DOUBLE FEATURE: The Houses on Haunted Hill (1959 & 1999)
#31DaysOfHorror — October 12th and 13th
This October, for the second year in a row, I’ll be reviewing one horror movie each day! Respected classics, trashy and forgotten B-movies, both new frights and old… I love ‘em all. Well, some of them I’ll probably hate. We’ll see.
The Background
Last week, I went browsing for #31DaysOfHorror ideas at my local secondhand film shop. I found a double-feature collection that included both the original House on Haunted Hill — William Castle’s classic 1959 chiller — as well as the 1999 remake. I’d never seen either, so, I bought it. Remakes are an essential facet of the “story” of the horror genre, so I should probably deal with them at some point during this month, I figured. Horror remakes crop up over and over, new ones every year, and horror fans always say “Why?!” and then go see the remakes anyway. Sometimes they’re great! The recent Evil Dead remake was a fantastically solid film, and I wrote at length last year about the excellent Town That Dreaded Sundown quasi-remake-cum-sequel.
So, perhaps I’d like both Houses on Haunted Hill! Maybe the remake would give me interesting things to say about remakes in general, and why we shouldn’t treat them as cynical cash grabs, because sometimes their very status as a remake allows them to perform interesting functions in how they subvert and conform to generic expectations. I had a very long train ride yesterday, so I watched both films back to back… and…
My Review(s)
House on Haunted Hill (1999) is not only a bad remake, it’s just a terrible, terrible film. It is a cynical cash grab, exactly the kind of awful, ugly movie that gives remakes a bad name. It takes almost everything about the original that works so well — the witty repartee, the quaintly creepy gimmicks and special effects, the refined, sophisticated acting — and throws it out the window in favor of cruel insults, horrible CGI, and awful, so-bad-it’s-still-bad acting that veers wildly in tone from scene to scene.
Ugh. Deep breaths.
First things first, though: the original House on Haunted Hill is rightfully considered a classic. The plot concerns a haunted house where seven murders have recently taken place; a rich husband and wife decide to throw a party at the house, and they offer to pay their guests $10,000 each if they survive the night. The party is the wife’s idea, but the husband has planned it.
House on Haunted Hill opens with the floating head of Watson Pritchard (Elisha Cook, Jr.), the house’s owner, who looks directly into the camera and gives the backstory for the house — including that several of his relatives were recently murdered inside. He floats away, and then Vincent Price’s Frederick Loren floats to the forefront; he explains the concept of the party directly to the viewing audience, explicitly inviting us along to participate in the haunts and thrills that are soon to befall the characters. While this kind of introduction to the movie would never fly today — and, in the remake, it’s not recreated — it’s quite effective, in a quaint sort of way. It seems like the kind of thing that would play while you wait in line for a haunted house attraction at Disneyland: not scary, exactly, but unsettling enough to remind you why you found these sorts of things utterly terrifying as a child.
It soon becomes clear that Frederick and his wife Annabelle don’t like each other very much, and may in fact be plotting each other’s murder. They spar verbally, Annabelle telling him, “Your jealousy isn’t tax-free and your possessiveness is maddening!” He leaves the room, shooting back in that wry Vincent Price™ way, “Don’t sit up all night thinking of ways to get rid of me. It makes wrinkles.”
Even though most of these characters are stereotypes — the smarmy doctor, the snooty newspaper columnist, the neurotic real estate agent who’s terrified of ghosts, the histrionic woman who lets out bloodcurdling shrieks at the slightest provocation, etc — they’re pure fun to watch. They play off each other extremely well, the dialogue flying fast and furious as they try to figure out why they’ve been brought together, whether the ghosts are real, whether the ghosts pose any threat, and whether the biggest threat may in fact be their host.
House on Haunted Hill reminded me of nothing so much as Clue, one of my favorite cult classic campy comedies. In both films, guests are brought together by a mysterious host in a remote mansion for a party, someone dies, and the guests spend the majority of the film running from room to room trying to figure out who the killer is while accusing each other of murder. A quick Google search didn’t turn up too much definitive about House on Haunted Hill having an influence on Clue, but the latter has to be paying homage, on some level, to the former. It’s too perfect.
The end of House on Haunted Hill finds numerous people having been murdered and come back to life, just in time to then murder the next person down the line. You can never tell until the very end who’s dead, who’s just pretending, who’s a ghost, and who’s next to die. (If you believe Watson Pritchard’s final fourth-wall demolition, we’re next to die!) The whole thing is delightfully screwball, and I watched the entire last twenty minutes with a huge grin on my face.
Plus, the end of the film provides us with this classic .gif that’s been a favorite of mine for years, even though I had no idea what it came from. So, thank you, House on Haunted Hill (1959), for this piece of Internet artwork.
