”
The film’s disproportionate success is said to have caught the notice of Alfred Hitchcock and inspired Hitch to undertake his own low-budget black-and-white thriller, “Psycho.” At a lean 75 minutes, “House on Haunted Hill” never outstays its chilly welcome.
Roy and I will be haunted housesitting and swapping acid remarks on the next Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner. Lend us a little rope in the comments section, as we livestream on Facebook, this Friday evening at 7:00 EDT!
