HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1959)

HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1959)

Tagline: The doors are locked at midnight.

(Horror, Mystery, Random Vat of Acid) [PG]

Note: This movie was not given a rating by the MPAA. It likely would have drawn a [PG] rating.

The caretakers will leave at midnight, locking us in here until they come back in the morning. Once the door is locked, there's no way out. The windows have bars that a jail would be proud of, and the only door to the outside locks like a vault. There's no electricity, no phone, and no one within miles, so no way to call for help.

In this one eccentric millionaire, Frederick Loren offers $10,000 dollars to 5 people if they can stay the night in a large rented house believed to be haunted, with him and his wife. Each of the 5 is given the option to leave before midnight, but after that, they are all locked in for the night. Will anyone survive the terror of HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL?

First off, whenever legendary horror actor Vincent Price shows up, you are going to have a good chance of a good movie happening. He plays Frederick Loren in this and gets plenty of lines, but ultimately both he and his wife are pretty repulsive as people. 

When it comes to the score and atmosphere this movie is pretty top-notch. I loved the sets and it’s also pretty cool that they used a house built in 1924 based on a design by Frank Lloyd Wright. I literally work on a road named after him in Scottsdale, AZ. I have been in several buildings designed by him and they are all extremely intriguing. This movie features a skeleton in a few scenes and like a lot of movies back then, the skeleton used is real. It was cheaper back then to just get a real skeleton from a biological supply than to have a fake one made. 

Acting wise as I mentioned you can’t go wrong with Vincent Price (THE MASK OF THE RED DEATH, THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM, THE FLY, and many others). This is another great performance out of him. We also get a fairly macabre performance out of Carol Ohmart who plays Annabelle Loren. This was her first horror feature film. I also thought Carolyn Craig was pretty good as Nora Manning, but I am guessing she was hired mostly because she has the ability to scream her head off in terror at the drop of a hat. For most of this movie Elisha Cook Jr. plays Watson Pritchard. He does a pretty good job of creeping everyone out being the only one who has a tie to the house from before the night this movie takes place. Why this was added into the plot is a bit confusing, but I guess it was there to throw the audience off of what was really going on and to ratchet up the horror elements. If you look up Elisha and he’s got a super familiar face, it might be because he was in over 219 movie and television productions. I also liked Richard Long in this as Lance Schroeder. I felt like his steady calmness, helped keep this movie from going off the tracks into just being overly chaotic.

This movie ended up being a smash at the box office and is said to be the movie that inspired Alfred Hitchcock to do the low-budget PSYCHO in 1960. This is another movie from the ’50s that fell into the public domain though which is why you can find it on several streaming services for free. 

Overall this one gets a 4 out of 7. There are some cool elements in here, but it had too much of a “but wait a minute” feel to it by the time the final frame popped up. Having said that, this one is a classic and it’s definitely worth being on your Horror-O-Thon movie list even for viewers not familiar with 1950s horror. At the very least, if they think it’s too campy, everyone will at least get a laugh. 

GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF ALLIED ARTISTS PICTURES COMPANY AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY. 

Please check out the link below by clicking on the picture. Purchases made at Indy Planet for any issue of DARK 30 will go towards funding the next issue.