And now we come to the 1999 version. What a difference.
Unlike the floating-head exposition in the original, House on Haunted Hill (1999) opens with a scene set in the past, graphically depicting a doctor slicing up a mental patient before the rest of the inmates overrun the asylum. After the credits, we’re treated to numerous gory, gruesome, grotesque closeups of the hospital orderlies being slashed, stripped, stabbed, and sliced. Subtle and quaint, this ain’t.
I actually really liked the next twenty minutes or so of the film. The main cast is made up of a bunch of people I’ve enjoyed in other things, including Geoffrey Rush (the Pirates of the Caribbean films), Famke Janssen (the X-Men films), Taye Diggs (Rent), Ali Larter (Final Destination, Heroes, Obsession), Peter Gallagher (The OC), and Chris Kattan (SNL). Even James Marsters (Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) turns up for a scene as a cameraman. So, really, I thought, what could go wrong?
Rush plays the Frederick Loren character, here named Steven Price in a clear nod to the actor from the original. Instead of a rich eccentric, the mustachioed weirdo is the proprietor of a chain of horror-amusement parks renowned for their gimmicks designed to drive people insane; this, too, plays on our knowledge of the original film, including director William Castle’s reputation for devising gimmicks to frighten the audience, such as a rigged skeleton that would soar over theater seats at crucial moments in the film. We remember that the skeleton at the end of the original film was a trick, and we assume that here, too, the amusement-park guru will be the one behind all of the hauntings that go wrong at the house. But unfortunately, right around the time one of Price’s more tasteless gimmicks sends a roller coaster car careening off the rails, the film follows suit.
This film was released in 1999, which was the same year that brought us The Blair Witch Project. Interestingly, the House on Haunted Hill remake also features a found-footage aspect, as if prefiguring the seismic shift in horror that was about to occur. (While The Blair Witch was released a few months earlier, House on Haunted Hill was in fact filmed a year earlier, in 1998, so it’s not a case of trend-jumping).
The implementation is rather clunky, however. The early scene features a nurse who stands in the corner filming through a rotating crank-operated camera, capturing the surgery and the corresponding revolt, but the footage doesn’t crop back up later to scare us. The present-day scenes, too, have a character who walks around watching everything through a home video camera, hoping that she’ll capture some footage that’ll land her a television hosting gig. Reality TV wouldn’t really be a huge phenomenon for another few years (as captured in the desperately of-the-times Halloween: Resurrection [2002], also about people spending a night in a haunted house), so it’s interesting that House on Haunted Hill could sort of anticipate the fact that the democratization of filming would have an effect on horror, but it isn’t quite sure what to do with that.
There is one moment where the film seems to understand that, if we’re supposed to feel involved in the film through the use of an intermediary camera, we should probably use that camera for something interesting. While the aspiring TV host (played by Bridgette Wilson) walks around the creepy basement of the creepy asylum, she stares through her camera and sees the doctor/nurse/patient scene from earlier… but only through her camera. Then, as we’re finally given a few of the footage rather than of her looking through the viewfinder, slowly, creepily, everyone turns to look at her. It’s effective! I wanted more of that. But then she’s killed and the camera breaks. Oh well.
So, would you believe me if I said the proto-found footage elements are what work best in House on Haunted Hill (1999)? Everything else is an utter disaster. Instead of sparring verbally and letting us in on the state of their marriage through witty one-liners, the husband and wife call each other “motherfucker” and “bitch” a lot. Instead of imbuing the film with a fun-loving sense of screwball quasi-comedy, the characters in this film just torture each other, physically and mentally. And everyone seems to be in a different movie from each other!
Ali Larter and Taye Diggs are in one of those too self-serious teen-horror flicks that were all the rage in the 90s. Geoffrey Rush is hilariously over-the-top, almost literally wrapping his jaw around the scenery and chomping down. Famke Janssen can’t seem to decide whether she’s supposed to be a badass scorned woman or whether she’s actually exactly as much of a conniving bitch as her husband says she is; instead of making a decision either way, she just rolls her eyes a lot and lounges around the set, bored of it all. Chris Kattan seems to be actively fighting against the film, almost ready to burst into tears at any moment — not, we get the sense, because his character is so scared, but because he as an actor can’t believe what he’s been given to work with.
House on Haunted Hill (1999) doesn’t actually go the route the original did, of having all the hauntings be the result of the rich eccentric’s tricksy gimmicks. Instead, this house — which, really, is an asylum, let’s be clear — is actually alive, full of a malevolent spirit who takes the form of a sentient inkblot. No, seriously.
I mean, really. I understand the thought process here — it speaks to the film’s status as a remake, and it’s commendable that they wanted to subvert expectations for people who had seen the original by flipping the ending on its head. But, you have to give me something better than that.
Me @ the remake:
